On Monday 18 September 2006 17:14, Les Ferguson wrote: > I forked out over $100 on the latest Partition Magic (remembering that > it usedta be kinda useful once) and was bitterly dissapointed with it. > In the end I downloaded the GPartEd cd instead, to solve my problem. > This is one area that the open source alternative is far ahead of the > commercial options.
My feeling is that currently the software world is divided in two: - anything infrastructure (operating system + system administration) and networking is usually provided in much better quality and functionality by open source products - anything"end user application" is usually more refined and easier to use for Joe Average when coming from commercial software providers The rule of thumb to me is that if the computer is supposed to solve a problem for me *unattended*, that is silently and reliably in the background, there is no way around open source in most instances. But if software depends on heavy user interaction, it is usually a commercial product that excels. The paradoxical situation is that high quality end user software is sadly designed in a way only to run on crappy infrastructure, because either their developers are ignorant of that fact or they simply chose the wrong development tools - they assume that their development environment has to be as refined and "user friendly" as the software they produce. Alas, it is not the wrench with the most colourful frills that serves the engineer best. Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
