On Monday 03 December 2001 18:36, Chris Howells wrote:
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On Monday 03 December 2001 4:11 pm, Michael Brown wrote:
It always irritates me when I have to use a system on which the user interface has been locked down in the interests of 'security'. This is, as far as I can tell, a practice that originates from the days of Windows 95, when you had to lock down the user interface simply because the underlying system didn't provide any security itself. This is not the case with Linux; even if you leave the full user interface exposed there is very little that users can do that will affect anything beyond their own personal settings.
Absolutely true. But would you really want users changing their personal settings (and possibly making a mess -> wasted time for the administrator) when they could be doing more productive things?
The teacher has a role here! Kids can destroy all their books but they don't because they have been taught not to. Part of learning is to be responsible and if you foul up your own computer time by being an idiot its a good lesson to learn. On balance I think heavily locked down systems are worse. I am constantly in schools with teachers moaning about an inability to do anything in their own user directory. We wasted an entire training session because the person with the password was off and no-one else could get us in so we could install the relevant software even on a local machine. Regards, -- IanL