🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <nevin-0502960947150001@150.135.1.79>,
Nevin ":-]" Liber <nevin@CS.Arizona.EDU> wrote:
>In article <9602051257.AA29046@dxmint.cern.ch>, Dan Pop
><danpop@mail.cern.ch> wrote:
>
>> A scientist or engineer who wants to run his programs, developed on other
>> systems, on his Mac, via a simple compilation (they were written in
>> portable C, after all)
>
>Yeah, sure.  There are absolutely no #ifdefs in the code, right?
>
>> is in the situation of not being able to use the Mac
>> for any other purposes.
>
>Yes, if the scientist or engineer wants to behave like an idiot, the MacOS
>will in no way, shape or form prevent him or her from doing so.  Just like
>Unix itself won't stop me from writing:
>
>while (1) {
>   malloc(1000);
>   fork();
>}
>
>It takes the administrator setting process limits to stop this from
>causing trouble.

This is true.  It takes a little bit of tuning to prevent a program
like the above from making the system unusable.

Now, tell me: just what kind of tuning can the Mac "system
administrator" perform that will prevent an "infinite-loop" style of
program from making the system unusable, short of terminating the
program itself, hmmm???  Answer: none.

Which is *exactly* the point.  Sorry, but thanks for playing.



One more thing: the user and the idiot who wrote the program are, more
often than not, *not* the same thing.  Do you *really* think the user
(if not *all* users of the system!!)  *should* be at the complete
mercy of *one* idiot user-level programmer?  If you do, then there's
no hope for you.

-- 
Kevin Brown                                     kevin@frobozz.sccsi.com
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