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.

Comments

Slashdot needs a dupe section.

[vadim_t]

The editors could move the articles there after they find it's duplicated, and this way we could choose to filter them out.

Little test...

[Dark Lord Seth]

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.

Re:Well, we all know it's a dupe

[vskjefst]

Then you might also want to have a look at these:
The INQUIRER, Andrew Busigin and Opera
Opera is lovely really
Opera: an apology

Re:Well, we all know it's a dupe

[n3k5]

Don't waste your time with this Inquirer story (as I just did), it was rejected four times for a very good reason: It doesn't contain any interesting facts. The author believed to have detected indications that should make you suspicious about Opera's privacy policy and its practical implementation. However, he couldn't verify anything. The article is just a long rant that digressed into the totally irrelevant several times. Oh, wait a moment, you're reading responses to a dupe, you're already wasting your time...

Re:Dupe!

[rf0]

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

Rus

A HOWTO on fixing Unix's user interface

[YetAnotherName]

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.

Re:A HOWTO on fixing Unix's user interface

[voodoo1man]

"given enough decades we will eventually produce the workable Lisp Machine."

What exactly do you mean by "workable"? Is it the same definition as that of your "practicality"? As far as history goes, the first Lisp Machine took only a couple of years to be completed, and they were being built until Symbolics went bankrupt in 93 or 94 (LMI had gone under years before, and TI quite intentionally destroyed their Lisp business before selling off their computing division to HP). You can still get a fully working Genera virtual machine for $5000 for an Alpha workstation (but hey, I guess DEC wasn't pragmatic, nor practical, nor affordable, and that's why you can't get a new Alpha anymore).

"C isn't a tenth the language that Lisp is, but it has ten times the speed, can be learned with a tenth the effort, and runs on that same cheap hardware."

Whoa, you've never even seen Lisp, have you?

Re:Dupe!

[blah_ect]

I'm sorry to say that dupes will continue on and on and on as long as Taco is an editor here.

I didn't used to think this so.

I used to think Taco would wake up, notice that dupes, misquotes, spelling errors, and totally blown articles are costing Slashdot *money* and lots of it. Who is going to subscribe to Slashdot... spend hard earned dollars when the Editors, chiefly Taco can't be bothered to read the front page ?!?!?!?!?

Anyway, I hope Taco does "get it" sooner rather that later because I like slashdot and don't want to see it being run into the ground like it has been these last few months. I want to see Taco "get it" as I think he's a good human being basically and right now folks aren't laughing with him, but at him... and by extension slashdot.

Anyways...

- blah ect

the whole freaking universe

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

hmmm

[nyseal]

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.

Re:Dupe!

[jmertic]

<SLASHDOT RANT>

I swear, this getting so damn ridiculous already. I know Slashdot is has a tendancy to dupe stories, but if one can't see that "The Unix-Haters Handbook Online" and "Unix-Haters Handbook Available Online" are the SAME story, one shouldn't be an editor.

</SLASHDOT RANT>

Anyways, let's try to be more careful guys. I've seen the dupe count increase since April Fools Day. It's sad since there are so many people who send in articles that get rejected since they don't fit "the way we want slashdot to look today", yet these dupes get in. Could maybe this be a function of the new Membership privlidges of seeing stories before they hit the live page ( checking for dupe stories )?