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.
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.
... I guess Taco hates Unix so much, he wanted us to see this story twice.
The editors could move the articles there after they find it's duplicated, and this way we could choose to filter them out.
This time the duplicate is deliberate: they're trying to double-slashdot That Company's servers.
-Mark
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
Cut and paste mirror link from previous article.. I'm going to fire him so hard when I get in to work Monday...
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.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
That's what we really need.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
At the top left corner of the dedication page a single word that reveals the ugly truth:
vi
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.
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."
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.
Although one factor he fails to emphasize enough is that, for various political and business reasons, Apple was forced to start over several times (first Pink, then Copland, etc.)
Free Hans!
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
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.