[28589] in Hotline Meeting
A complaint
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sohrab Ismail-Beigi)
Wed May 31 18:30:19 1995
To: hotline@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 31 May 1995 18:30:10 EDT
From: Sohrab Ismail-Beigi <sismail@MIT.EDU>
Dear Sir or Madam,
This afternoon, I witnessed an event in the 4-035 cluster that
irritated me quite a bit. I believe I am writing this letter of
complaint to the proper place as the Rules of Use for Athena
references the hardware hotline in case of questions.
While working in 4-035, an employee of Athena logged out a user who
had his/her screensaver on. The "xscreensaver" option for a potential
user to log the current user out was active. I tried to convince the
employee that there was no need for HIM to log this person out in
their absence, but unfortunately I failed. I understand the rules of
use for Athena and I believe they are meant to facilitate the usage of
the computer system. However, there is no need to log someone out
when there are 15 other free computers in the same room. I had been
working in 4-035 all day and at any time, at most 5 people were
actively working on computers. This type of action, while officially
justified, has a more appropraite name: spite.
Rules are meant to help everyone. But inflexible adherence is also
just as pointless. Last week, I lost 3 hours of computations for my
thesis work due to the same problem (again, the situation in the
cluster was roughly the same).
Thank you for your understanding.
Sohrab Ismail-Beigi, Graduate student in Physics
