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.
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_
If the Taco isn't at least going to read his own web site before posting, why doesn't he at least write a little slash module to search recent articles for possible duplicates? Wouldn't be hard to do, wouldn't have to be some fancy Bayesian filter... or maybe he likes wasting his effort - and our patience - posting dupes.
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,
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.
The fact that Macs everywhere are now running a UNIX is delicious irony to anybody who has read the UNIX Hater's Handbook in the past.
Apple, mind you, spent hundreds of millions (billions?) of dollars in the early to mid nineties on initiatives to develop their much heralded Next Generation Mac Operating System all of which turned out to be pissing down a drain. That huge elite development team at Apple turned out to be a bunch of failures at coming up with a winning OS design.
Apple finally had to fall back on the NextOS, which was a reasonable re-working, an evolutionary extension, of the UNIX environment.
It's one HELL of a load of egg on the face of the Apple zealots and every technology journalist from the period of the mid 80's onward who wrote about Apple's development environment and corporate culture as a marvelous Engine Of Progress. Turns out all Apple has is some pretty GUI layering and fashion designers running the marketing and case design divisions of the company.
That would help more if people would stop writing articles that read like:
"There's an article on CNN about a new sequel to the popular PC game Half-Life by Valve Software (and published by Sierra Entertainment. I'm sure all of Slashdot will be glad to hear this news. GamePro also has an article. The White House had no comment.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
I guess I just don't plain old get it. How, in the scheme of the whole freaking universe, does it matter if there is a duplicate post?????? I don't fucking get it. I mean, if it's such a waste of time, what are you doing...reading the duplicate for 2 hours and suddenly it dawns on you that, "Derrrr, oh, this is a duplicate!"???? If it's a duplicate, use the fancy little button on your browser labelled "Back". It's not that difficult. I, for one, don't give a fly's ass whether an article is re-posted once and a while, there are bigger things to worry about in the world.
Zed's dead baby. Zed's dead.
What about something that just scanned for duplicate URLs for the last 48 hours. Not 100% effective but wouldn't be to hard to implement
I guess that would be easier than just *reading* the site that they administer.
-Sean
The same filter could ignore URLs that link to a site's top level page. That is, for you article, only look upm e_ov er/column_gaming/index.htm ,l ,. htm l, andp c/gam es/news/29027.shtml, and skip the other eight.
http://money.cnn.com/2003/04/23/commentary/ga
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=seque
http://games.tucows.nyi.net/action_fps_default
http://www.gamepro.com/index.html?/computer/
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.
"How, in the scheme of the whole freaking universe, does it matter if there is a duplicate post?"
For every dupe you see, there is another unrelated interesting article that got rejected to make room for it.
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
You won't find any complaints from me (or thousands of other /. readers) if it's made so there's only one link in the news post, with maybe a little comment afterwards "oh and debians website (duhh) is debian.org"