|
Home > Archive > Linux Debian support > March 2006 > How Linux can benefit from Microsoft
You are viewing an archived Text-only version of the thread.
To view this thread in it's original format and/or if you want to reply to
this thread please [click here]
| Author |
How Linux can benefit from Microsoft
|
|
|
| How can Linux benefit from Microsoft?
A very strange thought!
But consider.
What does Microsoft have? Money and power.
That means they can find out what people want.
(It is *extremely* expensive to find out what people want!)
Linux people could easily ride on the back of that, by using Microsoft's
research to do the same thing - either more elegantly - or, at least,
free.
So, for example, take the case of emailing pictures.
Ordinary people really want to do that ... and they want to do it
quickly and easily.
XP provides just what people want. Even an idiot can send a photograph
to his mum in about five seconds - using "Send To" - "Mail Recipient",
whereupon everything is done automatically ... the re-sizing ... the
compression ... the launching of the default email application ... with
the picture set up as an attachment.
You must admit, this is a a magnificent example of giving people what
they want!
So - what are the implications of this?
I am subscribing to this newsgroup - and I am spending hundreds of hours
struggling to master Debian - and so please accept me as being friendly!
I am wondering how Microsoft could be USED by you.
( I was going to say "by us" - but I am too much of a newbie - and that
would have been presumptuous!)
--
Chris
| |
| shakotah 2005-10-24, 9:42 am |
| And in a year they'll sue us all for patent infringement.
---
Stultorum infinitus est numerus
| |
|
| In article <0MCdnWEkXJ9inM3eRVn-rA@speakeasy.net>, shakotah
<shakotah@spymac.com> writes
>And in a year they'll sue us all for patent infringement.
Lighten up! I was looking for benefits!
>Stultorum infinitus est numerus
Stultorum infinitus est numerus - Infinite is the number of fools.
(Bible)
Could be finite and large. Could not be infinite.
Mathematicians differentiate between big and infinite!
--
EXUBERANCE:
a passion to know more;
a playful spirit;
an empathy with nature;
a sense of joy.
| |
| Madhusudan Singh 2005-10-24, 9:42 am |
| Chris wrote:
> Could be finite and large. Could not be infinite.
> Mathematicians differentiate between big and infinite!
Is that countably or uncountably (in)finite ?
| |
|
| In article <43504d14$0$93534$14726298@news.sunsite.dk>, Madhusudan Singh
<spammers-go-here@spam.invalid> writes
>Chris wrote:
>
>
>Is that countably or uncountably (in)finite ?
I suppose if we went into the future and considered all of time it could
be infinite - but it would have to be aleph-null rather than continuum,
don't you think, in that people are discrete, even if not discreet.
--
Chris
| |
| A. Ben Hmeda 2005-10-24, 9:42 am |
| Chris wrote:
<snip>
> You must admit, this is a a magnificent example of giving people what
> they want!
>
<snip>
In my book, any program that does stuff like that automagically is worth
un-installing.
Take a quick look at the history of GUI, Word Processing,
Spreadsheet/Database programs, web browsers and media players etc. and
you may find that MS has always been a "me too" company. In a recent
Q&A, an MS PR person commented on the lack of tabbed browsing in IE by
saying that "it wasn't what our customers wanted" . Only recently, it
has been announced that tabbed browsing will be a " feature" in the new
IE. If anyone is doing the copying and learning here, it is MS.
| |
|
| In article <KtCdnQr5zOh76sneRVn-1Q@rogers.com>, A. Ben Hmeda
<abhNOCAPS@canada.EH.com> writes
>Chris wrote:
><snip>
[vbcol=seagreen]
><snip>
>In my book, any program that does stuff like that automagically is
>worth un-installing.
<snip>
Fair enough - I am open to ideas.
How would you do this in Debian though?
In fact, how *do* you do it?
Do you go through all the steps one-by-one when you want to send a
picture?
Or do you use a script to automate the process?
--
Chris
| |
| Philipp Pagel 2005-10-24, 9:42 am |
| Chris <nospam@[127.0.0.1]> wrote:
> XP provides just what people want. Even an idiot can send a photograph
> to his mum in about five seconds - using "Send To" - "Mail Recipient",
> whereupon everything is done automatically ... the re-sizing ... the
> compression ... the launching of the default email application ... with
> the picture set up as an attachment.
> You must admit, this is a a magnificent example of giving people what
> they want!
I think the point here is, that this is a good example of Microsoft
providing a feature which does what THEY THINK people want. In this
particular case they may even be right for the majority of home users.
On the other hand, this is definitely NOT what I want because it makes
assumptions about my intention and qietly imposes its choice on me. For
the very same reason I routinely throw a fit once I have to use Word and
some 'helpful' feature decides I just started an enumeration, when I
didn't. (Yes, I know you can switch that off)
Many people say the goal of LINUX should be "world domination" i.e.
putting Microsoft out of business and be on everybodies desktop. I don't
think so! I like LINUX because it is DIFFERENT from Windows. If you want
the features and functionality of Windows I say: Then use Windows. And I
don't mean this at all to be insulting or anything like that. Seriously
- despite all MS bashing, Windows does a pretty good job for many
applications. Free software is about choice - not monoculture.
Long live LINUX, UNIX, Windows, Mac-OS, ...
cu
Philipp
--
Dr. Philipp Pagel Tel. +49-89-3187-3675
Institute for Bioinformatics / MIPS Fax. +49-89-3187-3585
GSF - German National Research Center for Environment and Health
http://mips.gsf.de/staff/pagel
| |
| linxlvr 2005-10-24, 9:42 am |
| On Tue, 18 Oct 2005 10:21:03 +0100, Chris wrote:
> In article <KtCdnQr5zOh76sneRVn-1Q@rogers.com>, A. Ben Hmeda
> <abhNOCAPS@canada.EH.com> writes
>
> <snip>
>
> Fair enough - I am open to ideas.
> How would you do this in Debian though?
> In fact, how *do* you do it?
> Do you go through all the steps one-by-one when you want to send a
> picture?
> Or do you use a script to automate the process?
I usually email photos as attachments, not sure what you are really after
here. If I wanted to send several, I would highlight several and select
them all at once. I would also use the same method on a windows machine.
But then again, I would be using Mozilla on a windows machine also. :-)
--
dw
| |
| linxlvr 2005-10-24, 9:42 am |
| On Tue, 18 Oct 2005 00:20:33 -0400, A. Ben Hmeda wrote:
> Chris wrote:
> <snip>
> <snip>
> In my book, any program that does stuff like that automagically is worth
> un-installing.
> Take a quick look at the history of GUI, Word Processing,
> Spreadsheet/Database programs, web browsers and media players etc. and
> you may find that MS has always been a "me too" company. In a recent
> Q&A, an MS PR person commented on the lack of tabbed browsing in IE by
> saying that "it wasn't what our customers wanted" . Only recently, it
> has been announced that tabbed browsing will be a " feature" in the new
> IE. If anyone is doing the copying and learning here, it is MS.
So true. MS didn't even want to have anything to do with the internet
until it caught on. Then all of a sudden they had 'invented' it. There is
a reason the whole internet is forward slashed... It's because Bill
didn't invent ANY of this.-- dw
| |
| A. Ben Hmeda 2005-10-24, 9:42 am |
| Chris wrote:
> In article <KtCdnQr5zOh76sneRVn-1Q@rogers.com>, A. Ben Hmeda
> <abhNOCAPS@canada.EH.com> writes
>
>
>
>
> <snip>
>
> Fair enough - I am open to ideas.
> How would you do this in Debian though?
> In fact, how *do* you do it?
> Do you go through all the steps one-by-one when you want to send a picture?
> Or do you use a script to automate the process?
If I were to send many pics, then I would use gThumbs to mass-resize to
640x480 and create a web album. I browse to the directory it created and
grab the resized images from there...and delete everything else
| |
|
| In article <cq2dnatQTppDbMTenZ2dnUVZ_tCdnZ2d@rogers.com>, A. Ben Hmeda
<abhNOCAPS@canada.EH.com> writes
>
>If I were to send many pics, then I would use gThumbs to mass-resize to
>640x480 and create a web album. I browse to the directory it created
>and grab the resized images from there...and delete everything else
Thanks - I will keep your suggestion as a reference.
Haven't yet had time to look at gThumbs - but I take it that it
compresses the files as well as re-sizing?
--
Chris
| |
| A. Ben Hmeda 2005-10-24, 9:42 am |
| Chris wrote:
> In article <cq2dnatQTppDbMTenZ2dnUVZ_tCdnZ2d@rogers.com>, A. Ben Hmeda
> <abhNOCAPS@canada.EH.com> writes
>
>
>
> Thanks - I will keep your suggestion as a reference.
> Haven't yet had time to look at gThumbs - but I take it that it
> compresses the files as well as re-sizing?
gThumb could be used to mass-resize pics and creates a nice web album
from these pics to be viewed by a browser
| |
| Son of Sam 2005-11-15, 7:50 am |
| > ... - but I take it that it compresses the files as well as re-sizing?
sure it does comporess it if u select jpg, png or gif as output file
format, nothing special.
| |
| Son of Sam 2005-11-15, 7:50 am |
| > ... - but I take it that it compresses the files as well as re-sizing?
sure it does compress it if u select jpg, png or gif as output file
format, nothing special.
| |
| David H. Lynch Jr. 2006-03-21, 5:49 pm |
| Chris wrote:
> How can Linux benefit from Microsoft?
>
> A very strange thought!
> But consider.
> What does Microsoft have? Money and power.
>
> That means they can find out what people want.
> (It is *extremely* expensive to find out what people want!)
Open Source software is created by people trying to solve their own
needs. While it is not the result of massively expensive market
research, it is about an individual finding a way to solve their own
problem. In essence one of the thesis of Open Source is that given that
the source to everything is readily available, a percentage of users
will be motivated to improve it to better meet their needs and the best
solutions/improvements will work their way back into what all of us use.
If you use OpenSource long enough while you will certainly find a few
ways in which Windows is friendlier or does a better job, you will also
discover inumerable ways in which OpenSource tools are better and
friendlier.
I am a software developer. I take both windows and Linux (and other
projects). When doing windows development, I run coLinux under windows
so that I always have a Linux environment available that I can use to
work on my windows projects. There are many programming tasks that can
be performed trivially just by dropping to Linux and scripting together
the tools needed.
One of the hardest things about migrating - from anything to anything,
is it does not matter if the destination is significantly better than
the source, Outlook Users will not migrate to Thunderbird, Office users
will not migrate to OpenOffice, until they can easily perform - usually
exactly the same way that subset of tasks that they do routinely.
Conversely, once you migrate, you will not return even when the
underlying problem that caused you to move gets fixed for exactly the
same reason. Microsoft continues to bleed users to Firefox. Even if IE
is fixed sufficiently to stem the loss, getting the users that left back
can not occur until IE supports the FireFox features like tabbed
browsing they have come to depend on.
Obviously OpenSource developers should borrow good ideas from Microsoft
- just as Microsoft "borrows" ideas. But OpenSource Developers are
scratching their own itch, and that is more likely to produce useful
innovations for all of us.
--
Dave Lynch DLA Systems
Software Development: Embedded Linux
717.627.3770 dhlii@dlasys.net http://www.dlasys.net
fax: 1.253.369.9244 Cell: 1.717.587.7774
Over 25 years' experience in platforms, languages, and technologies too
numerous to list.
| |
|
| In article <bUednVlV6qPsvL3ZUSdV9g@ptd.net>, David H. Lynch Jr. writes
>Chris wrote:
>
> Open Source software is created by people trying to solve their own
>needs. While it is not the result of massively expensive market
>research, it is about an individual finding a way to solve their own
>problem. In essence one of the thesis of Open Source is that given that
>the source to everything is readily available, a percentage of users
>will be motivated to improve it to better meet their needs and the best
>solutions/improvements will work their way back into what all of us use.
>
> If you use OpenSource long enough while you will certainly find a few
>ways in which Windows is friendlier or does a better job, you will also
>discover inumerable ways in which OpenSource tools are better and
>friendlier.
>
> I am a software developer. I take both windows and Linux (and other
>projects). When doing windows development, I run coLinux under windows
>so that I always have a Linux environment available that I can use to
>work on my windows projects. There are many programming tasks that can
>be performed trivially just by dropping to Linux and scripting together
>the tools needed.
>
>
> One of the hardest things about migrating - from anything to anything,
>is it does not matter if the destination is significantly better than
>the source, Outlook Users will not migrate to Thunderbird, Office users
>will not migrate to OpenOffice, until they can easily perform - usually
>exactly the same way that subset of tasks that they do routinely.
>Conversely, once you migrate, you will not return even when the
>underlying problem that caused you to move gets fixed for exactly the
>same reason. Microsoft continues to bleed users to Firefox. Even if IE
>is fixed sufficiently to stem the loss, getting the users that left back
>can not occur until IE supports the FireFox features like tabbed
>browsing they have come to depend on.
>
> Obviously OpenSource developers should borrow good ideas from Microsoft
>- just as Microsoft "borrows" ideas. But OpenSource Developers are
>scratching their own itch, and that is more likely to produce useful
>innovations for all of us.
Good ideas - well expressed. Interesting. Thankyou.
--
Chris
| |
| CorporateGeorge 2006-03-21, 5:49 pm |
|
i don't trust Monopoly$oft anymore. their code is hidden and only viewable
by the chosen ones. i'll never use their overpriced infected crap again.
Chris wrote:
> In article <bUednVlV6qPsvL3ZUSdV9g@ptd.net>, David H. Lynch Jr. writes
>
> Good ideas - well expressed. Interesting. Thankyou.
|
|
|
|
|