Christopher Stone wrote:
On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 10:01 AM, Matthew Garrett <mjg@redhat.com> wrote:
  
Everyone involved agreed that not having a
keystroke that caused immediate data loss was a sensible idea.
    

Ha!  Imagine if these same people were in charge of bash.  We would
have to remove the rm command because someone could accidentally type
rm.  Imagine if someone accidentally typed rm -fr / as root!!! That
could be disastrous! !

  
Kudos.

What many people don't realize is that now instead of when a user sees that their mouse and keyboard are locked up they can just hit the Gtrl-Alt-Backspace like they've done for years and kill their X server and be back at a login prompt, now they're going to call the help desk.  And it going to go like this:

Help Desk> Good morning, Help Desk.  How can I help you?
User>My keyboard and mouse are behaving weird.  I checked the cables and their plugged in ok.
Help Desk> Sounds like your X server is messed up.  Did you try killing your X server?
User> Yes, I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Backspace but norhing happened.
Help Desk> What OS is loaded on your workstation?
User> I'm not sure.  They loaded a new one last week.
Help Desk> Ok, let me open a System Administration ticket for you.  They'll call you back in about 10 minutes.
User> Ok, thanks.

Ring
User> Hello.
SysAdmin> Hi, I see your having a problem with your workstation.
User> Yes, my keyboard and mouse aren't responding now.  They just kept getting slower and slower.
SysAdmin> Ok, it sounds like something has happened to your X server or you have some runaway process.  Let me check something.
User> Ok.
SysAdmin>  Ok, I can see that your X server is pegged at 98.3 percent of cpu.  So have you tried killing your X server yet?
User> Yes, I tried Ctrl-Alt-Backspace but it didn't do anything.
SysAdmin>  Ok, I can kill your X server from here.  Would you like me to do that?
User> Yes, please.
SysAdmin>  Ok, I killed your X server.  What do you see?
User> It went back to the login prompt.
SysAdmin>  Good, you should be able to just log back in now.
User> Yes, I'm in.  Thanks a lot.
SysAdmin>  Your welcome.  Is there anything else I can do for you?
User>  No, I'm fine now.
SysAdmin>  Ok, well have a good day.  I'll close this ticket.
User>  Yes, go ahead.  And thanks again.
SysAdmin>  No problem.  If you have any more problems just call the Help Desk.  Bye now.
User>  Ok, Bye.

And that's what we're going to start seeing instead of users being able to manage the situation themselves.

Regards,
Gerry