A few years back, I wrote an article for O'Reilly about something I'd
noticed starting in the 1980s. Unix (and later Linux) had grown in the
direction of readable (i.e. ASCII) file formats, where MS-DOS had grown
in the direction of unreadable formats. I think this is related to what
you're talking about.
And, based on my experiences working at DEC, I attribute some of this
tendency to an accident of hardware design that was cause such pain for
us software developers that we avoided more efficient hardware-oriented
data formats, and that pushed us toward using ASCII.
If you're interested, my article's "How an Accident of Hardware Design
Encouraged Open Source
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/02/22/open-formats-open-source.html>".
Mark Rosenthal
On 2/11/2014 6:44 AM, John Abreau wrote:
Not sure whether this would mean anything for a new user, but from the
perspective of someone who started using UNIX (Linux's ancestor) long
before Windows existed, I find that on Linux systems, I'm free to work with
my data directly, whereas on Windows and MacOS it feels more like my data
is locked up in file formats that I can only access through the
straitjacket of the application that created the file.
In other words, the Linux environment provides me with a rich toolkit for
handling my data, and it's very easy to build simple scripts for tasks that
I'll be repeating often, such as processing photos into my photo album or
post-production editing of videos to prepare them for uploading to youtube.
Whereas on Windows, and to a lesser extent on MacOS, I have to depend on
various applications to handle my data for me, and if the application
doesn't do what I need it to do, I have to wait for the application's
developers to add my needs as a new feature in some future release.
Either that, or change what I want to accomplish in order to accommodate
the limitations of the application.
Of course, like any toolkit with powerful capabilities, there's a learning
curve that comes with developing the expertise that leads to mastering
those capabilities.
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 9:21 PM, Micky Metts <[email protected]>wrote:
I have a request for the group -
I am speaking at the GLADcamp Drupal conference in Los Angeles next month
and wish to have part of my talk cover the benefits of Linux. I have
started a riseup.net pad here:
https://pad.riseup.net/p/linux
I would love it if anyone has some things to add that I may have
overlooked.
So far I plan to mention fsf.org and the groups on meetup. If you have
any wisdom to add, please do share!
Thanks for all of your help with this and with inspiring me to teach
others how to install Linux locally.
--
Michele Metts
DrupalConnection.com - Social Networks - Websites for Entrepreneurs
617-877-1658
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