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I'm an electronic packrat. One of the things I've collected is every povray SDL
I've ever done, and I think it's incredibly cool that I still have their
original creation dates associated with the file.
One day, for some reason, some linux application was resetting the created date
to the current date when I copied the files from one directory or media to
another. I was ticked. I immediately went to complain and ask how to opt-out
of this behavior in the IRC channel for that app. The one person there, to the
best of my knowledge, fully understood what I was complaining about and implied
I was silly for not wanting it to be that way. He or she defended the idea
that every time you copied a file, the only date that ever mattered would be
the date-of-copy-to-new-folder. Asinine! And a radical change from how
computing has always worked. (FWIW, my linux system was only engaging in that
behavior for a short time: it's not typical of how linux has worked for me.)
It does raise the question of whether some design questions are just silly.
Now on the other side of the spectrum, I know that in free software,
non-RTFM'ming newbies can be rude. It's like some beneficient old man puts out
a giant sub sandwich for free at the pool, and nasty kids go up to complain that
he didn't make separate mustard and non-mustard-containing sections.
On the other end, I think that sometimes there's a paradoxical view in free
software of "We're ready for enterprise use," "We're the coolest," versus "Who
cares if some a lazy newbie doesn't get it?", "Who cares if this locks out a
work practice used by 25% of our users-- my work practice is better!"
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