Re: [tlug] Running without Gnome/KDE/xfce/whatever. (was: Ubuntu 16.04-LTS Japanese Text Input)

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2016-04-28 18:33 +0900 (Thu), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> I didn't mean that it was easy to do a good job of dealing with design
> issues posed by observed failures.  Just that "the security mindset"[1]
> isn't necessary to identify failures in most cases, simple observation
> will do.  I'm more pessistic than you -- I don't think "most software
> developers and their managers" are as much optimistic as they are
> willing to impose the costs on users rather than do the necessary
> thinking to get to a good solution.

While the customers do of course see some of the blowback from stuff
like this, I've personally observed managers at companies directly screw
themselves because they refused to spend a bit of time thinking about
how to make a system install more reliably. They ended up spending about
30% of their programmer-hours over the next year doing installation
support for individual customers instead of programming.

I've seen enough of this that I'm convinced the majority of cases, even
when the cost really is mostly an externality, it's usually not someone
actively trying to dump costs on someone else but someone just not
wanting to think about the effects of what they're doing.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson         <cjs@example.com>         +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch