You mostly list server/admin/console utilities in your 'good' list and on your 'bad' list two 'luser' GUI apps -Windows and Office' which have to do 1000 things for 1000 different (mostly uneducated) end users. Due to their complexity and GUI orientation, these apps are considerably more complicated than a webserver or mailserver utility, which is one reason why they are 'buggier'
I'm not sure that universal OSS QA standards are enforcable or practical across the large range of OSS products, given the different purposes and motivations for coding, but having worked as tester and test manager I believe that intelligent independant testing is invaluable for any development effort.
It should be obvious that end-user Office-type apps need a lot more prerelease formal QA than a utility like samba or squid would need. this is because experienced users (hackers/sysadmins) will verify functionality and ask for fixes/improvements of a network utility or such, while the real users of a consumer-type GUI will see the product too late and be too inarticulate or uncommunicative to give good feedback. QA for GUI apps often serves as Usability testing and user advocacy as much as functional testing. (I play an SQA on TV!)
Where Linux/OSS seems to fall short sometimes is in the (insert windowing system of choice) GUI frontend to CVS, Squid, Senmail or whatever. By the time that a GUI-based end-user product gets released to its end users it is usually too late to protect the users from errors -they must be fixed prior to release -they need a 1.x release that has been blessed by QA for meeting the functional spec
These people may not be happy with Windows, but that doesn't mean that they want to wade through forked or half-finished code, or camp out on freshmeat waiting for a new patch because the app doesn't cut and paste for some reason. As other posters have noted, writers of GUI apps need to adhere to GNOME/KDE standards, and realise that a lot of GUI design is a lot more subjective than, say writing a TCP/IP stack and that sometimes the endusers/QA understand some of these issues better than the developers do.
Re:Cisco calls it a modem, was Re:Dearth of techni
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WinDSL Coming?
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Actually, my PacBell-provided 'DSL' modem is really an ATM NIC card -at least that's the binding and protocol that is loaded into WinNT (sorry) networking when the card is installed. The card is an Efficient Networks SpeedStream 3030. I can't wait until the Linux drivers are released and I can ditch my bluescreening NT server.
I used one of these at a small office before I knew a single word of UNIX. It was very easy to install and configure. We did have some connectivity problems that were solved 2 years ago with a patch.
As far as single point of failure, for a small non-tech office we had good tech support from the ISP who were a partner with whistle. Although there were connectivity probs mentioned above we never had email problems with it. We didn't have any tech resources or UNIX savvy people to troubleshot multiple firewalls, proxies, mailservers etc. The dollars lost in minor connectivity problems were more than outweighed by the savings over multiple boxen and a $50k+ sysadmin salary;)
Before the II came out I did usability testing for interjet and thought that it was even better. I was disappointed by IBMs decision to bundle it with services since we already have DSL. Before we went with DSL I upgraded the SW for VPN and had been playing with PPTP and such....
This is not the same as having a Linux or BSD box that is fully accessible, but it can be administered by non-techs and certainly beats NT ProxyServer and Exchange! Because we couldn't upgrade the Interjet 1 when we got DSL, it now serves as DNS/mail and internal docs and web. We love it!! too bad we can't put an extra NIC into it for internal firewall.
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You mostly list server/admin/console utilities in your 'good' list and on your 'bad' list two 'luser' GUI apps -Windows and Office' which have to do 1000 things for 1000 different (mostly uneducated) end users. Due to their complexity and GUI orientation, these apps are considerably more complicated than a webserver or mailserver utility, which is one reason why they are 'buggier'
I'm not sure that universal OSS QA standards are enforcable or practical across the large range of OSS products, given the different purposes and motivations for coding, but having worked as tester and test manager I believe that intelligent independant testing is invaluable for any development effort.It should be obvious that end-user Office-type apps need a lot more prerelease formal QA than a utility like samba or squid would need. this is because experienced users (hackers/sysadmins) will verify functionality and ask for fixes/improvements of a network utility or such, while the real users of a consumer-type GUI will see the product too late and be too inarticulate or uncommunicative to give good feedback. QA for GUI apps often serves as Usability testing and user advocacy as much as functional testing. (I play an SQA on TV!)
Where Linux/OSS seems to fall short sometimes is in the (insert windowing system of choice) GUI frontend to CVS, Squid, Senmail or whatever. By the time that a GUI-based end-user product gets released to its end users it is usually too late to protect the users from errors -they must be fixed prior to release -they need a 1.x release that has been blessed by QA for meeting the functional spec
These people may not be happy with Windows, but that doesn't mean that they want to wade through forked or half-finished code, or camp out on freshmeat waiting for a new patch because the app doesn't cut and paste for some reason. As other posters have noted, writers of GUI apps need to adhere to GNOME/KDE standards, and realise that a lot of GUI design is a lot more subjective than, say writing a TCP/IP stack and that sometimes the endusers/QA understand some of these issues better than the developers do.Actually, my PacBell-provided 'DSL' modem is really an ATM NIC card -at least that's the binding and protocol that is loaded into WinNT (sorry) networking when the card is installed. The card is an Efficient Networks SpeedStream 3030. I can't wait until the Linux drivers are released and I can ditch my bluescreening NT server.
Young Lady, In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Doh! Lousy Gravity! -Homer J Simpson
As far as single point of failure, for a small non-tech office we had good tech support from the ISP who were a partner with whistle. Although there were connectivity probs mentioned above we never had email problems with it. We didn't have any tech resources or UNIX savvy people to troubleshot multiple firewalls, proxies, mailservers etc. The dollars lost in minor connectivity problems were more than outweighed by the savings over multiple boxen and a $50k+ sysadmin salary ;)
Before the II came out I did usability testing for interjet and thought that it was even better. I was disappointed by IBMs decision to bundle it with services since we already have DSL. Before we went with DSL I upgraded the SW for VPN and had been playing with PPTP and such....
This is not the same as having a Linux or BSD box that is fully accessible, but it can be administered by non-techs and certainly beats NT ProxyServer and Exchange! Because we couldn't upgrade the Interjet 1 when we got DSL, it now serves as DNS/mail and internal docs and web. We love it!! too bad we can't put an extra NIC into it for internal firewall.for those interested in a fantasy league political experience a la rotisserie baseball leagues check out http://www.fantasyelections.com