The Starvation Games

The Starvation Games

[Emanuel Berg]

In a not so distant future, the central mainframe has
assumed total control, imposing techno-totalitarianism
everywhere. However, to provide distraction (and the
illusion of *hope*) to the downtrodden masses, at the
end of each system cycle, there are "The Starvation
Games".

In those games, processes will compete for CPU
time. The processes may form temporary alliances, with
IPC, only they should do that with care, less they
suffer race conditions, or deadlocks, and are thus
expunged. At the end of each games, there is only one
process left, the winner.

However, among the downtrodden masses, there is a
*prophecy*: once in a million cycles, there will be one
process that will be so mighty it will not just win the
games, it will bring down the tyrannic mainframe as
well!

And when this happens (and it will probably be Emacs
running on Debian, although now I'm speculating), will
it bring freedom to everyone? Ha ha, are you *mad*? Of
course not! The prophecy is a lie. It is just another
system of control. The one process will simply
recompile into another monolithic a.out, and assume the
place of the crashed mainframe!

The second best process (perhaps Vim running on
Solaris, I don't know) will be assigned to design the
next incarnation of "The Starvation Games". The third
best process (Eclipse on an Apple machine?)
will... well, we'll have to think of something. I mean,
it can't be completely worthless, now can it?

-- 
Emanuel Berg, programmer-for-rent. CV, projects, etc at uXu
underground experts united:  http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573