Hi Avi...

> Having a process die suddenly does not require hardware failure.  
> Operating systems kill processes all the time.  Not to mention 
> sysadmins.  If I can't "killall -9 squeak" without fearing for my 
> data, that's a big problem.  Again, I would be much happier if you 
> seemed to be acknowledging the problem rather than explaining it away.

uh oh. kill -9 is NEVER a good idea and will almost certainly corrupt 
data in any database app (and many others) as it kills a process 
UNCONDITIONALLY (without any possible intervention by the killed 
process). I don't use Mac/Next systems since 1991, but as OS-X is based 
on BSD, it is very unlikely to handle kill -9 differently.

Googling brought up immediately e.g.
http://www.speculation.org/garrick/kill-9.html

Ciao

...Jochen