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The Root of All Evil
Unless you've been living behind a 2400 baud modem for the past few years, you've probably heard of the tales of Columbia Internet as described in the online comic strip User Friendly. You've probably even looked at a few strips from time to time. You may even have bought the two previous books "User Friendly" and "Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell". Whatever experience you've had with User Friendly, you'll really enjoy the third printed installment "The Root of All Evil".
What's good?
"The Root of All Evil" picks up right where "Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell" left off, with the first comic being the result of a "Y2K" error. Normality returns to Columbia Internet in short order, however, with the invention of an office assistant for VI called "VIGOR" (which spawned it's own real-life equivalent). There's plenty of good story lines in this collection: Pitr challenging Crud Puppy, the introduction of Cat Five, the Coffee Ring incident, Dark Side Dave, the X-Friends, the camping trip, and many many more. But the real reason many UFies should get this book is the introduction of the character that's quickly become a fan favorite: Sid Dabster. The battles between Pitr and Sid are absolutely hysterical. If you need proof, just think what might happen to Sid who has all of his old code on punched cards neatly stacked in a room, only to have his rival Pitr waiting outside the door with a leaf blower. There's plenty of moments like this in "The Root of All Evil" to keep you smiling.
The comics are transferred to the page rather well, with only a few contrast issues. Unlike the previous books, all of the Sunday comics are in their proper height.
What's bad?
There's only two nitpicks I can level at this collection, and they're both extremely picky. The first is the Sunday comics are all in black and white. Unfortunately, to print 1/7th of this book in color would probably increase the printing costs way beyond what User Friendly's audience would pay. Fortunately if you really want to see them in their original glory, you can view them online. The second nitpick can be levelled at any collection of topical comic strips. Sometimes the jokes are too topical. A few of the Sunday sight gags (which tend to be more topical than the weekday gags) left me scratching my head. Some of the jokes are starting to show their age (this is internet time, of course :) ), but there's also a certain nostalgia in comic collections like this. It's like going back and reading Bloom County books with their references to 1980's popular culture. Sure the "I Love You" virus is remembered about as well as a Sean Penn joke, but there's a certain charm in remembering a time when "I Love You" was zipping effortlessly across the net, and X-Men was the movie everyone camped out to see. Do I think User Friendly should be less topical? Of course not. That's some of the beauty of User Friendly (and Bloom County, for that matter). The strips in this book perfectly capture the humor of the situations we all were facing at the time. Just remember you might have to bring some of those old memories back to fully enjoy this book.
What's in it for me?If you have the previous User Friendly books, this is a no-brainer purchase. If you don't have them, you might want to get the other two books before purchasing this one. If you've never viewed User Friendly, view a few strips online or leaf through the other books first. If you're like most geeks, you'll find you'll want as much User Friendly as you can get!
You can purchase this book from FatBrain.
I can't believe that a comic with so many nerdy, linux-related jokes was actually in a real newspaper (the national post, in canada) for a while. I'm sure 99% of the population didn't have a clue what any of the stuff they were talking about was. It didn't last long, of course. One more thing... didn't userfriendly have a GOAT in it? I wonder where they got the idea for that from.
The Slashdot Effect: A new for
I, for one, am hiding behind my Hayes Micromodem //e at 300 baud. I've never even heard of it.
the root of all Linux is /
X-Friends was awful! That joke about erasing the backups just fell flat.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
I think you are due a humour transplant.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I find only BAUDOT survives the interruptions of our communications systems these days. Anyone using 300 baud or above is subject to all forms of magnetic interference.
Futurist Traditionalism
I never got this.
Why do people want to read jokes about their work?
Every programmer, sys-admin, developer, designer, de-bugger, support-desk jockey, etc. that I know DESPISES their job and can't wait to get home.
This may consist of them popping onto IRC again 45 minutes later from a home workstation, but one thing is clear: they DON'T want to read jokes about their work.
My guess is that User Friendly's readership comes primarily from wanna-bes and the unemployed; people who, due to ignorance or poverty, actually want to have one of these drudge jobs.
Goat sex free since 2001
Micro modems are pretty sweet.
Thanks.
Ma bell is so nice. 8)
You can only come up with so many tech support/microsoft-sucks jokes and not become repetitive. I read this comic every day. Sometimes I laugh out loud and sometimes I am left thinking "... uh?"
Illiad has tried a couple of new approaches that detract from the usual themes (eg the Miranda/AJ thing) but sometimes he fails to follow on them.
I'll be ordering my copy of the book as soon as Amazon has it available (ordering directly from the author can be a problem when you live overseas).
No sig
Oh yes, you're a simpleton who's easily amused by tedious and repeatative garbage, but obviously it's the other guy who has a humor problem.
There are far better web comics out there to support!
When I saw a book review titled "The Root of All Evil" I thought this was going to be a review for "The Road Ahead"
After reading the replies here, I am relieved to find out I'm not the only nerd/tech/freak who does *not* find User Friendly even remotely funny or entertaining.
It's badly drawn, for one: I drew like this in high-school. The 'side view of skinny guys with flat asses and no pecs' thing is not bad per se, but shows little effort on the part of the author to go beyond an adolescent presentation.
The jokes are usually groaners, bad puns and such. Yay.
The only people I can envision regularly laughing out loud at this would be wearing white socks with brown shoes, green turtlenecks and thick horn rimmed glasses.
Where the f*** is the elementary courtesy of telling us this is a plug for a comic book?
Yeah, we know ya get money if folks click n' buy,
but sheese! Maybe we'd rather not have mystery topics. Sell a banner ad.
I still prefer redmeat.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
I was actually dissapointed at the quality of the print-outs. The halftone function wasn't carefully selected and many of the sunday strips (as well as a couple of the regular ones) are a blotch of black ink.
My other complain is that, in light of the price (US$12.95 list), I had expected some original, non-web, content. Contrast with the Sluggy Freelance books (to name just one example) which are not only of atonishing quality for the price, but has color pages too ("Game called on account of naked chick").
Complain about Erwin not being as good nor showing as often as three years ago avoided.
Why do people publish comics that are so badly drawn that it defies description? Ok, Dilbert is not a hallmark of technical proficiency either but at least it obeys the K.I.S.S. principle, and it works. People that can draw comics as good as the one above come thirteen in a dozen - heck, even my 8 years old daughter draws comics that are of higher quality. To make the point that I'm not just another badmouthing neophyte, I'd like to shamelessly recommend my own online comic, The Sixth Seal. It is a good example of a comic drawn by a visually oriented hacker who puts in as much effort as some of his peers put in software development, with the same ultimatum that only quality matters.
Existence usually comes as a surprise (Idem)
-Kevin
Yeah, I am pretty "geeky" I suppose you would say. In my opinion UserFriendly suffers from.......not being funny!! Not at all!! Yeah, I can appreciate net and linux jokes; when they are funny. Am I alone in this? Surely I cannot be the only intelligent person who thinks that the strip sucks?
BTW, to even mention Bloom County in the same breath(no pun intended>:) as UserFriendly is desecrating the memory of a truly brilliant work.
\\evil\c$ And on a WINDOWS SMB mount, too! :)
--joshua
I'm not a big User Friendly fan either. The thing that bugs me most, though, is not the rushed art, lame jokes, constant rehash of the "yay Linux/boo Microsoft" theme, overuse of the word "geek", or the fact that many hackers think that vague scribble called Miranda is hot.
No. What bothers me is that UF is now a commercial cash cow. As such, whatever quasi-rebellious, hackerly "edge" the strip may have had during its early days is now gone, and the strip now relentlessly panders to its readership, each joke carefully crafted to appeal to a market-demographic profile of the "typical geek". This is not the Illiad who brazenly stated that Microsoft products were three-coiled turds. This is the new, marketroid Illiad, determined to make his bland comic the perfect vector for sales pitches from large IT companies.
Maybe that is why Illiad is so cruel to Stef... he's rebelling against his very nature.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
And why yes, I do p1mp my own Webcomic in my sig right after that rant about UF. Guess I'm into a little marketing too. -_- Though at least I've been trying to improve as an artist over the past two years... :)
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Really.
:)
It's a very new website! It's uneven and we're trying to improve it.
Unless you don't like us 'cause the wrong joke fell on your head..
--perdida
Oliver from Bloom County. He is the original cartoon hacker.
What's bad?
The fact that User Friendly has never actually made me laugh.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
NTK noticed this book at Amazon
Surely Illiad could've come up with a better cover?...
The quote that most people remember as "money is the root of all evil" is actually a pretty bad misquote from the Bible. The original quote is, "the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." This of course, changes the meaning of what the original author said entirely, but it's amazing how often people get it wrong.
I guess that's why they laid off all but three people a month or so ago - with all that cash, who needs employees?
A book called The Root of All Evil?
Didn't someone already write Bill Gates' biography a couple of years ago?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Here it is!
MONEY = SQRT(EVIL) (money is the root of all evil)
GIRLS = TIME * MONEY (girls are time and money)
TIME = MONEY (time is money)
Therefore...
GIRLS = MONEY * MONEY
GIRLS = MONEY^2
Substitute in the first equation...
MONEY^2 = EVIL
Therefore...
GIRLS = EVIL
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
This is not the Illiad who brazenly stated that Microsoft products were three-coiled turds. This is the new, marketroid Illiad, determined to make his bland comic the perfect vector for sales pitches from large IT companies.
I really don't think this is the case at all. Illiad says here that "The explicit rule is, the business side has *zero* impact on the cartoon strip. In fact, if you read the Investor FAQ, it reveals that I still draw pretty much anything I damn well please."
This can be shown by the fact that Illiad also states that the CEO runs the business side (UFMedia), and he runs the content side (the cartoon strip). User Friendly is not a "commercial cash cow", Illiad is making a living out of what he does, and without letting business interests intrude on his readership's interests.
I have been reading User Friendly for about a year and a half now, and I admit that when I was first introduced to it, I didn't find it all that hilarious. But then I read all the strips from day one (I wonder how many people on this board who have posted merely to say "UF sucks" have actually done that?) and in my opinion it's still as funny as it ever was. Anyone who doesn't like it is of course entitled to their opinion, but as an earlier poster pointed out, a large proportion of the criticisms on this board are to do with Illiad's drawing, which he makes fun of himself (see this strip and this one.)
-- "Love is a device invented by bank managers to make us overdrawn." - Arnold Rimmer
300 baud - luxury ;-)
:-P
Until they lay 'phone cables up this way I continue to communicate with my ISP via smoke signals. I have a paraffin burner at the end of my RS232 giving nearly one bps - it took six months to download this page. I get my U/F via weekly carrier pigeon
http://fsfeurope.org/
Why do people want to read jokes about their work?
To remind themselves how silly this game is! One of my collegues commented one day on the effectively random stuff the hackers would say. It ocurred to me that it was the sentient equivalent of chewing one's leg off to get out of a trap.
Mark.
'I've run out of limbs but have to give four weeks notice. Good of sales to hand me another pre-fucked project.'
Yet in all of the "official" press, either from ORA or from reviews like this, you'd think the man had written for Seinfeld.
Why won't the official press just acknowledge that UF sucks and move on?
The UF lovefest is just a circlejerk.
Don't you mean, "C:\"? I'm sure that's what I heard.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Time = Money
Women = Money * Time
Women = Money^2
Money = sqrt(evil)
Women = evil
Not a very good one though, as they've just laid off a large chunk of their (bloated .com) staff. There's a rather pathetic begging letter on there recently asking UF readers to find them jobs.
Incidentally (or otherwise), when I asked how I could explain to my HR department how all of the layoffs could be "senior" or "management" or "directors" without that necessarily being indicative of them being just another bunch of over-hyped under-skilled .gone wannabe's, I had my account summarily deleted for trolling. The question (a serious one, which they will be asked by potential employers) was never answered.
Sure, the UF community is friendly. As long as you're utterly compliant with its smug and insular attitude, that is.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.