Position & proposal

[Paul Prescod]

Mike McDonald wrote:
>   In a multiuser environment, you don't know what the other users are
> doing. Traditionally, it's the OS's job to protect you from them. I
> don't know how an OS that allows you to muck with everything can also
> protect you from someone else's mucking around.

Even OS's that don't allow you to muck with everything can't protect you
from someone else's mucking around. Try using Unix when the sysadmin
decides to randomly stop and restart daemon processes (like the UI
server, for instance). This problem is no worse in a reflective system.
You just need to give up that particular benefit of LispOS when it isn't
appropriate.
 
>   There nothing keeping a single user machine from acting as a server.
> Just have SERVER login as the user.

As soon as a the single user machine becomes a server you introduce the
problems of mucking everybody who is a client up by changing something.
If they are accessing files and you install a buggy distributed file
server daemon, you screw them up. You must be just as careful as if they
were "full fledged" users on the system.

 Paul Prescod