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.
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
Cut and paste mirror link from previous article.. I'm going to fire him so hard when I get in to work Monday...
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.
That's what we really need.
The dupes are a UNIX usability thing - it won't be cleared up until the slashcode port to another platform completes.
Oo, don't you just HATE *nix?
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
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
Cheap UK and US VPS
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.
Exactly, they need to move to Windows where everything has so many features duplication is near impossible, not matter how hard people try
- 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.
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.
At the top left corner of the dedication page a single word that reveals the ugly truth:
vi
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.
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.
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
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
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