Tom I Helbekkmo <tih@Hamartun.Priv.NO> writes:

>The practical solution, IMHO, is to let login names be
>sequentially assigned, not related to real name, and not reused.

>The solution is non-personal logins like "eng0145", which maybe says
>that this is the 145th login account authorized by the sysop in the
>engineering department, and email aliases like "engineering", "sales"
>and "project034" for services, project groups, specific positions --

	Ugh, this sounds like Compuserve (that "OTHER" service provider).

	User number 1932904587.2349349745 please step forward.

	I can see the problem in a situation like Project Vincent at 
this university, with over 90% of the 24,000 students having registered
vincent accounts, and old userids being kept around for Long Long Times.

	But BOY is it not user-friendly to have to remember a 9-digit
number, for a PERSON. I believe it should be up to the site to decide 
what nomenclatures they use, and not dicated by the OS. On the flipside,
I can see where 8 characters can prove insufficient (it gets more difficult
every year to come up with meaningful 8-char names on Project Vincent), but
16 should be more than sufficient. Having arbitary-lengths is .. silly, 
especially when one is trying to type "ps aux" and determining who owns
a given process.

	"This is how I feel." :)

Cheers,
Phil
--
Phillip F Knaack
Database Programmer, Information Development for Extension Audiences (IDEA)
Iowa State University Extension