What is the UI level user context in OS X?
If you're asking what I think you're asking...
On a newly purchased box, the user has admin privleges available via sudo.
If you're setting up a lan, you have more options. At eTranslate, we took one box and set it up as a NetInfo server and slaved all the other machines to that NetInfo server. We set it up so each user's home dir was located on a sun box with a fast raid array and nfs mounted on login. We also set up central tool directories and nfs mounted those.
Result - any developer could walk up to any machine in the place, login, and have his stuff - his colors, his environment, his directories, his shell, whatever.
It totally rocked. For the laptops, we had netinfo clone scripts that would clone the server netinfo into a local netinfo and use that if booting off the network.
I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customer got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.
--Alan Perlis
