Slashdot Mirror
Unix-Haters Handbook Available Online
prostoalex writes "The Unix-Haters Handbook, publication year 1994, is now available online for free as a single PDF file. Apparently some suburban Seattle company has agreed to host this 3.5MB file on its servers. The anti-foreword is written by no other but Dennis Ritchie, who proclaims: 'Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But
it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy.'" This is what should happen to more out-of-print books.
Windows Hater Book, Entry 1.
.
A "32-bit multi-threaded Operating System" which freezes for 30 seconds while Adobe Reader 5.0 starts up and downloads a 3.5 MB pdf
I guess it is multi-threaded. I mean, I could wiggle the hourglass.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
the entire book is there
Oh crap, there goes my Karma.
I checked the wrong link.......
Huh?
Click on the "Now Online For Free!!" Not gonna link, cause that's just mean.
"If I am such a genius, how come that I am drunk and lost in the desert with a bullet in my ass?" --Otto (Malcom ITM)
This might be on Microsoft's servers, but it's in Daniel Weise's private webspace (he being one of the three authors). No, this is not an unsubtle attempt at pro-windows propaganda.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
(I know, 'cause I sent in the note which it listed there ;)
.tex source (which one may not process save under specific circumstances) for _The TeXBook_ and _The METAFONT Book_ by Dr. Donald E. Knuth). Books of interest include:
That's, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ for those who aren't familiar with this wonderful site.
It lists a number of other out-of-print books which're of interest to geeks (and some which are in print such as the
_Unix Text Processing_
Norman Walsh's _Making TeX Work_ (which is on Sourceforge)
Eckel's book on programming Java
and for those with kids, _The Great Logo Adventure_
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I read with great interest this "UNIX Haters Handbook" that you host online through one of your research monkey's web sites.
I use Windows and now I know why I hate UNIX so bad.
I'll do anything you tell me to do.
Sincerely,
Bob Underling
It's hosted on microsoft.com.... is anyone surprised?
It's news because research.microsoft.com is hosting the entire (3,554 KB) book.
Why is acroread freezing my system for 1 minute everytime i wanna read a damned pdf, are adobe's programers on crack or the format so unefficient it has to bring my machine to a halt to render the nice fonts and all?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Only faster! Now that's Hyper-threading!
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
...the best part of the foreword:
"As for me? I switched to the Mac. No more grep, no more piping, no more SED scripts."
Just FYI: the correct way to denote book titles on a website is not by _pseudo-underlining_ them, but by using italics.
The italics codes (and most other HTML) work under Slashdot's "Plain Old Text" mode as well as the "HTML Formatted" mode.
"As for me? I switched to the Mac. No more grep, no more piping, no more SED scripts.. "
Oh well. I guess he really can't escape Unix.
From the Preface:
Modern Unix is a catastrophe. It's the "Un-Operating System": unreliable, unintuitive, unforgiving, unhelpful, and underpowered.
Now, who has the URL to that Microsoft company picture from the 70's where everyone looks high?
In my opinion, Dennis Ritchie is jealous of his brother Guy. Dennis was stuck programming computers while his brother was making great movies, marrying Madonna, then making horrible movies and living off of Madonna's income. :)
Any person who complains that a clock takes 1.4megs of memory is still stuck in East Africa...
Not that I think Unixes are very good, but this sort of anti-advocacy has to be fresh to really resonate with its audience.
I'm not really surprised it's been released for free now, since it has no value.
Thanks! I was looking for Woodcock's Z specification book and was tempted to buy it at Amazon.
Dennis Ritchie himself uses Windows NT...
Simson Garfinkel eventually became a hermit and withdrew from public life after too many people mistook him for Art Garfunkel. He now lives in a cave in southern California.
Daniel Weise went on to work at Microsoft. He distinguished himself as the first non-Samoan to ever pick up Bob Barker after winning the Showcase Showdown on "The Price Is Right."
Steve Straussman (no website, sorry -- anyone?) left the Unix-Hater's list after it was revealed that he had fallen in love with a woman who loved Unix. He has come to terms with the past, and now teaches "How to Shell Script in Linux" classes at his local community college.
John Klossner went on to a successful career making cartoons for Lucas' Skywalker Sound company newsletter, until fired for printing one that suggested an unnatural intimacy between Luke Skywalker and Chewbacca.
Donald Norman won the coveted "Golden C< Prompt" award and retired from public life.
Dennis Ritchie became something of a celebrity on the web for his many and varied contributions of photos to Engrish.com.
Scott Burson became a monk and moved to Iceland.
Don Hopkins ran for office in Lousiana and lost. He is now a semi-successful insurance salesman, and plays harmonica regularly.
That was all I could find out about -- anyone got any more?
Carousel is a lie!
I find it ironic that in the forward he mentions he switched to a mac to avoid cryptic UNIX things like grep and pipes, etc.
Now Mac OS X is based on UNIX!
He should derive self esteem from the mocking of others, in order to bolster his own self-confidence, as he is lonelier than you or I could imagine.
It's the author's webspace... he happens to work at MS.
I would care about the server getting slashdotted, but since its microsoft's bandwidth, and this is slashdot, I feel compelled to be a dick and not volunteer a mirror.
Microsoft has more bandwidth than god anyways.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Since when was it a good idea to post a link to a 3.5mb file hosted on a small suburban server on slashdot? :)
no comment
I actually have it in paperback form, and it comes with a Unix barfbag. A lot of the points made in the book are still quite valid, but a lot of them are things that have been fixed in the last 10 years. When placed at the appropriate time, you have to realize that it does a decent job of describing the worst parts of Unix from the views of VMS users, among others. Like /., it makes no pretense of being a balanced view.
My main gripe is that they confuse the Internet with Unix. So an entire chapter is devoted to Usenet. That was written before spam, I'm sure the author would be able to write even more vitriol in that category.
I'd love to see it updated, particularly given that so many of the gripes have been addressed and fixed in the world of FS/OSS.
Probably my favorite quote that really needs an update: "Unix was no designed for the Mac." (page 18 of the PDF)
Michael
Do you have ESP?
Seriously, that's why you should have a .torrent for it, not because I don't want anyone to catch me downloading files from microsoft.com, really...
I read this book when it came out, when I was just a mere youth in the world of Unix. I actually learned a lot about Unix, both the history and actual day-to-day usage. It's clearly authored by a collection of people who love to hate unix and hate to love unix.
In the intervening nine years, a lot of the criticisms in this book have been addressed. Even at the time it was released, this was becoming true. A lot of the issues in the book have a solution, and its name is "Perl". But don't fool yourself; Unix still sucks in a lot of ways. The chapters criticizing X, for example, are unfortunately far too true today.
I hope the people who read this get the joke; that only a group of people intimately familiar with Unix could have produced such a book.
can do your part in slashdotting "the beast" simply click here
That server seems to be holding up surprisingly well, I wonder how long until someone realizes the R&D department's bandwidth usage went through the roof and deletes the file...
I don't need to worry about those rabid unix haters, I use Linux. Oh wait...
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
page 337:
* u++/
In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson,
Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating
system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April
Fools prank kept alive for more than 20 years. Speaking at the recent
UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following:
"In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/AT&T
Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early
release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland,
and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and
power. Dennis had just finished reading Bored of the Rings, a hilarious
National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien Lord of the Rings
trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment
and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating
environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to
be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration
levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other
more risque allusions.
"Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal,
called "A." When we found others were actually trying to create real
programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and
evolved into B, BCPL, and finally C. We stopped when we got a
clean compile on the following syntax:
for(;P("\n"),R=;P("|"))for(e=C;e=P("_"+(
8)%2))P("|"+(*u/4)%2);
"To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that
allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually
thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science
progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T
and other U.S. corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C!
It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate
even marginally useful applications using this 1960s technological
parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense)
of the general Unix and C programmer.
The forward is written by Don Norman, who worked where in 1994? You guessed it. Today's largest distributor of Unix in the world: Apple.
fsck -u
The Problem with Hidden Files
Unix's ls program suppresses file whose name begin with a period (such as
Windows' dir program suppresses file whose are attributed with H (such as...what you see in attrib *.* with H with them) by default from from directory displays. Attackers exploit this "feature" to hide their system-breaking tools by giving them attribute H. Computer crackers have hidden mega bytes of information in unsuspecting user's directories.
Using file name that contain spaces or control characters is another powerful techniques for hidding files from unsuspecting users. Most trusting users (maybe those who have migrated from the Mac or from MS-Windows) who see a file in their home directory called system who't think twice about it - especially if they can't delete it by typing rm system. "If you can't delete it," they think, "it must be because UNIX was patched to make it so I can't delete this critical system resource."
Using file names that contain spaces or control characters is another powerful technique for hiding files from unsuspecting users. Most trusting users (maybe those who have migrated from whatever-OS-on-earth) who see a file in their system directory called system.dll won't think twice about it - especially if they can't delete it by typing del system.dll. "If you can't delete it," they think, "it must be because Windows was patched to make it so I can't delete this critical system resource."
The entire article is stuffed with argument as such. Worth reading only for a laugh.
So, in 1997, Donald Norman of Apple bashes UNIX...
And now all Apple Systems ship with it!
I [heart] Irony
I guess he really can't escape Unix.
Mac OS X's low level follows much of the Single UNIX Specification, but it is not a UNIX® brand system.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I own this book and it's great! While some of the arguments are contrived, it does bring to light many usability issues that appologetics so easily support. Name any other operating system that you can create a file ("-s") that can destroy your operating system? Linux, the kernal, is an amazing beast. The shells and "tools" are amazingly beastly.
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/humour/msoft.htm
ttp://www.theinformationminister.com/press.php?ID
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
TrollKore
Come to irc.freedomirc.net #trollkore
I've got the print version of the book. Witty, clever, and sadly on-target in quite a lot of its observations. (I'm still dismayed to see a greater-than character in front of "From" when it's the first word on a line in an email message. There's just no excuse for that in 2003.) And I'm a die-hard Unix lover (logged on using a Silent 700 when I was in 3rd grade).
But I was turned off that the Unix Haters mailing list was so exclusive: you had to write some similarly erudite and novel observation on how awful Unix was before you'd be let into the club. Clever invective to be kept a careful few? Sounds a bit fearful to me.
Regardless, it's been years since the book's been out, and Unix still has many warts. The book (and presumably, the mailing list, although I wouldn't know), could serve as a requirements document on how you'd go about improving Unix in general.
What did the authors offer as a better UI? No, not Windows. Not Mac. Some arcane LISP machine was usually the machine of choice. Sorry, I live in the real world and have to earn a paycheck.
In case it does get slashdotted, there is a mirror at www.cyruslabs.com/unix-haters/
It even has an HTML converted version for all of us that hate PDF's.
He switched to Mac OS, to...avoid unix. I guess that didn't pan out.
This documents has many excellent points. When you are a green developer just into college you are sort of brainwashed into the "UNIX is the best. PCs and Macs are just toys compared to the incredible power of UNIX." When I encountered things I just assumed it was my lack of knowledge or understanding. UNIX wouldn't have faults or problems!
Of course, many of these problem have been resolved since this book was written. Unfortunately, far too many have remained and have many their way into Linux.
A) Cryptic Command Names. Still there in Linux
B) "Unix was like Homer, handed down as oral wisdom."
Man, this is so true. I got most of my UNIX knowledge passed down to me by upperclassmen and professors. It is amazing how much training it takes in UNIX to do something simple in Windows. For example, recursively searching through a subtree for some text in a file.
C) Terminal Insanity. Still there in many ways. VT100 pops up its ugly head decades after it should have been killed.
D) The X-Windows Disaster. X-Windows is what first made me question UNIX's superiority. Dang X sucks. Bad. What a mess! "Motif Self-Abuse Kit" made me laugh because my brief experience programming Motif was one of the worst in my life. It was a mess of void pointers and pointers to functions that was an absolute pain to program.
E) Make "Unfortunately, in their zeal to be general, many
Unix tools forget about the quick and easy part."
I've never found a make that I liked. You should not have to spend hours programming the freakin makefile. Nor should you have to debug whitespace because you have an extra space or tab.
Wow... That's an impressive list.
:( I couldn't find it on CPAN either.
It's a pity the METABOOK link does't work
So, does anyone know another link?
GNU guru and mainframe hacker
Yes, but did it's TCP/IP stack implement the evil bit?
You Twit
I think you went too softly on him, he didn't deserved as much respect.
First Crybaby statement:
A) Cryptic Command Names. Still there in Linux ALIAS to something easier you dolt
Yeah, let's try to cover up the problem.
Second Crybaby statement:
It is amazing how much training it takes in UNIX to do something simple in Windows. Like grepping a text delimited file and piping its output into awk or sed from a simple command prompt? Or storing that information in a simple system variable to be used by a C program compiled on gcc for whatever reason you need? How dumb is you!
A real crushing blow there.
Third Crybaby statement:
D) The X-Windows Disaster. X-Windows is what first made me question UNIX's superiority. Dang X sucks. Bad. What a mess! "Motif Self-Abuse Kit" made me laugh because my brief experience programming Motif was one of the worst in my life. It was a mess of void pointers and pointers to functions that was an absolute pain to program.
It's Open Source bigshot college educated programmer, weren't you bright enough to FIX the problems or just whine because thats what you can do?
In other words, you had no argument and so resorted to the tired "fix-it-yourself" mantra that never stops being invalid or intellectually lazy.
Last Crybaby statement that prooves no programmer wrote this:
And your statement "prooves" an illiterate is writing it.
I've never found a make that I liked. You should not have to spend hours programming the freakin makefile. Nor should you have to debug whitespace because you have an extra space or tab.
Riiiiiiiiiight, everything should work perfectly the first time with only minutes invested regardless of the complexity of the code and how many source/header files you are trying to link up with that makefile.
You're right. Things should not work perfectly the first time. Way to decimate his argument.
Maybe you need to go back and put some real work into that useless piece of paper you got, cuz buddy you are a programmer like George W. Bush is a Scholar and Genius.
Next time, come around when you actually have any points to argue.
You Twit
"Twit" is a word of the mentally weak.
Next.
"Sufferin' succotash."
My god man! You've come to realize that Acrobat is a steaming pile of bloated dogshit, but haven't yet replaced it with Ghostscript and GSView? Well consider today your lucky day!
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
-Snag Ghostscript 8.x and then GSView 4.x from above link.
-Uninstall Acrobat (for good!)
-Install Ghostscript and then GSView
-Update your file type extentions to use GSView for the opening of PDF files.
-Tell everyone you know about how you've discovered a way out from the horrible experience that PDF viewing (under Acrobat) has become!
At least this is the progression that I went through recently... Oh, did I mention this software is absolutely free for personal use, and runs on Win32 and *nix?
You can't read the boot (or use the OS) without the barf bag. Maybe it's time to put mine on Ebay. Seriously I like unix, you don't need as much to run it as w2k.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Look, there's a lot of things that one can learn from reading this carefully, and considering it carefully.
Regarding the rm disasters, we need to lose this macho attitude of "tough shit" and make a solution, or implement a solution. I believe libtrash is a good one, which should work with any programs that use libc function.
Btw, I think even in Linux (I'm not going to talk about UNIX, because I don't give a flying fuck about proprietary crap like Slowlaris), rm does not actually destroy data. It simply marks that area on the HD as being "empty" and available, in that it does *not* write zeros over that area. This is something that has privacy experts in a panic, but I see it as no problem since there are shredder progs.
I'm not saying that overall Windows and Mac are better than Linux (btw, regarding Linux, almost all distributions are perfectly [or nearly so] cross-compatable). In most things, Windows and Mac simply suck -- namely, stability, security capability, and performance. However, GNU/Linux needs to be more concerned with accidental users mistakes, like typing 'rm * foo' instead of 'rm *.foo'.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
From your post, sounds like you have no hot air left to blow out. At least try to make an argument rather then rushing to the defense of a fellow TWIT
The only question to me is why people would want to re-publish this monument to their ignorance after another decade. And it's not like any of them can point to a big success, or even significant effort, at doing better than UNIX/Linux either.
There are no such things as "rm disasters".
There are only mistakes, stop making them, or at least think before you execute.
--- I do not moderate.
"New users of a computer system (even seasoned ones) require a certain amount of hospitality from that system. At a minimum a gracious computer system offers the following...:
* Logical command names that follow from function
* Careful handling of dangerous commands
* Consistency and predictability in how commands behave and how they interpret their options and arguments
* Easily found and readable online documentation
* Comprehensive and useful feedback when commands fail"
In general, UNIX and its workalikes are just as atrocious in not satisfying these very reasonable minimum standards as ever. You can still easily annihilate your most important data by mistying "rm *.bak"...
The main thing that has become obsolete about the book is that some of the security issues with UNIX et al have shifted to Microsoft's OSes, not necessarily because UNIX has become more secure as that it has become relatively less popular.
Ok, so, I think everyone on /. knows that I like GNU/Linux. So, you expect that what follows is going to be a ranting rave about how much this book sucks, right? Wrong. This book is great, and here's why.
Many here have pointed out that alot of these very same problems exist elsewhere. Hidden files are a social-engineering security problem on Windows and Mac as well; likewise with undeleteable files.
So what? Saying, "well, their OS sucks too" doesn't make our OS any better. Since when is it ok for me to accept my own flaws just because everyone else around me also has those same flaws, or others?
The stuff written in this book shouldn't be seen as MS/Mac propaganda. I think most people who are going to be reading it are GNU/Linux users, and aren't going to be switching anytime soon, irrelevant of how much the authors hate *nix. (btw, if *nix sucks so much, why is Mac basing OSX around it, and why do we keep hearing rumors about MS doing such as well?).
There are many valid and important criticisms of *nix in that book. We should consider ourselves lucky that this book is narrowly targetted to *nix and doesn't address any of the same problems win Windows and MacOS -- we've received solid constructive criticism which others haven't, and that's a good thing.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
So which sucks more, vi or emacs?
Will unix ever have an editor as simple and easy to use as dos edit? And if this phenomenon were to occur could we find one unix guy who wouldn't denounce it as a "child's" application?
Like grepping a text delimited file and piping its output into awk or sed from a simple command prompt? Or storing that information in a simple system variable to be used by a C program compiled on gcc for whatever reason you need? How dumb is you!
Vs Windows 2000:
Right click on folder. Select search. Type text. Click "Search Now".
I already know which one is harder. Now which one is better?
It's Open Source bigshot college educated programmer, weren't you bright enough to FIX the problems or just whine because thats what you can do?
Someone already did. It is called OS X.
Riiiiiiiiiight, everything should work perfectly the first time with only minutes invested regardless of the complexity of the code and how many source/header files you are trying to link up with that makefile.
Or maybe someone could do it right.
Your attitude is the biggest weakness of Unix. Instead of trying to make Unix better, you blame the messenger for being "too stupid" to get it.
I think you want it to be harder because it makes you feel superior.
Personally, I could give a crap what about computer "religious wars". I've programmed in C, C++, Java, PL/SQL, Delphi, and more scripting languages than I can think of. I've programmed on UNIX boxes, Linux boxes, and Windows boxes. The only thing I care about is getting the job done in the best way possible.
Brian Ellenberger
Shouldn't it be _UNIX-Haters Handbook for Dummies_?
Here are some Unix Lovers commands:
/backup/home.tgz /home (backup home directory) /etc (make CD image of /etc directory) .wav file to .mp3)
/bin (-y option is now deprecated)
- mail bob <file.tex (send file file.tex to bob)
- mpack -s "photo" photo.jpg bob (send photo.jpg as attachment to user bob)
- for i in *.gif; do convert $i $i.jpg; done (convert all gif files to jpg)
- lynx -dump -nolist www.slashdot.org (grab latest slashdot posting)
- xv -root -smooth background.jpg (put a new background picture)
- strings file.doc|more (read content of MS Word document)
- rm -rf ~/.mozilla/*/*/Cache (clean out Mozilla Cache)
- tar -czpf
- scanimage -mode binary >file.pnm (scan image from scanner)
- cdrecord -eject -v dev=0,0 cdimage.iso (burn CD)
- mkisofs -r -d -o cdimage.iso
- mpg123 -k 25 -n 100 -w file.wav file.mp3 (cut out part of an MP3 file)
- lame file.wav file.mp3 (convert
- perl -p -i -e 's/AAA/BBB/g' *.html (change all AAA to BBB in all html files)
Here some of my Unix haters issues:
- tar -xzyf test.bz2
- dvips -o file.ps file.dvi but dvipdf file.dvi (inconsistent behavior)
- find . -name test.txt (why not just allow 'find test.txt')
- required TABS in Makefile
BTW: many poins mentioned in the unix haters book are no more an issue in a modern Unix OS.
Full April fools prank: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/joke/c.htm
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Yes, UNIX can be difficult to learn especially coming from a pure GUI environment such as Windows. But each OS has their own pros and their own cons. The history of UNIX is that it was written by programmers for programmers for a true mulitask environment to let resources be shared. At the time of it's conception hardware and software were both very expensive luxuries. Since then it has had a few different owners and several tools created for it some embedded in all distros and some inclusive to that particular distro. Anybody that tells you they know every single tool available in UNIX/Linux should be a politician because they are a complete liar. Learning as many as you can and finding other ones that do the job easier is all part of the learning curve with UNIX and the source of the frustation that can create such a book.
Windows however was created as a quick mass distribution OS that was GUI dependent. It was designed for easy use to mass market PCs to the general masses. Thus, it's uses are different from the typical UNIX uses. If you buy new BMW sports car to use as a work car when you should have bought a full size GM truck because you are in the construction business, any wonder your getting pissed off? So purpose can have influence on the perspective of things.
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
Sure things could be easier and the documentation would be more thorough, but a tool is a tool. If you want a quick meal, get fast food or order delivery. If you want to write software without having to think deep and hard, then don't use unix. Programming is hard and takes experience and skill. Contrary to microsoft's assertion that "any idiot can program" writing sophisticated software is difficult and time consuming. Can a carpenter build an intricate 15' meeting table with carvings in one day or one week?
As usual, some lazy people are equating commercially promoted laziness and stupidity as a flaw of some technology. think about it. It's in the best interest of swansons to paint a picture that toiling over stove is tedious, so they can sell more TV dinners. Just as microsoft equates command line as archaic and "too complicated" to their own best interest. What has all this marketing done for our society? People have less patience and feel things should always be easy. Even things that really should be hard, like building a scalable application or cooking a fine french dish.
get off your fat ass and work for a living. Americans sure are getting lazy and more stupid every day. Just like governments assertion the solution to declining quality of education is to use more standardized tests. When in fact it results in rote memorization and reduced critical thinking. Rather than hire more teachers and pay teachers competative salaries, they reduce salaries to pay for more idiotic tests.
AAAAAAAAHHHHHH. My god, is ALL of Slashdot fools these days? THAT "story" was the April Fools joke. Do you also still believe that Microsoft adn Disney give away free stuff to people who forward emails, or that stepping on cracks actually breaks backs?
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
Thank you for sending us a copy of your book, "The Unix-Haters Handbook" to us. We've taken a look at it, and realized how misguided we have been.
As we are quite pragmatic, we decided to fix these outstanding issues. It's much better now; you would be proud. In fact, we did a good enough job with your guidance that Macs everywhere are now using it too!
Thanks again,
Unix Users Everywhere.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Pico or the MC editor [nt]
The burden of proof is not on me. You're just angry I tore it apart. You'll continue to post as an Anonymous Coward.
Next.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I totally agree. Rather than get boged down in arguments, let's just admit something needs fixed, and fix it. It takes a mature individual to admit their shortcoming than to deny them. Similarly, it takes an intelligent person to realize the shortcomings in their computing system, and dedicated some resources to FIXING them, rather than saying "well it's' worse over there!"
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
I think this is part of the blinders that you and other people had on at the time. You hacked operating systems and because hacking some particular OS was great fun for you, you thought it was great for users. But for users, none of that mattered.
UNIX does come off very baddly compared to the other O/S of its era.
Maybe from the point of view of a Multics kernel hacker. From the point of view of a user, it looked pretty sweet in comparison to those aging, messy behemoths.
[Lack of security] did not work to keep UNIx replacing real O/S like VMS.
You are confusing the presence of security features with security. VMS had plenty of security features, it just managed to be even less secure than UNIX at the time (a pretty amazing feat).
Denis Richie effectively invented the buffer overun bug. C was the first computer language that had dynamic memory allocation without dynamic range checking.
Fortran had dynamic memory allocation, which was widely used (too bad it wasn't standardized) and no bounds checking. So did BCPL. So did many Pascal compilers (and not all Pascal compilers offered bounds checking). So, for that matter, did assembly language.
UNIX is unfortunately not the greatest creation of computer science. The fact that so many youngsters look at the pile of offal uncritically is somewhat disappointing.
The whole UHH book, as well as your posting, reek of arrogance and ignorance. Do you really think people who chose UNIX at the time weren't aware of the problems that the UHH points out? They (myself included) chose UNIX nevertheless because, in the end, it was still better for getting real work done than the alternatives.
What the world could have used was some rolling-up of sleeves and efforts to do better, either by bringing those fabulous other systems to workstation-class hardware, or by at least porting over bits and pieces of them (shells, programming languages, etc.). But, in the end, your emperor had no clothes: while people like you whined and complaied a lot, when it came down to it, you apparently really didn't know how to do any better.
The comment of one macho veteran Slashdotter have so annoyed me that I think it deserves being a main-comment for criticism:
There are no such things as "rm disasters". There are only mistakes, stop making them, or at least think before you execute.
Exactly the kind of bullshit macho attitude I was talking about.
Why don't you try doing that if you're a car company, and sell a car that can so easily be fucked up? Oh, yea, instead of having an out of-the-way hard break lever, we put a hard-break button right next to the defog button...but don't fucking bitch at us if you accidentally press the hard-break button (which is right next to the defog button) when trying to defog your windows, and your car spins around and crashes on an icy road.
Does that kind of bullshit macho attitude apply for companies making airplanes? When people making airplaies discovered that slats switches were being turned on accidentally, did they say:
"Yea, so what the slats extention switch can be accidentally turned on by an unintentional movement, possibly causing passenter-injury. Tell the pilots to be more careful and not fuck up."
No, they didn't. They said,
"Ok, so this is a problem. Why don't we cover the slats switch with a spherical clear cover that has to be unhinged before extending slats -- that way, they won't get extended at 500mph and cause the plane to trolly."
Just because many of these problems are socialogical not technological doesn't mean they're not problems. People are not robots. People fuck up -- quite a bit actually. To you perfect people writing a reply to this boldly telling me that people shouldn't "fuck up", how many times did you have to use backspace in writing that response?
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Fess up, you are no programmer!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your the one who jumped to the defense. You'll continue to post a TWIT
The comment of one macho veteran Slashdotter have so annoyed me that I think it deserves being a main-comment for criticism:
There are no such things as "rm disasters". There are only mistakes, stop making them, or at least think before you execute.
Exactly the kind of bullshit macho attitude I was talking about.
Why don't you try doing that if you're a car company, and sell a car that can so easily be fucked up? Oh, yea, instead of having an out of-the-way hard break lever, we put a hard-break button right next to the defog button...but don't fucking bitch at us if you accidentally press the hard-break button (which is right next to the defog button) when trying to defog your windows, and your car spins around and crashes on an icy road.
Does that kind of bullshit macho attitude apply for companies making airplanes? When people making airplaies discovered that slats switches were being turned on accidentally, did they say:
"Yea, so what the slats extention switch can be accidentally turned on by an unintentional movement, possibly causing passenter-injury. Tell the pilots to be more careful and not fuck up."
No, they didn't. They said,
"Ok, so this is a problem. Why don't we cover the slats switch with a spherical clear cover that has to be unhinged before extending slats -- that way, they won't get extended at 500mph and cause the plane to trolly."
Just because many of these problems are socialogical not technological doesn't mean they're not problems. People are not robots. People fuck up -- quite a bit actually. To you perfect people writing a reply to this boldly telling me that people shouldn't "fuck up", how many times did you have to use backspace in writing that response?
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
It does take some training. If you're just a casual computer user and never intend to go beyond that stage, you might find that annoying. However, let's compare some similar tasks:
/tmp/myarchive.cpio
Search all files in dir D for the string "car".
Windows: Open a search window, browse until you get to "D", type in the text "car", and maybe click a checkbox that says in essence "search contents of files".
Unix: find D -type f -print | xargs grep car
Search all files in dir D for the string "car", as a single word on its own (i.e. excluding "cartography", "cartridge", "Decartes", etc.)
Windows: can't be done
Unix: find D -type f -print | xargs grep -w car
Search all files in dir D for the string "car", and save the result as a text file.
Windows: can't be done
Unix: find D -type f -print | xargs grep -l car > some-file
Search all files in dir D for the string "car", and put every matching file into an archive.
Windows: can't be done
Unix: find D -type f -print | xargs grep -l car | cpio -o >
Touche Brian, now keep pretending to be a programmer with your useless fancy piece of paper. Its posted on another thread if you need to read it again.
X is a lot better nine years on, and I can't help wondering if everyone who writes "X sucks" is still using a 3.x version or lower. ... (and I use X 4.3.0 with a Pentium 120 and a 500 MHz Celeron so if there were speed issues I think I'd be aware of them!)
XFree86 != X. There is a plethora of other X implementations. Saying "X 4.3.0" is akin to saying "Linux 9.0", and sounds almost as bad.
"Unix was like Homer, handed down as oral wisdom."
;-)
Mmmmm chocolate... Mmmmm donuts... MMMMMMMM Chocolate Donuts!!!!!!
Now that's wisdom
You are the most easy to troll person, EVAR.
If you couldn't build with Make and clearly had an alternative why are your bitching? Make a stand (no pun intended), and use ant. No one is stopping you.
Your attitude is the biggest weakness/threat (depending on how you look at it) of/to Unix like systems, making critical statements that hold no water because clearly there are alternatives. Bitch when there is a real problem that impedes progress.
Like you said the only thing you care about is getting teh job done in the best way possible.. So use Ant and not make, write a frontend search utility that ties in all the tiny unix programs together. Get to work and stop bitching.
W0RD!
Use delete. Too bad this was never standardized, as it works great (I've been using it since college, about 12 years at this point).
t ml
http://www.mit.edu/people/jik/software/delete.h
Where are the pencil dick or soccer ball wide twat moderators when you need them!
Oh yeah...wasting mod points on TROLLS like me, good thing they modded me into such a fine TROLL.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
P.S.
Windows Rawx!
Apparently some suburban Seattle company has agreed to host this 3.5MB file on its servers
;)
Or perhaps just a little outside of Seattle, like say, Redmond.
Time travel is possible. We are quickly heading for 1984.
You should be able to find _The METAFONT Book_ at www.ctan.org
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
This was a hoax. In fact, the C code given does not compile, and I don't see how it would compile under any reasonable compiler that would ever have been built. Even after wrapping the code in a main() function and adding appropriate functions, gcc still chokes on R=; (empty Rvalue) and the second for loop (no increment step). The comma-operator, the and-operator, the bitwise operators, hex constants: any language that gives you a lot of control over your data-structures and how you access them needs these one way or another. Sure, Ada is perhaps more readable. In fact, perl can be made a lot more readable than C, even though it, like about a dozen other languages, borrows its operators straight out of K&R, precedent included.
Set your threshold to ignore 50% of the new users and you'll notice that most of the old Slashdot crowd isn't even around here.
I about shit myself when I read Dennis Richie's anti-forward!!
.pdf is being hosted at Microsoft?
I wonder what the author thinks about OS X given his distain of Unix in favor of his beloved Mac?
Did anyone notice that the
heh.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
Well, you've forgotten the C preprocessor, right? Define a few macros and presto, it'll compile. To what is another question, of course...
Now we know what we have to change to inprove it for some people.
There is always a saying if you live in a Glass house don't throw rocks. I see microsoft has not learnt this yet. Mind you let take a positive spin if these thing are hated lets change them.(as a option)
Really microsoft windows is a overloaded poorly patched OS. At least Unix as never really got that bad. Now after more than 6 years of complaints something has happened at microsoft lets beat microsoft at every thing and fix what people don't like.
H8 teh l00nix.
Longest
troll
evar.
Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
i guess sockets were bsd's way of saying "screw you" to at&t :}
This is a UI issue. UNIX has a lot of UI issues. Someone who is Mac-saavy probably is going to put a lot of importance on good UI.
.. are actually file entries that show up when you do a listing internally. If you just check the first character for '.' you can eliminate these listed items and as a side effect you can have hidden files. The allowance of putting almost any character in a filename is because programmers don't like to just make arbitrary restrictions on their application. If it's easier to just "support everything" then that's what a developer will do! Having weird characters in filenames means UTF-8 works great on almost every Unix filesystem. (UTF8 is the Unicode encoding for 8-bit ascii that does not use the NUL character which is one of the problems with UTF2 (16bit) text files).
As a user I tend to agree that hidden files are bad. And files that have weird characters in them are totally unacceptable to me.
As a developer there is a certain elegance to the way UNIX and Unix-clones do thing. Like files that start with . are hidden because . and
Unix makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks possible. Windows makes easy tasks easy and hard tasks $29.95.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It IS a (unintentional) handbook for what Linux CAN be when addressing the very complaints the book is rife with.
I wish I was a programmer in this vein so I could help, but I'll leave it up to you young folks to pull up the slack. Godspeed!
(words from a old fart DOS + FoxPro dude)
db
Cig:
ôô
Some of the "problems" that we UNIX geeks deal with everyday aren't really problems to us. But after reading some of this book I'm starting to feel that these would be hurdles to many people. I am actually in the middle of designing an OS and this is already changing some things about the UI for me.
I'll still be command-line based though. ehehe.
reminds of when a stupid, frigging engineering dept requirment said i had to learn to program in f@#$ran 77 (yea - line numbers, common blocks, sphaghetti) on a crappy old vax with a gigantic, faulty hard disk. no, modula 2 just wouldn't do.
hated every second. filesystem sucked. dcl syntax sucked. networking sucked. felt like it had been designed by robots. hated it! hated it!! hated it!!! yes siree!!!!
I bet the on-line version doesn't come with the "UNIX Barf Bag" that the treeware edition had! I still have the book (and the barf bag) but I'm using Linux now instead of one the multitudinous versions of UNIX I've used over the years (first affliction 1987).
For a while, the book was actually a quite good reference for those of us who moved from say HP-UX to SunOS to Solaris and back again as different contracts came along. I compare it to the "Oddments" chapter that used to be in the Perl "Camel book". It documented in one place a variety of things that varied between different flavors of UNIX plus a few of the things that didn't vary but we all wished did since some things were consistently abysmal.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Command line with the most commonly used commands in a menu on the bottom of the screen. Easy.
Just google for: nano text editor
A.Lizard
Tech Public Policy stuff
Ken Thompson invented Unix so that he could continue playing spacewar.
Although I agreed and replied to your parent post, I just had to comment on that.....
db
Cig:
ôô
A lot of the problems listed no longer exist. They have been fixed.
Like the shell everyone I know users bash. Basicly unix and linux is surval of the fitest. Basicly until some comes out with something better than Xwindows that is the way it stays. Note I would love to see that but the moden verson is not to bad.
Now about config files windows suxs there all inside one or two file so if you stuff up you can do major damage to the system at least with unix most likely something will still work to fix it better than what I can say about windows. Note windows can even do its self it with the right conditions.
Now with C any good programmer would run bounds checking or at least should(this is a patch for gcc and electricfence for doing this too depending on the system you like(unskilled programmer the gcc patch is better electicfence checks only allocs ie what malloc calloc free and realloc create)). The alloced mem is freeed and there are not overflows posable. Now what is the dif between c# and C complied not much really. Basicly C can break more rules still work still be memory safe. Note resizing mem realloc can be used to stop buffer overflows from ever happing. Note it does not stop out of memory.
C# might be good but in time if it is good gcc will get the functions too. Ie gcc package is c, c++ , object c and java. Both c++ and object c were attemps to do what c# is doing now.
So basicly every thing he said is true at some point and false at another. But from my quick reading at least 70% false now or more. Really it is a history of faults in Unix that most have been fixed. Unix and linux are changing things in ten year we might not ever know that these fault were there if we don't do history.
And this quote is a great "It turns out that you can't add garbage collection to C++ and get anything nearly as good as a language that comes with one built-in.". Why then does modern gcc C++ have one??. Gcc is the standard complier on neally all unix and linux systems today so basic what they add is standard. Now gcc even runs on windows so the garbage system can be done as one system.
Now come on this doc is due for either a full rewite with all the things that have changed or the bin I can not put it any better.
And the examples at the the programing section suck the answer to the question to print Hello world and just that is
#include
main () {
putf("Hello World\n");
}
But it come into it own when you can do this
#include
main () {
putf("This is the first line\n"
"This is the second\n"
"This is the final\n");
}
One function call three lines of text printed.
Not even basic can do it that fast.
NFS just as bad as mixing windows NT windows 3.1 and windows 95 on the same network. Fine with the same versions or close verson with each other but hell sometimes with all three. Another point not to right home about. If it was happening when NFS were all the same versions that would be another thing. Basicly new versions more bugfixs and sometimes blow top with old errors.
Now teach this guy what a virus is it is a self replicating piece of code that try to replicate with out the users knowlage. Ie user is compling they know not a virus. Basicly if this book says that c is a virus so is VB, C#, C++ and every other compling programing lang.
Note these are just the high points.
at least in unix, one has to be superuser to trash the system.
also, ever heard of a zeroize button (prevents unfriendly regimes from capturing military technology)?
finally, some people aren't allowed to f@#$ up. (otherwise they get sued for malpractice, court-martialled, etc). resistance against f@#$ing up in certain ways can be increased through practice and following procedures.
This isn't a HOWTO. No solution is involved. No fixes. Just a case of saying the way it does work is wrong, without explaining how to do it better (Note the LISP macing examples - not actually practical solutions.) And real-world implementation of something will always have warts compared to theoretical might-have-beens. I'm not impressed by this book.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Vs Windows 2000:
Right click on folder. Select search. Type text. Click "Search Now".
I already know which one is harder. Now which one is better?
Now re-read the post above yours and realize you are solvind a diferent (much simpler) problem than the one proposed. It wasn't just a matter of finding the resulting files for a human to look through. It was a matter of *processing that list* in some further fashion through some other tool. The GUI way doesn't let you do that.
(I've often wondered if it would be possible to design a GUI targetted at experienced users, giving means to express more complex concepts like (take the result of this find and run it through this program over here before showing me the results.) Some sort of a drag-and-drop pipestream would be needed to give GUIs anything even close to the functionality of a CLI.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I really didn't see too much in the whole book I could take seriously, actually. So like, calm down, Mr Hater. LOL
To admit something is broken and has to change is frightening to those who actually *use* that "broken" feature to get real work done (who therefore don't see it as all that broken). That's why OS religious wars develop. When you take a feature someone actually uses and say it's a misfeature that needs to be removed, you are essentially denying that that person exists.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The problem is that I am usually removing files because I need the disk space - so putting them in a trash folder doesn't really help. It just makes an unnecessary intermediate step to actually getting rid of them. This happens a lot in GUIs with trashcans such as Mac and Windows as well - the only reason to use the trashcan is that it is what the GUI interface is designed to do by default.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, I find myself continuously surprised to see how many four and 3 digit UIDs that I see here on a regular basis.
It's just...odd. Doesn't anyone ever graduate from this place?
Hmm, this book was produced without TeX, groff, etc. Maybe that explains all of the COMPLETELY BLANK pages in the PDF.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you'd better start looking for a carpentry job.
Mach is a kernel..and the rest of OSX is based on FreeBSD. ;)
What Jobs " abandoned was NeXT which was based on the Mach kernel. And he didn't even abandon it for very long..looks like all those Mac faithful are using it with a new GUI.
Tell me what you believe...I'll tell you what you should see.
I must agree w.r.t to the issue with rm. Its a problem - not that you /can/ instantly and silently delete files, but that there's no option not to.
What's wrong with "srm" (safe-rm) or "trash" or "del" (pick a name) grafted on to *n*x, and a "purge" command to ditch files from ~/.trash/ or whatever?
It is, indeed, too bad that it'd break a lot of things to change the behaviour of unlink(1) for consistency with the shell etc.
Basically - its fixable, but it'll break backward compatability. I'm increasingly of the opinion that we need a UNIX2 - that is, STUFF backward compatability and fix the problems once and for all. There are lots of issues much like this one.
Unfortunately, a "compatable mode" would still be needed to allow for legacy apps - but it should be possible, even if slower. Just imagine if UNIX vendors could be made to agree to a standard for the changes...
Too bad it'll never happen.
Metaphorically and literally, any sufficiently capable tool is also a weapon, and the more capable, the more ways you can use it to shoot yourself in the foot.
Idiot proofing implies removing options that idiots might trigger.
Sometimes you want those options.
The preface also mentions, proudly, that the book was typeset on (among other things) a NeXT box. Given that NeXT by and large was a serious attempt to address a lot of the usability bitches and whines the book is based on, one suspects there was a certain deliberate blindness on the part of the Unix-Haters. Of course, they were mostly basing their bashing on things about Unix that were already archaic in computer terms by the time the book was published in print form--never let progress get in the way of a good rant, right? :)
First heard of this book back in the MacOS 8.1 days. Boy, how I wanted to have it back then! Unfortunately - out of print. But now, with MacOS 10.2.5 running on my iBook, it's like kind of... bummer.
C:>HELP FINDSTR
"E) Make
I don't know what you're doing to make using make so hard. Automake is tough, but for a single project, which you dont intend to be porting to other systems, a Makefile containing the targets, the sourcefiles, and the commands to compile each takes about 30-60 seconds of typing per target (especially with copy and paste and variables for compiler options), assuming you know how your source files fit together. If you want to do fancy stuff, buy a book. (See B. Not all wisdom is oral.)"
The very existence of make is a dire threat to our very American way of life.
You should be ashamed of yourself, apologizing for make. Sadam Hussein is more deserving of such an analinguistically adept rim job that your flattering words give to the daemon-spawn make. Does your mother's mother know you've sunken so low?
There's a challenging job opening in Iraq for a new Minister of Information, to which you should consider applying your considerable anal-oral wisdom and reality distortion skills.
America: Love it or leave it. And to love America means to reject all forms of Makefiles!
Pick a window, you're leaving.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
"C++" it to "C" as "lung cancer" is to "lung".
It's 3.5MB, and it's just been hit by the slashdot effect. If the administrators don't remove it, Microsoft is apparently willing to subsidize the bandwidth required for thousands to download it.
Later, a fellow by the name of Rob Malda helped fashion SlashCode, a piece of code so bloated and confusing that it could disable a whole server.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I'm not sure, but I think the footprint of vi is quite small therefore most peeps use it on emergency systems(ie. boot disks). So if you're trying to restore a system without your great dandy mandrake rescue CD, then it's *wise* to at least learn the basics of vi.
-fuck accounts
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
That may be very well, but there are editors with staggeringly tiny footprints that are much better suited to recovery disks.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
Most of these problems are important, like XFree and NFS, but they are problems in software *on_top* of a unix system. don't compare apples to oranges, e.g. system design to application suite quality...
we don't need to ged rid of unix-compatibility to get a fast window system for example...
I agree that this man is full of shit. I don't doubt that he is brilliant, but brains can be as misused as muscles. In addition to his wierd (and patently illogical) statements about heirarchical filesystems, he has written "articles" for the NYT (they're really a cross between a polemic and an advertisement) that laud Windows as a platform and urge us all shore up its ubiquity. Way back when the Unibomber was America's most feared terrorist his appearance on Charlie Rose became an opportunity to bash "Sesame Street". There aren't enough "Homemakers" on that show which is a big no-no for Dave. To him, homemaking is the finest thing a woman can do.
I've been using Linux for five years, I am sysadmin of our household LAN and email server (8 users), and I still make mistakes like this. My most recent was rm -rf * ~ when I meant rm -rf *~ (there were hundreds of directories ending in ~, before anyone asks why I was using -rf and not -i. I forget why -- some sort of brain-dead temp-directory naming program that blew up halfway through the run. And this was as a user, not as root. There's little of value in /root, ironically.)
The analogy of a butcher's knife being dangerous a few posts down is faulty: yes, butcher's knives are still sharp things that are dangerous, but they have non-slip handles and other accroutments that make them as safe as they can be and still function acceptably. Frankly, rm is not as safe as it could be. I have it aliased to rm -i but that's not a catch-all; it's rather tedious to hit "y" a hundred times to clear a big directory. And even now, after two times in the last five years that I've gotten my backup CDRs out after a fuckup, I still occasionally type an rm in a rush and hit enter before really thinking about what I'm doing. It's only a matter of time before I do this again and I consider myself to be pretty average at these things.
You win again, gravity!
There once was an OS named Domain/OS. It came to being circa 1980. From day 1, it was network-aware. The only trouble is, it was attached to expensive hardware.
I worked at Apollo and worked with a Unix hater. Unix hating had nothing to do with Microsoft. It had to do with much more advanced OSes. Apollo's Domain/OS was way ahead of it's time. It was far better than Unix, but suffered a bad fate because it was only supported by one vendor (Apollo) and came with hardware that cost too much. In a lot of ways, it was like Apple. However, it was designed and built for engineers.
After Domain/OS died, I realized that the best technology does not win. The cheapest technology that is sufficient wins. Hence Microsoft and Sun.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
When I saw this topic I knew it was gonna be like a kid kicking over an ant hill. I didn't even have to go very far down the page of replies to see that I was right.
/. is that *nix is the greatest OS ever and the bestest thing since sliced bread and pussy were invented the book has already convinced me of truly awesome power of *nix:
While the general consensus here on
A single slip up with this OS will enable you to bend yourself over and fuck yourself right up the ass harder than you have ever been fucked in your life.
GNU forever.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Haven't you used ed? g/re/p, where "re" is a regular expression, prints all of the lines in the file that contain the regexp.
Why not "alias rm=trash" and "alias remove=\rm"
Perfect Operating System?
Go here to create your own Slashdot dis
From Donald A. Norman's foreword:
"If this book doesn't kill Unix, nothing will."
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
Well I guess. Every action has an equal opposite reaction. Right my fellow Windows lovers?
I could be wrong. I'm always wrong...
Not much longer would I run WINE.
I Hurd it on the Grape Vine
I've rebooted for the last time!
Clear, Dark Skies
Now I've no idea who Dennis Ritchie is (i'll google in a minute), but he needs to learn to write plain english.
I'm smarter than the average bear.
is being a unix.
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9
http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
#!/usr/bin/perl
/dev/null";
for(;;) {
system "lynx -source http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/uhh.pdf >
}
have you seen the pedigree on the table of contents?
Looks like somebody had their bandwidth overused. :)
http://download.au.kde.org/pub/uhh/unix-haters-han dbook.pdf
The link has been removed until the "brou-ha-ha on Slashdot to dies down". If you go to the google cache to get the link, you will get a "forbidden" error when you try to use it. Lucky, the pdf of the book is in the Google Cache.
Genuine thing. Post is informative.
msq
Maybe it's been pointed out before (gimme a break, there are like 400 posts before mine!) but isn't this a violation of copyright? Tristan Louis pointed me to it last week with that same question!
In any case, I say let the Window fans live in their self-deluded world... and be sure to get a copy or two. Each time you download that thing it takes bandwidth away from the Borg.
My sig is too lon
Apple heavily advertises that it is a true UNIX ... at least, they like to say "UNIX-based" ... http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/unix.html
I remember it being a semi-big deal that they were now the largest UNIX vendor overall.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
So, how would you work around missing rvalues in an assignment or the incorrect for() with the pre-processor?
This is an amazing and enlightening article
Come on, admit it you losers have been fightin a losin battle with Microsoft
Unix is getting old and useless and with the advent of opencrap things have taken a nosedive.
If you support our BRAVE MEN, and support America, you should NEVER use any kind of unix
unix had deteriorated into an unAmerican piece of shit.
By supporting Microsoft, you support America. If you dont want to. GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY COUNTRY.
The ONLY reason those foreign crapprogramers are writing crap is to decrease the power we have over other countries thru Microsofts dominance. It is a matter of national security that you denounce unix which is a natural path to scumbag operatin systems like linux
"Thank you Mr Bush," said the iraqi people when our BRAVE MEN LIBERATED iraq from the opressive regime of saddam and his THUGS
Heil Bush
Our GREAT President will win the next election and show you liberal SCUMBAGS that we are the majority.
This is an entertaining read even though it's dated. The single thread in Unix Haters seems to me to be, "Unix is not as good as whatever-I-used-last". Whether that was VMS or LispM or RT11, etc. I can imagine turning into a curmudgeon over being forced to move from an OS that I understood well to one that I didn't; heck, I had to move from Unix to DOS and then spent years trying to make it work more like Unix (4dos, DesqView, etc.). When Linux appeared I jumped on it like a shot. It's only human nature to prefer what you know over what you don't yet know. And Unix is surely an easy target with all those arcane commands. But Apple has also shown that a Unix-like OS can be made to work pretty well in a modern computing environment. Unix endures because it seems to be adaptable to almost any idea of what computing "should be".
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Any programmer should have been cringing with shame for his kind reading that book. I could point out that almost all the things mentioned in the book are still that way today. I could point out that instability and inanity of Microsoft Windows is not an excuse. I could reply to the book point by point, trying to create a discussion on how to fix the mentioned problems. But I can't. Slashdot does not really care. Linux hackers' attitude toward users is well known. So I guess I'll just have to shut up, fire up my editor and try to fix it myself. All of it. After all, who else is ever going to try? :(
The book goes to great lengths to explain why "trash" programs are not a solution. They can only work in the shell. Programs do not just call "rm" in the shell when they want to delete a file, they use the unlink() system call, which will have no knowledge whatsoever of your trashcan.
From the foreword: The only operating system that is so bad that people spend literally millions of dollars trying to improve it.
This reminds me of Alan Kay's famous observation that the Macintosh was "the first computer good enough to be criticized."
It also brings to mind Winston Churchill's remark: "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the other forms which have been tried from time to time."
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
"Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding
stuffed with apposite observations, many
well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains
enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to
sustain life for some. But it is not a
tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and
of envy."
-h-
Being that he took it down, you can also find the cached html form of it at:
g C: research.microsoft.com/~dweise/uhh.pdf+uhh.pdf+uni x+haters&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ktVYEIwWRI
I guess the microsoft servers are not capable handling slash dot users.
That's not true! It can't be! Unix is the best OS that every was and ever will be! It can't have started out as a prank! :::sob:::
What would you consider to be an alternative to makefiles?
It might behoove you to actually read the introduction to the book and the bios of the authors. The people who wrote it were not circa-2002 pro-Microsoft trolls; they were circa-1991 VMS and Multics refugees who as a rule knew more about operating system design and engineering than you'll ever learn.
Also, pointing out that idiotic mistakes such as "hidden" files have been perpetuated by newer operating systems does not negate the point that it was an idiotic mistake. (Quite the opposite, actually.)
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Re - a more flexible GUI.
The Unix command line is powerful because it is, in a sense, a programming language.
So far, there has been little success in creating a graphical programming language. Sure, people have been talking about such possibilities for more than a decade, but I'm beginning to suspect that it could never work very well. It would either have to be extremely high-level and programs constructed from big, ready-made components, or it would increase the amount of work required to create the program, since once you've learned it, manipulating text is very efficient - when creating an object of a given type, would you rather type the name of the type or choose it from a list?
So what was Richie's reasons for using WinNT? From the article:
We're back to the same old arguments. Linux (and often other Unix/varients) handle the basic tasks fine - word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing, and remote access (even Terminal Services). But the Devil's in the details, of course. The more complex a Word or Excel document, the less likely it can be handled. The more a web site relies on Internet Explorer, the less it will work with other browsers.
How one interprets this depends on the individual. Some may say this is proof that Linux/Unix can't do it all. Others may point out that 1) it is simply a combination of vendor lock-in and ignorance of those who continue to support it and 2) amazing that Linux/Unix can handle any aspect of these lock-in technologies.
I suspect Richie is simply being pragmatic about the situation - using whatever tools he has to. After all, his interest isn't in the current IT landscape. His interest is in the future. And for him, that is Plan 9.
(No text.)
Daniel Wise has taken the PDF offline until the brou-ha-ha at Slashdot settles down.
--
Free Linux Shells!
http://www.niconet2k.com/
The real comparison is how compentant the average UNIX/Linux user is as compared to the average Windows user. UNIX is not made for stupid people (except OS/X, which I view as a Godsend, since someone finally figured out how to make UNIX that my mother could use...we're getting a Mac real soon for my parents). Windows is meant to be used by stupid people, who don't care if it's just as bad with computers as they are.
Oddly enough, Microsoft has maintained that Windows has been a serious contender since WinNT was first released. Furthermore, they have been scoffing at Linux for the past 5 years as it has been gaining more and more attention - now often presented by industry press as a contender for anything from proprietary Unix to Windows (and even the occasional niche OS offering).
I certainly wouldn't paint Windows as the underdog here. But it is nice to see them react to competition.
One of these days I'm gonna build me a time machine. This way I could easily read the articles today, then jump back to tomorrow in order to visit the linked page before it was slashdotted.
Or I will buy me a ton of Valium and whenever I read an article, I'll go to sleep for one week so the page maintainers have time to rebuild the server, pay their bandwith-exceeded penalties etc. Yeah, maybe I should start reading only old Slashdot postings, living a life with a 1 week phase shift...
(Off, mumbling about unix-haters, fate, life, the univere and everything)
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
microsoft is the macdonalds of software engineering, sorry, mediocre engineering. Packed with worms, crash every 30 seconds, still needs DOS to do: unix% cat clip{1,2,3,4} >> movie.mpg
Virus a day, patch every other week, overpriced, overidiotic, word still buggy 10 years later, shutting down takes 30 times longer than booting up, file system - what file system FAT32???
One user per machine - he-he-he. Got to pay to print via TCP, so one printer per computer too.
All in all, clicking madness - there is nothing I need that can't be done on UNIX. Except having to worry about 23,000 known viruses, similar number of worms, and the daily crash. No thanks. I don't hate windows, same as I don't hate McDonalds junk food and Ford Fiestas - I just don't use them. If you HAVE to use Windows, try Mac OS X for a change, or Linux. You will not be sorry.
Oh, and the book - Looks like Iraq's minister of information wrote it. The mother of all lies, complete with Quotes from Prominent People Taken Out Of Context - this is from what I have seen online without reading the whole drivel. Reminds me of the comnment, a famous author made to a budding writer, who gave him a manuscript to read and noticed upon return that the hair between page 12 and page 13 is still there. The author, explaining why he didn't read the whole book said
"Whan I eat an egg, I don't have to eat the whole thing to notice that it is rotten".
Windows has gotten better. Pretty darned good, in fact. But my personal experience suggests that claiming even the newer offerings don't crash is still a stretch - albeit less of one these days.
To be fair - I've crashed XWindows environments before. And on a rare occasion, my old Voodoo2/Glide combination will leave my old machine in an unusable state (I have to SSH from another machine on the network to try to recover it or, ultimately, reboot).
Neither Linux or Windows is bulletproof. But Windows is certainly catching up. About time.
Um, Start | Help,
type "screen flickering",
First article: how to change refresh rate.
That's what annoys me about people, that they refuse to use the help function. But in the case of my friend, he actually didn't know the screen resolution could be better.
Windows tries to pick a better screen resolution on setup, dunno if it tries refresh rates. Does Linux?
Last I tried (1 year ago), the major distributions configured everything just fine. Don't know why this post displays so strangely.
Now if I remember correctly, isn't the NT Kernel based off a quasi-UNIX based? I've heard that they had to subcontract the NT project out to another company back in the late `80's because the fucking half-wits at Microshaft couldn't figure out how to write a damned network O/S. I think its kinda funny that this fact is completely mute over in Redmond, don't you?
For those who don't have time to read the whole thing, I provide this handy summary which (true to the unix philosophy) is 90 percent "good enough":
Unix has no versioning file system.
If you want the other ten percent of complaints, you'll just have to read it yourself, but that summary will get you pretty much the whole thing otherwise.
Mahnamahna!
Oh, thank god, a mirror of a Microsoft site!!! Like they're ever going to get /.ed :)
-- "I believe the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully." - George W. Bush, 29 September 2000
It's trivial. The preprocessor simply replaces strings with other strings. For example, the whole expression could simply be #defined to be equal to 1; No compilation errors (assuming a main() etc.) Stupid isn't it? But the point is that C is closely tied to the preprocessor. Any reasonably large C program will be full of macros and #defines, so it's fair game to use them in this example.
However, some complaints are still valid today... so having this book on-line could do a great service, by making it possible for people to identify still-extant problems and how to fix them.
For example, it is silly that Unix/Linux allow programs to create files with almost any filename. Leading dashes (-) are nothing but trouble: create the file "-fr", and the next "rm *" will be rather surprising. And why should control characters be allowed? It'd be nice to create an LSM module or whatever to forbid creating files with various awkward characters - or quietly rename them. Indeed, why not just proclaim that filenames are UTF-8 encodings, and forbid/rename anything else?
And yes, it'd be nice if "copy", "move", and "link" were standard synonyms for "cp", "mv", and "ln". It's easy to do that on a single system, but unless those names are widely adopted, it's not worth bothering. E.G., embed this in LSB conformance. In this case, I don't see enough people caring to make such a change - too bad, perhaps.
I certainly would suggest mining the book for good ideas. But, much of it is no longer relevant, so you have to hunt in it for the good ideas.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Toddlers might sometimes wonder why people need to learn so many words and learn to speak in complicated phrases, when it seems that all you really need to do is point and cry to get what you want. Then we grow up.
/. readers would do well to read the first chapter of Unix System V - A Practical Guide - by Mark G. Sobell as it covers a brief history of Unix and it's intent.
Well said!
In the beginning, Unix was never designed to be a desktop for general/office/gaming use. Initially, it was designed to be a powerful OS/environment for programmers. Commands are brief and terse, but powerful. "No news is good news" is the philosophy behind this also. This powerful commandline design is useful for piping/redirecting the output of commands. It was never meant to be MacOS. I guess this is what the Window Manager or Ddesktop Environment was designed for - to be run as a program over the top of Unix.
Perhaps many
Windows tries to pick a better screen resolution on setup?
Not.
It installs in VGA mode initially. Then, if it detects your video card and monitor, it will allow you to set them (after a reboot) to better than 800x600x16@60hz (the only other option besides VGA).
The MS link is broken now, but the pdf is also available here.
I needed some humor in my collection of books. This "UNIX-Haters handbook" should create some really good laughs
...well, arguably, the Access QBE thang is pretty good at building relatively complex queries graphically, but it still cannot represent UNION queries at all graphically.
Dood - you need to step back for a moment and look for the HUMOR in that post.
I'm hoping that your reply to that post was also meant to be humorous.
ScottKin
P.S. Interesting homepage - nice to see another "member" posting here.
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
Unix is less cohesive. On the other hand, it is easy to reengineer and come up with something better. It is relatively easy to take a kernel and to build different environments around it.
NT/2K/2K3 tries to be cohesive, but unfortunately the old architecture was discarded last week and somebody forgot to properly document the new one for the users. The open Unixes (Linux/*BSD) have the power because it doesn't matter if the API is poorly documented, because you always have the source. WIth VMS you have some of the best documentation in the business, but they stopped giving out source listings on microfiche after about 4.5 or so, and yes, you ocassionally did have to hit the fiche for info.
VMS also came with a good file system that supported various access methods including Btrees. This made sure that programs could work together. The file system worked well across CPUs and clusters and still does. Yes, we have clusters on Unix and NT now, but the file system isn't clustered transparently. Clustered resource management (distributed locks) tend to suck compared with VMS. I know some people are trying to get VMS style locking onto Linux. That would be nice.
See my journal, I write things there
Oh... stupid me. Am programming too much perl these days... ;)
GNU guru and mainframe hacker
Linux supports the notion of a command line or a shell for the same
reason that only children read books with only pictures in them.
Language, be it English or something else, is the only tool flexible
enough to accomplish a sufficiently broad range of tasks.
-- Bill Garrett
The Unix haters handbook does contain useful information. It does however have a rather out of date perspective on a number of the problems and blames Unix for things that aren't inherrent to Unix. The remaining problems highlighted should be a call to arms to fix them.
.ini files).
Documentation: With Linux and less experienced users existing. This is no longer such a problem. Plenty of Unix books to buy. catman is cron'ed by default in modern Linux's etc etc
Mail: Largely seems to blame sendmail for everything. If you don't like sendmail don't use it. Many alternatives today. Plus sendmail has had lots of problems fixed. And sendmail exists for NT too. Hardly an inherent unfixable Unix problem even then.
Snoozenet: Usenet has it problems. Runs on any server operating system. Hardly an inherent Unix problem.
Terminal problems: Yes not great. Could do with being fixed as suggested. Doesn't really cause the average user or adminisrator too many problems.
X windows: Motif isn't really X. Motif is largely becoming legacy these days anyway. X has it's problems but tends to work day to day for most people.
Shell problems: Yeh the shell has a few issues. But once you realise how expansion works etc amd a bit of learning I don't think it causes too much suffering.
C and C++: You can blame Unix for the C things to some extent but C++. Hardly Unix's fault. You might as well blame Windows NT for C++.
Sys Admin: Unix reliablility seems to have improved drastically since the book was written. Its more likely NT systems going senile in a week or month. Some of the other issues, if you don't like dump/restore use another backup program. I mean who umounts filesystems for backup nowadays. Config files so so so much easier and more maintainable than the windows registry (lets go back to
Security: Complaining root is all or nothing. You can have more granularity now esp if you use the likes of sudo. But even in NT with it's supposed multilayered security model Power Users et all. We still have a user who can do everything. Someone on a computer system pretty much has to have this prividge. Most people anyway cannot be bothered with this and have an ordinary user for normal work and use an admin user for amdin stuff. Sounds kind of like root to me.
Su'id has it problems but it has been removed to a large extent from loads of programs. And any replacement say a client server password program. The server end still needs full permission. You've just moved the security problem onto the server program and protocol. Not a huge improvement.
Things like fork bombs can now be limited in all Unix version. And Shell PATH problems etc for security are very well known about.
The File System: UFS etc. Go out and pick your new filesystem. Not limited anymore. Haveing no types well NT doesn't either. And how often does this cause a problem. Faulty disks seem to cause as much or as little problems as on any other system
NFS: NFS has imporved loads. NFSv3 works over TCP by deafult (except on Linux I think). Has issues but mostly works fine. Complaining about PC/NFS. Doesn't pretty much everyone use Samba for that these days.
In summary, I'd say that the book if writtem today would probably half in size. An NT version would probably be double the size. But the remaining point are probably worth taking note of.
No. It's more like 40 (VMS Alpha 7.3). I'll tell you what I remember: I run 20 VMS machines here everyday. (They will be mustered out by the end of this year, in favor of its grandchild, Win2K, blech.)
The commands such as set, delete v. stop, show v. dir, print v. batch queues... ecch. As usual, when you hide complexity behind a pretend-English language, you get massive confusion. VMS'ers like to say that DCL only has a few commands. True, but they interact in very different ways:
set entry/release <BATCH_#>
delete/entry=<BATCH_#>
You have a batch queue. It is a queue of jobs, running or pending. You use the delete command to remove a job, the set/release command to run a pending job. But why is entry an option in the first and a qualifier in the other? Answer: extensible English-like syntax sucks, because people write things differently; that's great for literature, and lousy for programming
On the contrary, Unix was quite popular before the VAX -- for an OS that AT&T could not, by law, market. And RX11 was VMS-like, so we may count them as contemporaries, I think. Unix became much more popular post-VAX just because the VAX was so popular and powerful that all OS's that ran on it got a boost. Also, VAX came out in 1979, Sun in 1982 -- a three-year head start.
No, it makes the mistake of using logicals! What fun they are! A spaghetti operating system built from symbolic links and GOTO statements (which is what a symbolic link basically is). And GOTO and IF/THEN/ELSE statements (okay, they have GOSUB, too) are your only flow control. And don't get me started on dereferencing variables in DCL.
VMS was finely built. (Mostly. I once stop/id=##### a job that mounted a bad tape without thinking and we had to reboot the machine. But it was the Macintosh of minicomputers: proprietary hardware and software, through and through. VMS is actually less capable than you might think, because it deals with a tiny, limited subset of problems extant on only a tiny, limited subset of hardware.
And don't remind me that to up the number of users on PATHWORKS (1) you have to reboot the server!
1. ALL CAPITAL LETTERS ARE GOOD FOR YOU. -- DEC, 1979.
Just for correctness sake, Bored of the Rings was written and published by the Harvard Lampoon, not the National Lampoon. The latter had some continuity of staff with the former, however, so it's not completely wrong. The Harvard Lampoon predates the National Lampoon by quite a few years (history.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Good point. At work they have aliased rm to rm -i so it always asks a question. Everybody I know has turned this off. It is worse than useless, as I think 95% of the time the reason a file is being removed is to free disk space.
Actually every book I have read about NT4 talks about the original NT being designed by the architects for VMS, who were blatantly stolen away from DEC by Microsoft by being offered both more money and more autonomy. Microsoft has never tried to hide this. The issue of the BSD IP tools is somewhat of a different matter. I also heard rumour that Apple contracted a different company to do their IP stack. Honestly I think this is a good thing to do, anyway. You wat to make sure your IP stack conforms to everyone elses, and there are implementations available free/libre+gratis, so why not? If you use pretty much the same code as everyone else, it is likely your code will be compatable with everyone else's.
Nummynuts.