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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.
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 disagree.
I've been sys-admin'ing for long enough to want out. But I still enjoy UF and all the "in" or "out" jokes that go with it.
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Me thinks that if you dislike your work, your more readily wanting to make fun of your work (or have someone else do it for you).
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
Dilbert was bloody popular among engineers and the blue-collar workforce in general. User Friendly does the same thing. Illiad may be a rather lacking in the talent department (goodbye, karma), but he does know how to appeal to a certain audience. Dilbert got your cublicle workers, User Friendly your nerdy Unix freaks, Doonesbury your political liberals, Garfield your fat lasagna-loving cats (?), and so on...
Anyway, Penny Arcade is far superior in both art and content, and the jokes aren't nearly as obscure.
You seriously know that many people who hate their tech jobs? Scary! I can't imagine spending a third of my life doing something I despise. I recommend that everyone you know get a new job, or possibly get a different life. Something is seriously wrong when you can't laugh at yourself or your life.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
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"
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.
Your comic looks magnificent! It's very beautiful.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
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.
:)
Well I have to disagree with you here. My previous job I was a UNIX sysadmin and a Sybase DBA. I hated being a DBA--mainly 'cause I didn't get SQL very well, and had enough UNIX fires to deal with--the former sysadmin wasn't too terribly great, imho. I worked weekends, late into evenings. I would get called in on my vacations and holidays. Sadly I liked what I did (minus the DBA stuff), but I really disliked some of the people that I had to deal with.
So you better understand my meaning, having totally non-technical people telling me how I should do my job, and my boss not really understanding what I did or listening to my suggestions of how to improve efficiency and reduce downtime.
But I also switched jobs a few months ago, and I really enjoy my new job. It definatley helps that the people are much cooler.
But more to the point...throughout all of this I have enjoyed reading UserFriendly.
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
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!
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.
:)
Uhh... ya obviously don't know me.
Seriously, though, all the best tech folks I know love their work for a passion (and, being employed by MontaVista Software, I work with a great many of them). I (and probably most of the folks who are good at what they do) won't work somewhere I'm not happy, even if the money's better.
If you think coding is drudge work, then you Just Don't Get It; the joy of creation is lost on you. So be it -- some people don't have it -- but don't deny that some of us do. Hell, most free software wouldn't exist if creating it weren't fun.
I read User Friendly for the same reason I read Dilbert -- it's funny, and I can laugh about people whose jobs suck compared to mine (though we may both work in the same industry).
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?
Most of the geeks I know do it because they love it. The boss had to run me off Thursday night, and had to remind me last night that today is Saturday and I don't work. Those of us who can have DSL at home and hack our own boxen at night and on rainy weekends (which happens a lot in Seattle :)... my best friend just wrote a PHP hack to assist convention schedulers in planning panels, and I'm busy learning the ins and outs of Debian and making it play nice with my Sony Vaio....
My opinion is that if you're just doing it for the money, GET OUT OF THE FIELD, and find something you really like doing. Yeah, so you'll have to trade the Beemer for a Saturn. Believe me, I'm a lot happier working for an itty bitty company doing what I love, than pimping myself to some huge faceless corporation making the big dime and hating it. Been there, done that.
Go read "What Color Is Your Parachute." Yeah, it looks dippy. It's not. Changed my life.
Geekdom is like baseball. Yeah, there are some that do it because they're good at it and can make money. (Fie on you, A-Rod.) But the best players play For Love Of The Game. (I-CHI-RO!)
Just because you hate your job doesn't mean that those of us that love our jobs are losers. My personal definition of success is doing what I love and getting paid for it. If you don't love what brings home the bacon, then I gotta put my hand up to my forehead with my thumb and pointy finger held at right angles, because frankly there is no sadder thing than depending on that which you hate. I don't have to have the fattest paycheck on my block. Don't want it.... the price is far too high in terms of stress and happiness.Sign me, :)
Sleeping Well in Seattle
and the root of all Evil is \
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Sadly, just like very few people can appreciate truly elegant code or (something else that often gets neglected) well-architected software, I'm afraid that few people can appreciate good work in other domains, especially when appreciation takes effort. User Friendly is, to me, a mildly amusing piece of folk-art generated by the community which it serves. I don't think you could call it either a good comic or good comic art.
I hope you print this on paper someday and get it distributed, to reach a wider audience.
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.
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.
Userfriendly isn't nearly in the same league as "Dilbert". It's not as funny, not as witty, and the creator didn't work at Pac Bell for 10 years. Furthermore, "Dilbert" has a rather larger audience, which is all office workers. It's not blue-collar in the slightest (?)
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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/
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
My guess is that User Friendly's readership comes primarily from wanna-bes
Yep, that sounds about right (i agree with this from first-hand observations).
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
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.
I do not what prompts such silly bitterness but you must work in a really cruddy place. Like most people have said the people that read slashdot and userfriendly and such things do so because they love technology, computers, *nixes and the code.
From my user profile here at Slashdot:
I dream of big machines multi-processor server beasts. I fall asleep to the soothing whirr of RAID arrays grinding in the background. Endless lines of monotous code fill my head as I down one too many Jolts with the coffee cup still on my desk. I hold onto the mouse like a lifeline because it is. This is what I always wanted. This is what I got. I am not afraid.
ACK