“Again I Say: Log Out Once Per Day”

My instructions to log out once per day were well received by some, but not by others and it's clear that I need to clarify a little.

Mainly, there are three points I need to address.

Firstly, my friend Flip pointed out that since Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) was released, the OS makes sure that your "cron tasks" run later, if they're not able to run at night because your computer is shut down or asleep. So, it's totally ok to put the machine to sleep at night. (I wasn't aware of this change.) However, that doesn't affect my other point about logging out and back in again.

Secondly, some people have been quite vehement -- even quite rude -- in disagreeing with me about logging out and back in again. Jim's main point seemed to be "don't do it becuase you shouldn't have to" (with "shouldn't" meaning software should work better than it often does). Jim moderated his tone a bit in his second post (thank you!). The other guy can't seem to tell the difference between logging out and rebooting.

(Hey Charles: logging out won't affect your uptime!)

There were some people who clearly agreed with me, like Michael Tsai (maker of some apps I use every day).

Finally, if you know the difference between a memory leak and a cron task, then my instructions weren't for you. ;-) Power users, programmers, and sys admins: go on about your business. Most of you probably already tell your users to log off occasionally anyway! I was talking to the regular user, or even the app-crazy user I described here.