Re: [Usability] The checkbox fallacy

[Seth Aaron Nickell <snickell Stanford EDU>]

> A confirmation alert is a programmatically simple way of making
> something harder to do. But there are more pleasant ways you could
> achieve the same end; for example, `Log Out', `Restart', and `Shut Down'
> could all be in an `Exit' submenu, where the submenu itself makes the
> actions more difficult to select by accident.
> 
> The other side of the equation is to make logging out, restarting, and
> shutting down easier to undo -- which basically means improving the
> speed with which you can start back up and log back in.

Or, with respect to restarting and shutting down, cancellable. How many 
times have you started a restart and then thought "oh crap, I need to do 
_X_ first" (where X often seems to be "run lilo" in my case, grr) ?

This should be possible on Linux systems, we just need a way for the user 
to signal us until the last minute (then we just "init 4" or whatever, 
init scripts are generally quite interruptable). This has other advantages 
too, like not dumping the user into a nasty command prompt. What would be 
really ideal is if we could figure out how to keep an X-Server running 
with only a special window (I don't think X-Server's require file access 
once they are running, and we could carefully tune our own program not 
to).

--Seth