Why Was: US Military Dead during Iraq War 1821

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Sing it. The argument against this sort of centralized scheme was (if I remember right) that it didn't give users enough control over their own environments, but I rarely found that to be a problem in the days when my office "computer" was a terminal connected to a good multiuser shared system. Install software? most Unix stuff installs fine in a user-owned directory, no admin privileges needed. Maybe it was similar with TOPS-10?

So, perhaps the report some of us were hoping for -- what the Den Mother thinks of Unix -- may be delayed indefinitely? Rats.

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Agreed that there's a need for users to be able to define who has access to their files, without the need for intervention-permission by admins. I thought that was what ACLs (access control lists) -- which have been implemented on some-many systems -- were about, but I could be confused.

I started out to write "but if the alternative is to make it impossible for non-technical people to use this great-when-it-works technology, that doesn't seem good either." But maybe there's another option; you butture us that non-technical people could be trained to use TECO, without dumbing down the tool to a point where it wasn't useful to people with more expertise.

How so? it seems that if "everybody" includes "owner", then what happens when the rights granted to "everybody" are different from the rights granted to "owner"? To clarify, the Unix scheme divides users, with regard to access to a particular file, into three clbuttes -- (1) owner, (2) users in the same group as the owner, but not the owner, and (3) everybody else. (Well, actually I guess it's four clbuttes, if one includes the superuser-admin-root. Now that *is* something that you've said was different in TOPS-10.)

Maybe a follow-up on a better day ....

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.