On Sat, Nov 22, 2003 at 01:09:57PM +0100, Josip Rodin wrote: > You seem to consider it unhelpful to even mention that there's a problem > just because you assume everyone knows. No, I'm saying it's unhelpful to even mention that there's a problem *when* everyone knows. This is trivially true: everyone already knows, so what possible good can it do to tell them about it? It doesn't let them know anything they didn't already, and as it's just talk it doesn't make their job easier in *any* way. No if my assumption that everyone knows was wrong, you'd have a point. But there's no evidence of that, and Martin's already indicated that it's being worked on. > To me it seemed like nothing > concrete was done, so the latter assumption wasn't particularly likely. You'd need to also asusme that Mako and Martin are stupid: redundancy is an *obvious* thing that we all want wherever we can get it. And further, unless you're *actively involved* with the people doing the task, you shouldn't make assumptions that nothing is being done -- you don't know, and it's not anyone's job to inform you. The subject of this thread whines about "arrogance", well, congratulations, you're demonstrating it in spades. > I > would be glad to go into details and help them however I can, but nobody was > even talking about the issue, at least not to my knowledge. Because the general issues are obvious and well understood, and the people doing the job are already working on the specific issues. > Yeah, you could > hurl that back at me (why didn't I ask them rather than poking the DPL?), > but then we're going in circles. Why didn't you _ask_ the DPL, instead of _accusing_ him? Why were you willing to leap to the assumption that he wasn't doing his job, rather than assuming that he _was_ doing his job, and would appreciate some assistance? More to the point why _didn't_ you offer to assist in a useful manner instead of stating the obvious as though your fellow developers were unaware of it? > From where I'm sitting, you're responding to my criticism by saying how I'm > talking utter nonsense just because my criticism wasn't pointed to a > specific, exact set of broken up issues No, I'm saying your criticism was invalid because it didn't apply to the situation. You were criticising Martin for not being aware of the benefits of redundancy when he was aware of them, and further was aware of progress being made in the specific area of hardware donations. Further, I'm criticising the approach of assuming your fellow developers don't know what they're doing, and repeating cliches as though that's of any benefit to them. > It would be nice if the latter was done, but the lack of it doesn't > imply that the problem is being handled perfectly and that nobody should > even bring up the question. Everybody should have asked the question when they read the post. They should then either dismiss it as not being important enough to worry about, or do something themselves to ameliorate it. They shouldn't hit "reply", write down the question, and then think they've contributed though. If you've got something *insightful* to say, please do. If you've can't do anything but repeat things everyone already knows, show some restraint. > Conversely, I feel it's unhealthy to have an > atmosphere where criticism is dismissed based on assumptions. What's unhealthy is criticising based on incorrect assumptions, and criticising without providing any assistance at all. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. Australian DMCA (the Digital Agenda Amendments) Under Review! -- http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/copyright/digitalagenda
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