Re: [Usability] User Shut Down damaged PC

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Fri, 23 Mar 2007, Mark Knecht wrote:

> Hi Kirk,
>    I think you have it just about right as far as I'm concerned.
>
> a) I don't want to force anyone outside of my responsibility to have
> to do anything differently than they do today. I understand why the
> shut down command exists in the System menu and why many or even most
> people would want it there.

I was going to suggest that tools such as Pesselus might be able to help
"lockdown" features and help hide buttons such as shutdown.  Even then it
probably shouldn't hide the shutdown option in GDM.  Thinking about it
further I realised that when misguided adminstrators tried to prevent
users from shutting down do and I ended up with a computer that needed to
be forcibly shutdown I either used the power buttons on the box or
unplugged the computer at the wall.  Realistically a determined user
cannot be prevented from shutting down the computer so the best thing to
do is definately improve the warnings as previously suggested, and also
make it so that users are more likely to choose logoff than shutdown
(providing shutdown only in GDM seems like the appropriate way to achieve
that in your context).