Slashdot Mirror
The Unix-Haters Handbook Online
kinema writes "It looks like The UNIX-Hater's Handbook has been made availible
online for free. You'll never guess who's server it is on." Worth noting that the book was written some time ago, and that much of what is in there is ancient history. But still worth a look.
Dupe!
Look six headlines down (assuming you don't block topics) and it's still here on the main page.
Damn this double vision I got sux.
Good job there guys.
think i've read this somewhere before
It looks like this article is a dupe. You'll never guess who's responsible. Look here.
dupe
The number of dupes in the past four months has been more then in the past four years combined...
fsck -u
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.
The link is down. Did anybody get to see what it pointed to? If a pdf available... mirrors? .torrent?
no one has subscribed.
... I guess Taco hates Unix so much, he wanted us to see this story twice.
This version of the article is so much better... that word "Available" really wasn't needed. Great job.
] D
Can't even wait til the last one was off the main page, could you Taco?
The editors could move the articles there after they find it's duplicated, and this way we could choose to filter them out.
Lame.
I can't seem to stop repeating stop repeating stop repeating stop repeating...
Damn. Six posts and they are all "dupe" notices. I always thought people posted "FP" notices as soon as a story goes live. Is "dupe" the new "FP"?
This time the duplicate is deliberate: they're trying to double-slashdot That Company's servers.
-Mark
...that I just awoke and all but damn. The dupe is still on the front page for crying out loud.
I once asked an older coworker and Solaris guru what happened with the Unix-haters list. He told me that it stopped being quite so funny once Windows NT came along.
I'm certainly not blind to the faults of Unix- there have been many, many failed technologies that were more advanced than the crap we have to work with now. I think the reason so many people profess their love for Unix now is that the remaining alternative is pretty godawful, and many of us have had limited opportunity to work with anything better. You can pine for VMS all you want, but whatever made it such a badass operating system seems to have been discarded in the making of NT.
Perhaps in twenty years we'll be mocking old MS-bashing Slashdot posts as we attempt to deal with crashing PalmOS Metaverse servers and brag about how our Windows 2020 boxes are *real* computers.
Hate me!
I thought I was in the Matrix when I saw this one again. I saw it yesterday about 7pm then this morning, holy crap. Thanks for you messing with my head.
I didn't use the preview button, so get over it!!!!
Mike
Please move along.
And Taco posted a dupe (Dupe dupe)
Nary 24 hours after the ori-gin-al...
Oh Taco posted a dupe (Dupe dupe)
While the other story, was still on front page!
Dupe, dupe dupe...
Feeling down 'n' dirty, feeling kinda mean
I've been from one to another extreme
This time I had a good time, ain't got time to wait
I wanna stick around till I can't see straight
Fill my eyes with that double vision
No disguise for that double vision
Ooh, when you get through to me, it's always new to me
My double vision gets the best of me
Never do more than I, I really need
My mind is racing, but my body's in the lead
Tonight's the night, I'm gonna push it to the limit
I live all my years in a single minute
Fill my eyes with that double vision
No disguise for that double vision
Ooh, when you get through to me, it's always new to me
My double vision always seems to get the best of me, yeah-ah
Fill my eyes with that double vision
No disguise for that double vision
Ooh, when you get through to me, it's always new to me
My double vision gets me
Ooh, when it gets through to me, it's always new to me
My double vision always seems to get the best of me
Yeah, the best of me
Is it just me or does CmrTaco do most of the dupes? I mean it's still on the front page (with default settings) for crying out loud! How brain dead do you have to be?
no way to download the Unix Barf Bag!
Cut and paste mirror link from previous article.. I'm going to fire him so hard when I get in to work Monday...
For those who missed it the first time, here is a direct link to the handboook. Anyone notice that the "Unix-Haters Handbook" is abbreviated as "UHH"?
So instead of talking shit about it, how about you all go read a story that I submitted to Slashdot about 4 times, but of course, got rejected.
/. really, really hates Unix, seeing as they posted a dupe to this story so soon. ;)
Opera is Spyware?! - Check it out, made me think. But apparently
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
Why not make karma for news poster?
:-P
If your karma is below 0, then you must be approved to approve stuff to post..
Dupe on the same 10 news page would worth -10 karma! hehe
nyways keep on the good work Taco
- LastCall_
A New Meaning For Geotargeting At Monster.com
Could it be?
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
Mod the artice -1 Redundant
Since Taco is seemingly trying to kill this company's hardware, I suggest you all (Who've not already seen this book, since, well, it's a dupe) head on over to the Google Cache and spare the poor company's servers.
How about repeated-like-a-supa-dup instead?
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
It's great to know that it's still online.
Please keep us updated.
HULK HATE DUPES!
HULK SMASH!
So, are paid /. users not subjected to dup articles (in addition to the absence of big ads?)
Had to jab just a little. :)
Not good enough for them anymore I guess. If they did bother to read the articles posted, there wouldn't be any duplicates...
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
having made enough money off the hard work of open source contributors with their crappy forum where the *users* do the job of writing articles, the *users* do the job of submitting commentary, and *no-one* does the job of editing.. i guess they've finally given up.
Commander Dope, I mean Dupe...strikes again. I'd say something how this is eventually going to make the ./ crowd look bad, but it's too late for that.
Isn't story dupe'ing the first sign of SARS? Sad And Redundant Storys!!!
the reason the unix-haters handbook is on microsoft's site is because the guy who co-edited the book also works for microsoft. this book was out well before he came to microsoft and he probably put up an online copy to stir up interest in selling more copies.
./ editors should get their shit straight before posting something like this. if they can't be professional about stating that this guy is an editor of the book, then they should just shut the fuck up so they don't look like totally incompetent asses to the rest of the world.
seriously,
I just read half of it (thanks to the earlier posting ;)
The book is quite amusing imho. While the authors clearly have a lot of experience in the computing world, it's obvious to see that most of their stories are based on users not knowing that they are doing. Especially the part where the bash bash (huhu) and other shells was fun reading. The book could just as well have been written by Simon Travaglia as a manual for his users.
This pdf is 3.5MB. I really wonder how big it's Windows counterpart will be. I'd say approx 35MB then.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Some quite strange things happened today. The recent one: I sat in front of my computer, opened slashdot, and decided that the page must have been cached somewhere, because some hours ago exactly the same headline was on top. I actually reloaded the page three times before I found out that this was probably the fastest dupe ever on Slashdot.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
Is it like a race to point out that it's a dupe? At least put a joke in your post to make it worth reading!
Well thats the only reason I can think of for the dupe :)
rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Slashdot need a moderator-moderator... and so
That's what we really need.
Come on... HOW HARD CAN IT BE!!! This is not only dupe story, but it's still on the HOMEPAGE! Is it April 1st still? WTF.
Ok...I sense that you are upset that YOU submitted the story 4 times. Yes, that would be upsetting. My first thought was...there should be some piece of code that logs submitted links and their submitters ID. If that link is posted is parses for the ID that submitted it first. Then my second thought was...After the third rejection why did you go for a fourth?
Posting A/C as to avoid "karmic" retribution for speaking OT.Microsft no longer allows access... As has been noted, the file is still accessible in the Google cache. And knowing my server will be /.ed by my doing this (be nice, I only have a T1!), I'm mirroring the link - since I downloaded the file after reading the last edition of this article. http://storyinmemo.com/uhh.pdf
SIG: HUP
Worth noting that the book was written some time ago, and that much of what is in there is ancient history. But still worth a look.
This is slashdot, ancient history always deserves a look... or two... or three...
Mirror List.
Please add others.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
They must REALLY not like this handbook. What reason could they have for posting the link to it twice in a matter of 12 hours other than to /. it into oblivion? ;)
That's the noise of my head banging against my desk. D*U*P*E!
If you're happy and you know it read my blog
I don't know why this is getting any attention here. I read about it on Slashdot hours ago.
--
"It's a joke, I say, boy, a joke. I keep pitchin' 'em and you keep missin' 'em."
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
What counts for us counts for the /. boys too.
Once you've posted, it's final.
=P
Check my site: http://pixel.pagina.nl
10 posts a day, 6 minutes to scan the original article (which the staff rarely does) and check for dupes.
That's about 6 x 10 = 1 hour of work a day. And yet they won't even put out this minimal level of effort, but they want us to pay for it.
If even slashdot editors don't read slashdot, why should I?
This is a dupe! Hehee, your system is totally screwed...
They must think it's really cool, since they posted it twice and all.
You know, the fucking dupes are getting so fucking bad it's not even fun making fun of Taco anymore.
/. seriously.
How about, whenever there is a REALLY bad dupe, change the poster to CowboyNeal. That way, you can pretend it's a joke instead of another amazinly stupid fuckup.
With the dupes, trolls and all the fucking profanity, it's pretty fucking hard to get people to take fucking
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.
floating around on Kuroshin.org for a couple of days. Been there, done that.
A Slashdot-Haters Handbook:
/. effect
featuring:
Examples of annoying dupes
Grammatical mistakes
Sites taken down by the
Stupid things said by the editors
Jon Katz rants
Well, now he's vanished out of the polls, it's good to see that he's still alive.
Makes you wonder what kind of a dope trip he's been on during his absence, since his first comeback hit is a dupe.
Maybe he's secretly sponsored by the RIAA and they make him do the same as any other RIAA-backed outdated pop star?
Can you picture the album title; "Slashdot's Greatest Hits Volume I, II AND III" ?
Q: How does a Unix guru have sex? A: unzip;strip;touch;finger;mount;fsck;more;yes;umount;sleep
- 10 C++. The COBOL of the 90s
Let me see. The document is at some microsoft developers homepage, they way I translate this is that "C++ is bad"?
And what language is most of Microsoft Windows written in? Oh, let me see, C++? Isn't this a bit self-contradictory?
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
I mean come on!
Would it be sarcasm or ironic if slashdot were to review it? it would be farce if they were to review it twice.
Infuriate left and right
Chevy Chase: Unix is still valiantly hanging on in its fight to remain hated.
It's nice that we paid subscribers can see stories 10-15 minutes before they become part of the page, but when it's such an incredibly (incredibly) obvious dupe, it sure would be nice to be able to add a comment to the story. I understand that the process of a story moving from the mysterious future to the main page is probably automated, but it sure would be nice to have some way of helping out with this.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
It is just picky about its friends. I am reading this book and to be honest with you, everything that is said about UNIX can be applied to Windows OS just as well. As far as I am concerned Apple Inc. is one of the very few companies that may claim user friendliness and MS should be the last one to judge. Additionally, my personal experience suggests that Windows if a greater nightmare by far.
A mirror of the document is here.
And here is the master thesis of Tom Knight, describing the architecture of the Lisp Machine. If you want to see one in action, visit me on the Chaos Communication Camp.
One online Symbolics Lisp Machine museum is here.
And yes, UNIX royally sucks. It plays in the same suckage leage as Windows, of course, but still it sucks. It's a clone of technologies of the early 70ies, and a bad one.
I'm reading through this thing, and I just made it through the forward, and this quote caught by eye:
"As for me? I switched to the Mac. No more grep, no more piping, no more SED scripts. Just a simple, elegant life: "Your application has unexpectedly quit due to error number - 1. OK?"
And now the Mac IS unix.
At the top left corner of the dedication page a single word that reveals the ugly truth:
vi
It's a multi-volume set, published by O'Reilly, of course:
This dupe is brought to you for Free. Free(tm) as in Microsoft.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
I got a copy of it thanks to the earlier article; there's a bitzi ticket for it.
I've spent the past few hours skimming/reading through the book, and have laughed nonstop!
What a great book... And much of it applies today still.
I learned all sorts of neat things, such as: "start with the Microsoft Windows metaphor, which
was designed and hand coded in assembler."
Windows was written in pure assembler? Pfft... That's some crappy assembly then... I've never seen assembley run so slow! =)
Or what about this one from page 197:
"If You Can't Fix It, Restart It!"
Hmm... Now I know where Microsoft got there, "you need to restart for the changes to take effect" thing. =)
Great book, just wish I could find a dead-tree copy for less than $350!!!
Location: Mt. Xinu
Deja vu happens when they change something.
Yeah, CmdrTaco, you should just stop posting. All your posts are dupes.
Feeling down 'n' dirty, feeling kinda mean
I've been from one to another extreme
This time I had a good time, ain't got time to wait
I wanna stick around till I can't see straight
Fill my eyes with that double vision
No disguise for that double vision
Ooh, when you get through to me, it's always new to me
My double vision gets the best of me
Never do more than I, I really need
My mind is racing, but my body's in the lead
Tonight's the night, I'm gonna push it to the limit
I live all my years in a single minute
Fill my eyes with that double vision
No disguise for that double vision
Ooh, when you get through to me, it's always new to me
My double vision always seems to get the best of me, yeah-ah
Fill my eyes with that double vision
No disguise for that double vision
Ooh, when you get through to me, it's always new to me
My double vision gets me
Ooh, when it gets through to me, it's always new to me
My double vision always seems to get the best of me
Yeah, the best of me
i've had it with these dupes. please sack taco.
Hi everybody
Here's a copy of that infamous book : http://members.aol.com/Seb0013/uhh.pdf
Sorry for the delay, it took time to remember i had some disk space on a site which has decent bandwidth and which i don't mind being slashdotted.
Unix is the future.
When I trolled, I got a funny rating...at least I was able to turn my negative /. acct into an 'excellent' one: at the expense of my immortal soul, however. [ie, by realising I'm a slashbot. :~(]
Duplicate stories..
Duplicate replys....
COINCIDENCE? Or is there something more sinister at work.
And what's the Macintosh connection? These stories and more at 11..
If you think this is great, get a load of this: I hear the unix hater's handbook has been put online! A lot of you probably haven't heard of it since it's from 1994. I'll try to find the link and submit it as a slashdot story for tomorrow.
Sometimes reading slashdot is like starring in Groundhog's Day. Freaks me out...
I was interested to see what this book had to say unitl I noticed the URL. It lost credibility with me very fast. Kudos to Dennis Ritchie for his Anti-Foreword.
Reading this on my Windows 2000 machine in Acrobat reader takes up 100% of my CPU.
(ok ok a 'mere' 700mhz, but that should be more than enough to read a freaking document!!!)
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
'nuff said...
NEO: Whoa. Deja vu.
/. article said "Unix-Haters Handbook Available Online" and then I saw another that looked just like it.
/. article?
TRINITY: What did you just say?
NEO: Nothing. Just had a little deja vu.
TRINITY: What happened? What did you see?
NEO: A
TRINITY: How much like it? Was it the same
NEO: It might have been. I'm not sure.
NEO: What is it?
TRINITY: A deja vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when CmdrTaco doesn't check previous posts!
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike
most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor
any of the other numerous idiot lights which plague the modern
driver. Rather, if the driver makes a mistake, a giant "?" lights up in
the center of the dashboard. "The experienced driver," says Thompson,
"will usually know what's wrong."
And yes, UNIX royally sucks. It plays in the same suckage leage as Windows, of course, but still it sucks. It's a clone of technologies of the early 70ies, and a bad one.
The first version of UNIX was developed in 1969, fool.
All operating systems suck, it's just a question of how much. UNIX is the least sucky I have found.
look
Original comment
Sunny Dubey
Well, if it can work for the British government, it can work for Microsoft.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
The book says rm is bad because it doesn't warn you before you shoot yourself in the foot. People have lost lots of files because of this, and none of this would happen if everyone used MS-DOS.
Truth is, that everyone who uses DOS or Windows a lot complains about the numerous warning messages, as they slow down your work a lot and you won't read the warning message every time it pops up anyway. Pretty useless.
But then, you say, with MS-DOS you would never accidently delete precious files? Wrong! I can remember the time that I used diskcopy to duplicate a floppy. Unfortunately, I mixed up the important source disk and the empty target disk. MS-DOS did NOT give me a warning that I was about to make a duplicate of an empty disk. All data was lost.
You just can't stop laughing when you read that the people who complain about C's syntax say that Lisp's syntax is much better. A look at the source code of any Lisp program will make you scream: "Aargh! What are all these round brackets doing here???"
"It kind of makes you wonder what kinds of drugs they were doing back in the olden days.", they say about C's syntax. Not LSD, that's for sure. The quote: "Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don't think that this is a coincidence.", which is mentioned at the beginning of the book, is completely unfounded. LSD was discovered in Switzerland, by Dr. Albert Hofmann, exactly 60 years ago. Not in California.
slashdot | sort | uniq
A mirror of the document is here.
Think about it. They have whined and grumbled about the (mis)features of Unix, yet they themselves have done nothing and contributed nothing that has significantly advanced the state of operating systems. Worse yet, they are describing the old Unix. Unix has evolved far beyond that which is described in the book. True, the system remains cryptic and unforgiving but so does our own existence in this material plane. If you do something wrong, its probably your fault anyway so you have no one to blame but yourself.
Yes, Unix is old, Unix is antiquated, Unix is a relic from the past. But until the guys who wrote this book come up with something else that will surpass Unix in its flexibility, robustness, and elegance I remain unconvinced of their blabberisms.
And to add further, one of the guys who wrote for the book worked (still works?) for Apple *wink* *wink*. Talk about swallowing your own crap.
i have placed it here in its entirety:
Creators Admit C, Unix Were Hoax
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:
Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time. Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and Turbo C++, stated they had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance their Pascal prod-ucts and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastily convened news confer-ence concerning the fate of the RS/6000, merely stating "Workplace OS will be available Real Soon Now." In a cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH Institute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2, and Oberon struc-tured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was correct.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 Swit-zerland, and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading Bored of the Rings, a hilari-ous National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien Lord of the Rings trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environ-ment 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' frus-tration 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:
To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actu-ally 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.
In any event, Brian, Dennis, and I have been working exclusively in Lisp on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion, and truly bad programming that has resulted from our silly prank so long ago.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
well, no, i guess a dupe doesn't impact the speed of light in a vacuum or the ultimate fate of the universe.
but it DOES degrade the perceived credibility of both the slashdot website and the quality of its content. it is also indirecly a slant against the slashdot community which submits the stories.
if you picked up a magazine for the first time and realized that spelling errors were rife and that an article was repeated, what would you think as a reader? as a writer?
- a.c.
Exactly.
Heck, I might be tempted to self-mod as "-1, Redundant," but then again, the article's a dupe, and karma as a currency has zero value.
Ah, what I wouldn't give for an article moderation system.
they ain't no good for your health!
I accept the fact that this is a pro-Unix / anti MS site, but when are you people going to realize that the general pubilc does not WANT to know about root directories or /xcxx/kkk/lll/iuy? I recently spoke with a friend of mine who didn't even know how to access his floppy drive; which made me think....just because you're a guru with any given application does NOT mean that it's the best; even M$. I for one, would love to join the *nix revolution but after reading a lot of posts here makes it scary. "If you don't do this right...you deserve to get hacked,,,," is a common one. No, I DON'T deserve to get hacked and most people don't want the responsibility of keeping up their own systems which is why hackers will always win. Either way, I would still like to join the revolution but like so many other people we just don't need or want that much information....especially when it comes to pooters that are supposed to make our lives easier. I'm sure I'll get a 'troll' on this one but it's just my observation.
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
I find it interesting that so many people here apparently think this book slams UNIX to praise MSWindows. More careful readers noticed that this collection of rants arose from people who came to UNIX from other, less familiar, more robust platforms, and who were frustrated by what struck them in comparison as obvious omissions and limitations. Most were not DOS/Windows users, but experienced Multics, LISP, Mesa/Cedar, etc. hackers. They knew enough to realize a) that UNIX wasn't perfect, b) that they lost some capabilities and clarity when they changed platforms, and c) that many of the problems they encountered were technicaly solvable...so why the hell did they still exist?
Naturally, this book is dated, and the mailing list that fed it more dated still. But the most important thing is this: the book is a collection of self-declared rants. They're supposed to be narrow-minded flames. The result is supposed to be funny. And from my perspective, it is funny.
There are plenty of reasons that UNIX has its warts, most of which stem from its long, strange legacy of benign neglect under AT&T's care. If its original purpose and vision could have been sustained with an adequate development budget through the years, who knows what we'd have today? But it didn't happen that way. Oh well, we have what we have. We get plenty of value by putting up with UNIX headaches -- absolutely. But it's not surprising that somebody would feel pain after leaving a conceptually clean platform like Smalltalk, Cedar, or a LISP Machine.
And again, they're not saying that DOS/Windows was the answer, fer chrissakes. They're not actually saying that anything is the answer; they're just using their right to gripe and be funny about it. It strikes me about the same as most of our normal anti-MS rants (including my own). In other words, it's possible to say "I hate UNIX" and still hate Bill Gates.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
> can anybody debunk appendix B?
> i have placed it here in its entirety
I think you might need a sense-of-humor transplant. You think this might possibly have been satire?
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.
It's so good, it's worth two looks!
- Does it have a MIDI Interface?
- What's MIDI in your face?
whoa...dejavu.
Can you say "Dupe"?
Thought so.
I dont use Unix, I use BSD. doh!
PDF copy! Get your copies today! FB
Dupe dupe dupe,
dupe of Earl, dupe dupe
dupe of Earl dupe dupe
When III walkkk thr0u this wourld,
Nothin' kin stop me I'mda dupe of EARRL!
And when we are walking, handinhand
nothing will stop us, you're the Dukess of EArrl!
Dupe dupe dupe
dupe of Earl
--- and trolling.
that's really it. I don't mind duplicates much, especially if they are separated by days. But it does start to look like a basic issue of professionalism. Of taking it seriously. But there is a loose ethic involed here in this .com that is still ticking, and that might be ok, because to a degree it's the idea of allowing noise into the signal to reduce cost. You allow as much as you have to to make things easy to manufacture and use cheaper more standard parts. Then you reduce noise from there, with tools, new techniques, whatever. This method not only achieves the technical engineering goals, it ensures a cheap cost of production.
It's somewhat common once a technology becomes standard infrastructure. The consumer of a popularized technology, at first at least, gets something of a lower quality than what was being built in the labs. It's just good enough to get the point across. The quality raises slowly but surely, and ultimately faster than it would have otherwise --- without being cheap and tolerating the lower quality, it would never have been able to become popular, earning $$$ for the application of improving (and always cost effective) methodologies.
Slashdot just hasn't got to the increasing the quality of the article signal yet, in certain respects. In one respect dupes are not that bad of a bias ot the signal. On the other hand, you can't say they are imperceptable, they are easy for a daily reader of slashdot to notice.
No doubt they have a certain formula of the types of stories they post and have worked on making that an appealing recipe, and I guess it must be working for most of us that still read it. Most visibly they have focussed on increasing the quality of the comments you see through the moderation system. The merits of the system overall might be open to debate but certainly it does the job usenet never did of putting the foul mouth rants and flames below the surface while raising the lighting on many of the interesting comments.
I'm not a subscriber. How about this as a PLUM?
Let the subscribers moderate the articles.
[-1 Duplicate]. If as a use I get a personal interpretation of Duplicate posts... I would probalby 0 it. But it would be nice to see it marked duplicate.
[+1 Astounding Revelation]
[-1 Misinformed]
[+1 Well Informed]
[-1 Katz-like]
[+1 Controversial]
You could have these work to just label the article, or to actually affect a score as with posts, allowing users to have their own modification amounts for each category. [+1 Katz-like], [-1 Astounding Revelation].
This would be different than automating how stories are selected. I think it's good for them to do that manually, that basically IS their editorial input... human geek-info sensors fed by a community of geeks, google and the new york times.
-pyrrho
is a bunch a whiners that made mistakes and expected something or someone else to cover their ass. I'm sorry boys and girls, but that is not how the world works. Take responsibility and learn how to use the tool corectly. Don't whine to me if you are dumb enough to use "rm -r ./usr" in /home/dummy/mystuff and end up mistyping rm -r /usr. Mistake #1. You are operating as root. Mistake #2. You should have tried typing "rm -r usr" thereby preventing 2 unnecessary keystrokes. Mistake #3. Whining when the system does exactly what you tell it to instead of reading your mind.
This book is full of these types of mistakes. Personally I think it's a tongue in cheek book. These people are really bitching about their own mistakes in the guise of bitching about the system. hehe. It's hilarious IMHO. I would compare it to the Darwin Awards on the aspect of the posted examples brilliancy.
So, need a good laugh at others expences. Get the book. It's hilarious. If you want to use it to evangelize, then get a life and get some facts.
Here is a mirror /me
Amen, brother... I do the same thing and I'm certain that at the least, my entire day would be ruined if I missed an article on Slashdot. In fact, I would be so upset that I might just try to mow down pedestrians on my way home from work on said day.
Thanks.
However, in light of your intrusive questions into my personal life (which is very lurid, I assure you), I'm afraid I'm going to have to fire you. We have put together a nice little severence package for your departure... which mainly consists of a can of Manwich and a map to the stars homes that Fred got on that business trip to Los Angeles last year. Oh, and Cheryl in accounting asked if you wanted that stress squeeze toy thing that you liked so much. I told her no. Don't take it too hard. Or do. Whatever. I've got to go eat lobster and drink imported wine at my mansion with my beautiful model wife now.
I don't think it requires a careful reading to realize that a book in which the forward refers to the authors as a "rock throwing rabble" is not meant to be taken at face value. -- miu
So you would think. But the evidence seems to be to the contrary. The first thing a zealot seems to lose is a sense of humor -- and any sense of proportion. Wait...I mean, the first two things lost are a sense of humor, a sense of proportion, and a sense of justice. Wait....
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
I can just see it:
Whose dupe of the Unix-haters handbook story did it best?
(1) Taco.
(2) timothy
(3) michael
(4) CowboyNeal will dupe YOU!
just 3 things in the world i can't stand, in (inverse) order of magnitude:
1. Nerds
2. Unix (all of them including linex)
3. Intolerant people
Please read this. Also it is a bit harsh to criticize taco for not reading the site when you haven't.
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
At the time the book was written UNIX and the Internet were, for all intents and purposes, one and the same. Since Mosiac was ported to Windows that has been changing, many would say for the worse.
Democrat delenda est
..and my article about the Snort 2.0 release (released April 14) was rejected. Sure an out-of-print, horribly out of date PDF gets TWO notices, but a leading edge, security monitoring device is blown off...
Gotta wonder who the "Stuff" is in the "Stuff that matters" tagline...?
Dan
Am I the only one that noted how busted the wife of one of the authors is? Click here to raise your self-esteem Damn.
this seems like the best place currently avaliable to do this.
you mother fuckers who say 'windows XP is very stable, its only hardware problems that cause problems' are full of shit.
I'm a computer science major from MIT. I've got two boxes that I built my self. One has windows xp the other has linux (distrubution unimportant). Hardware wise they are exactly the same except for the fact that the linux box has 2 cd drives (one writable) while the windows box only has one (readable). I had to go and find special nvidia driver shit for both of them. other than that everything claims to be honky dory on both boxes.
My linux box has crashed twice in the last two years, both times when netscape freaked out. the fucking XP box crashes daily. And it won't recover from the last crash. It will take hours to days to recover from this, if I don't end up physically putting the hard drive in my linux box just to get the data I care about.
So to all you pieces of shit out there who ever defended any microsoft operating system:
FUCK YOU!
Chance
It's frustrating for me because there's now two totally independent sets of comments that I may want to read. People posting in one article will continue to post there and only there (and may not even have any idea about the other article). Frequently the same sorts of posts will end up in both places redundantly, sometimes prompting replies in both places if you want to get your viewpoint known.
Plus, it's just annoying and amateurish to keep seeing them over and over and over again. This is supposed to be a high-tech-oriented site, yet the folks at MSNBC seem to do a better job at managing articles.
It seems like whenever I want excitement and danger in my life, I install Linux. Last time I did that, my computer was partly crippled for two days before I got it to work again :)
Aside from the illustrations in the book (I posted some of them on my cube walls in the past), the barf bag (still attached to the back inside cover) was the real find. It helped convinced those Windows smucks I have to work with from time to time that even us Unix weenies have a sense of humor...
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
I just downloaded the book from http://members.aol.com/Seb0013/uhh.pdf. acroread 4 on Linux (Debian testing) tells me that "there was an error opening this document (14)." acroread 5 says that "the file is damaged but is being repaired", and then keeps on "repairing" forever, using up all available CPU time. xpdf 1.00 reports
the MD5 checksum of the file is 60d0746053d204477d40e74c19a6aea2.