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Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)

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Re: Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)

#32
post #7

Brilliant idea. With the Unix file systems, that show about everything of a computer, it should be possible to create a game, where the whole world is generated by that informations :D

IIRC there was a graphical file manager on some systems like this, famously featured in Jurassic Park ("This is a UNIX system! I know this!") Also, not quite the same, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus:_The_Game

Aha, I found it. The file manager in question was fsn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn

Re: Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)

#37
Processes should be differentiated by importance and resource consumption. For instance, PID 1 should be rendered as the Cyber Demon, since killing PID 1 would end your game. Any parent processes of the current process should be friendly, and processes consuming large resources should be special enemies like pinky.

Re: Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)

#39

Processes should be differentiated by importance and resource consumption. For instance, PID 1 should be rendered as the Cyber Demon, since killing PID 1 would end your game. Any parent processes of the current process should be friendly, and processes consuming large resources should be special enemies like pinky.

PID 1 should be rendered as Player 1 (as a http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Voodoo_doll ).

Re: Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)

#40

I think any real world environment in which this would be feasible would be served better by other tools. This is because in order to render a process that needs to be killed a system needs to know that it is a bad process. But if you know how to simply identify bad processes you would just write a script to kill it, which is widely done now. What you are doing at best is converting textual information into visual on…

Are you seriously considering this as a potential system administration tool, or am I just bad at detecting sarcasm?

well the article is obviously facetious, but what makes it interesting is the notion of more physical upfront analogies for controlling our computers. It get's explored all the time in Hollywood, and we all collectively roll our eyes, but maybe it's not the stupidest thing ever.
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