Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!texsun!letni!mic!convex!convex.COM From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin Subject: Re: Recreational Computing policies, guidelines, etc. Message-ID: <109912@convex.convex.com> Date: 6 Dec 90 05:46:36 GMT References: Sender: usenet@convex.com Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) Distribution: comp Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX Lines: 22 In article vturner@nmsu.EDU (Vaughan Turner) asks about a campus wide policy on recreational computing. I was a sysadmin at a large university computing center for five years. Game playing was restricted to only times when the load was low, and a daemon would get you if you didn't respect this policy. Recreational programming, however, was permitted and encouraged, so long as it didn't interfere with people's classwork. In practice, there were only two cases of this: now and then someone or other would inevitably write a program that forked forever or else stepped backwords in memory a page at a time, trashing the VM system. This was considered harmful, and the perpetrator was told to cut it out. Don't discourage recreational programming -- learning is what a university is all about. --tom -- Tom Christiansen tchrist@convex.com convex!tchrist "With a kernel dive, all things are possible, but it sure makes it hard to look at yourself in the mirror the next morning." -me