On Thu, January 1, 2015 3:15 pm, James B. Byrne wrote: > > On Wed, December 31, 2014 12:03, Warren Young wrote: >> >> So, cope with change. >> > > Is one to infer from your mantra 'cope with change' that one is not > supposed > to express any opinion whatsoever, ever, on any forum; on the externalised > cost of changes made to software with no evident technical justification? > And > that to do so is evidence of some moral or intellectual defect in oneself? > > We all cope with change until we die. That is not a philosophy or > program. It > is an observation on the state of existence; and is no more useful than > the > observation that, eventually, we all die. > First of all, I must say that I agree with you, James, on almost all of your points. Or disagree with your opponents on majority of their points. Moreover, I do suffer myself from "unnecessary change", thus for some tasks I even switched to different system (if the stuff that affects you is already in the kernel, you can not just switch from one Linux distro to another ;-( I have been suggested to shut up when I was too loud/persistent saying about that (luckily I do not remember by whom and do not care to remember ;-) Nonetheless, even though I try to speak up when I'm unhappy thus hopefully I'm providing feedback for developers and architects, I came to realizing that [open source] software developers most likely will not listen to me, even though I do represent certain number of their end customers. Take as example my last worst displeasure. I upgraded my FreeBSD workstation from 10.0 to 10.1 which made me step up from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3. And I can not bear the change. So, after a couple of weeks of frustration of just trying to do what I usually do on workstation I came to decision to abandon Gnome altogether. Whoever did that transition knows what I'm talking about. It is pretty much as switching from CentOS 6 to CentOS 7. What I told myself (not that I'm suggesting others they should...) is this. Developers often work without monetary reward and their only reward is seeing the result of their programming. What they get best reward is from seeing new, fancy... Which kind of contradicts utilitarian programming (to achieve particular goal your program is for). In last case we always were following the principle (yes, I was programmer too): do not make any changes unless they are absolutely necessary. Which appears to contradict goals many developers have (KDE, GNOME, Firefox, Windows 8,... you continue the list). All seem to abandon structured logical tree-like arrangements of your tools, and switch you to stupid search for what you need. Welcome to ipad generation, folks! Thus, I decided for myself to tolerate the change as long as I can and keep being grateful to developers whose products I use, but switch to something more suitable for my way of working with things as soon as I can not stand the change. I hope, this helps someone ;-) Happy New Year everybody! (and welcome to ipad generation! ;-) Valeri ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++