Autologout of unused terminals

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1086 at entropy.ms.washington.edu> charlie at mica.stat.washington.edu (Charlie Geyer) writes:
>UNIX doesn't just talk to dumb terminals anymore.  Maybe "Autologout 
>of unused terminals" is a bad idea.  If implemented, it should come
>with an easy way that any user can defeat it, and then what's the
>point?

Yes, all of that is relevant.  The point of a user-defeatable autologout
is that sophisticated users can avoid being bothered by this misfeature,
while naive users would have this system-administrator-determined policy
automatically enforced "for their own protection".

Someone else commented about the "user hostile" responses.  It is not
the user that I'm hostile to; it's the system administrator who thinks
he knows how I ought to be using the system and tried to force me to
conform to his mistaken usage model.  By all means protect naive users
if you and they both agree that they need to be protected, but don't
try to protect the knowledgeable user against using the resources in
perfectly reasonable, although unusual, ways.  Learn what UNIX was all
about!