RE:Re: About Automatic Entry: Profiling

>| In a few words:
>| 1 -I use my computer at work together with my room mate
>| 2 -I use my computer at home together with my wife (sons later)
>| 3 -I use my computer for hobbystic programmin-surfing together with a friend.

On Sun, 25 Feb 1996 19:32"William C. Cheng" <william@cs.columbia.edu> replied:

>Profiling is probably not the right solution to this kind of problems
>because one can not resonably expect all applications to support user
>profiles.  Windows 95 provides user logins and so does all UNIX machines.
>(I don't know about how Mac's handle multi-user environment.)  I think
>that browsers should explicitly *not* provide user profiling and expect the
>operating systems to implicitly support that.

Do you expect the majority of the users to use UNIX machines, or MAC/Windows?
And even with Windows 95, do you expect your friend/wife/son to login separately into the same machines?
Do you expect Apple, Microsoft and the other major operating system vendors to rapidly agree on some user profiling system?
Do really word processors, spreadsheets, etc. need user profiling?
I agree that a common profiling repository that can be accessed by all application will be a better solution, but probably not a practical one for a (long) while.
 
I see that the roots of Automatic Entry are still in discussion, but if the proposal will ever be written down in some detail I'm sure user profiling will be needed from day 0.

BTW, I'll hold my word for a while, until the Automatic Entry matter will seem to be more widely accepted.

Michele Bassan
bassan@pdadr1.pd.cnr.it

Received on Monday, 26 February 1996 15:41:34 UTC