CompuServe Messages

Don: I keep reading this thread, and am thoroughly confused. Our VAXen at work occasionally crash. The whole multi-user, multi-processing system goes on vacation. Surely, this is a "true" multi-user machine. When ever part of the system gets changed, our vulnerability to such crashing goes up. After a while, as bugs are found, work arounds implemented, that vulnerability goes back down to very low levels, so that we mainly need to fear hardware, rather than software, problems. That, of course, means that our DP guys DO NOT permit the rest of us free run of the system. We must "run their applications" for the system to be secure. They keep the users for the most part on a tight leash. Granted, the Amiga is not currently used much as a multi-user machine. Indeed, the OS was not designed with that in mind. But, even on the VAX, where both of these things are part of its raison d'etre, I doubt you'd find many "muti-user" systems where the DP managers did not very carefully control what users could and could not do on the system. So, why is Thol's doing this on his hypothetical Amiga multi-user system somehow "cheating". Ray Lewis