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The Unix-Haters Handbook Online

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the aged-liked-a-fine-win dept.

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.

3 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. Slashdot needs a dupe section. by vadim_t · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

  2. Re:Dupe! by rf0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

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    Cheap UK and US VPS
  3. A HOWTO on fixing Unix's user interface by YetAnotherName · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.