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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."
Only faster! Now that's Hyper-threading!
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
"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?
I parsed the negatives and came up with "this is a subtle attempt at pro-windows propaganda."
I was about to type that I parsed the negatives and found Jesus, but I thought I'd get modded troll.
(Pardon me, I'm in the middle of exams, so I'm not entirely in charge of myself.)
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!
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 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.
So, in 1997, Donald Norman of Apple bashes UNIX...
And now all Apple Systems ship with it!
I [heart] Irony
Yes, but did it's TCP/IP stack implement the evil bit?
A lot of the issues in the book have a solution, and its name is "Perl"
:-)
Oh boy, if Perl is the solution, please, please don't expose me to the problem !
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.
"Growing up" should never be taken as either a positive thing or a way of obtaining enrichment or as a manifestation of intelligence.
Even as a linguist, an individual who truly loves the power and diversity of language, I'm just delighted to know that a toddler can point and cry to express a wide variety of concepts, from the pleading
"Can I have the doggie in the window?"
to the effervescently snappy:
"Bitch, hold this."
Unix makes the easy things hard and the hard things possible.
Windows makes it hard to condense its design philosophy into a similar statement.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Unix makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks possible. Windows makes easy tasks easy and hard tasks $29.95.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Don't worry - they can afford it. They sell software. You know? For money.
Later, a fellow by the name of Rob Malda helped fashion SlashCode, a piece of code so bloated and confusing that it could disable a whole server.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
From Donald A. Norman's foreword:
"If this book doesn't kill Unix, nothing will."
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
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!