Jerry wrote:

> 
> The sad part is that they will continue to blame others for their
> lackadaisical approach.

So, let me attempt to summarize your side of this here (and do correct 
me if my summary is wrong, as I'm not trying to build a strawman argument).

You're justifying the laziness of the developers by accusing the 
users/sysadmins of being lazy?  Seems a little hypocritical, doesn't it?


I'll put forward two counter-arguments to this:

1) No one is advocating laziness on the part of the user/sysadmin, we're 
requesting at least better information, and better organized 
information, from the developers so as to better support the 
users/sysadmins.  And, ideally, better tools to help their consumers as 
they change the infrastructure they provide.  Not so that their 
consumers can be lazy, but because every bit of due diligence on 
_everyone's_ part is good for the whole ecosystem.


2) The proper mantra of computing, due to the constant trend of 
providing computing resources becoming cheaper over time (and thus 
always becoming more cheap than the price of time of the consumer) is: 
"it is the burden of the provider to leverage their resources so as to 
lessen the workload of their consumers."

I can go on and on about how this relates to the cost of a developer 
hour vs the cost of 100's of user hours, or the cost of a task in CPU 
dollars vs the cost of that task in human dollars, and how these always 
change in favor of the humans being more expensive than the 
computers/developers/sysadmins.  Or how this all feeds into each layer 
making their downstream consumers more productive and effective by 
automating the tasks, or bolstering the infrastructure, of their 
downstream consumers, freeing them up to take on bigger and more 
important/productive tasks.  But what it boils down to is:

- it is the burden of sysadmins to take on more work so as to lessen the 
workload of their users. (hopefully taking on this work by providing 
better streamlined services, and more effective and comprehensive 
infrastructure for their users to leverage)

- it is the burden of developers* to take on more work/tasks so as to 
lessen the workload of the sysadmins, users, and other (down stream) 
developers who are consuming what they're developing.

(* whether they are developing hardware, OSes, or applications)

(the burden of the user, incidentally, is to not rest more as their 
tasks become more automated, but to use the freeing up of their effort 
as a resource to apply in being more productive and effective, making 
society as a whole more productive and effective; thus, the role of 
computing in general is to support the advancement and productivity of 
society as a whole)

(and, while that may sound like a "workers paradise", 
recreation/entertainment is an appropriate form of "productivity" in 
this sense, where that type of productivity is part of improving the 
enjoyment of our lives, so this applies equally well to computer games, 
computer supporting movie makers and other artists, etc., .... or making 
both our society and or lives better by making us much more productive 
during the work day, lessening the time spent working on our private 
lives, and thus letting us get out of do more basic forms of enjoyment 
with the rest of our time)


Anyone in the computing ecosystem who isn't embracing this is dead 
weight in the ecosystem, and thus dead weight to society, and should be 
treated as such.


The point of that lecture: lazy developers, who are doing things that 
get in the way of their customers being more productive by making it 
harder, instead of easier, to find information about important or 
critical changes in their software, are not playing their proper role in 
computing.  Thus, they are leaning toward being dead weight, and should 
be treated as such.

The fact that this is being pointed out to those developers doesn't mean 
that the sysadmins/users are trying to be lazy.  For those ignorant 
among you who are taking this point of view, the purpose of the request, 
instead, serves making those sysadmins have more time to empower their 
users, and making those users have more time to improve society.

Suggesting that it is just sysadmin laziness is at best specious and 
ignorant, and at worst being willfully obtuse.  Either way, it's 
counter-productive to the software ecosystem as a whole.

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