Unix-Haters Handbook Available Online 760
prostoalex writes "The Unix-Haters Handbook, publication year 1994, is now available online for free as a single PDF file. Apparently some suburban Seattle company has agreed to host this 3.5MB file on its servers. The anti-foreword is written by no other but Dennis Ritchie, who proclaims: 'Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But
it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy.'" This is what should happen to more out-of-print books.
Windows Hater Book, Entry 1 (Score:5, Funny)
A "32-bit multi-threaded Operating System" which freezes for 30 seconds while Adobe Reader 5.0 starts up and downloads a 3.5 MB pdf
I guess it is multi-threaded. I mean, I could wiggle the hourglass.
Re:Windows Hater Book, Entry 1 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Windows Hater Book, Entry 1 (Score:2)
Moz does the same thing... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Moz does the same thing... (Score:5, Funny)
They're spcefications for a reason!
Re:Windows Hater Book, Entry 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Windows Hater Book, Entry 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the people who were on the haters list were actually VMS and Multics users, or like me they had used so many different O/S and written bits of them that they were in a position to make comparisons.
UNIX does come off very baddly compared to the other O/S of its era. The command line interpreter is garbage, the documentation abysmal and as for security - Denis Richie effectively invented the buffer overun bug. C was the first computer language that had dynamic memory allocation without dynamic range checking. Today we are unlearning that mistake with Java and C# which both have memory management and memory bounds checking.
UNIX is unfortunately not the greatest creation of computer science. The fact that so many youngsters look at the pile of offal uncritically is somewhat disappointing.
However take a read through the security chapter and then ask yourself whether any of the major security flaws in the UNIX architecture was an impediment to its success? If the answer is no then don't bet on the 'security issue' keeping Windows out of the data center for long. That did not work to keep UNIx replacing real O/S like VMS.
Security is pretty much like the 'character' issue in elections. The candidate that raised the 'character' issue in the last campaign was the recovering alcoholic with an undeclared criminal conviction for DUI, who had been a director of a company with Enron style accounting, had sold shares and illegally failed to report the sales to the SEC - twice, who had dodged the draft by getting his father to pull strings to parachute him into a draft-safe spot in the Texas national guard and then went AWOL for over a year.
Re:Windows Hater Book, Entry 1 (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Windows Hater Book, Entry 1 (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt it. The reason so many people prefer Linux (or other UNIXes) to Windows is the UNIX design philosophies, the rich history, and the community spirit. Bill Gates has explicitly stated his disdain for all three.
Re:Windows Hater Book, Entry 1 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Windows Hater Book, Entry 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't care less for "innovative" features. I'd just be happy with something that works. This whole freaking "innovation" hoobah was invented by the lawyers in the Microsoft antitrust case and as far as I'm concerned it can stay there.
Re:Windows Hater Book, Entry 1 (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd say mostly anybody using Windows ever though of moving to Linux because of the cheap factor. ALL of the moves i've seen fall in unrelated categories:
- Geek / coolness factor
- Institutional, tired of MS
- Wanted to tried / liked it
- Needed stability
Nobody learns Linux because of the chepo factor, I can understand some companies liking the cheap factor, but those companies hire guys
Re:Windows Hater Book, Entry 1 (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe you should look beyond your closest social circle to see why "so many" people prefer Unix to Windows. Many (like me) are forced into it because Windows doesn't work, and Unix is the only other thing that comes close to working (and then it's only two and a half flavors that do). How many other operating systems are there that feature decent network support
so, why didn't you do something about it? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is part of the blinders that you and other people had on at the time. You hacked operating systems and because hacking some particular OS was great fun for you, you thought it was great for users. But for users, none of that mattered.
UNIX does come off very baddly compared to the other O/S of its era.
Maybe from the point of view of a Multics kernel hacker. From the point of view of a user, it looked pretty sweet in comparison to those aging, messy behemoths.
[Lack of security] did not work to keep UNIx replacing real O/S like VMS.
You are confusing the presence of security features with security. VMS had plenty of security features, it just managed to be even less secure than UNIX at the time (a pretty amazing feat).
Denis Richie effectively invented the buffer overun bug. C was the first computer language that had dynamic memory allocation without dynamic range checking.
Fortran had dynamic memory allocation, which was widely used (too bad it wasn't standardized) and no bounds checking. So did BCPL. So did many Pascal compilers (and not all Pascal compilers offered bounds checking). So, for that matter, did assembly language.
UNIX is unfortunately not the greatest creation of computer science. The fact that so many youngsters look at the pile of offal uncritically is somewhat disappointing.
The whole UHH book, as well as your posting, reek of arrogance and ignorance. Do you really think people who chose UNIX at the time weren't aware of the problems that the UHH points out? They (myself included) chose UNIX nevertheless because, in the end, it was still better for getting real work done than the alternatives.
What the world could have used was some rolling-up of sleeves and efforts to do better, either by bringing those fabulous other systems to workstation-class hardware, or by at least porting over bits and pieces of them (shells, programming languages, etc.). But, in the end, your emperor had no clothes: while people like you whined and complaied a lot, when it came down to it, you apparently really didn't know how to do any better.
Re:so, why didn't you do something about it? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am so sick of the modern VIM vs Emacs flamewars.
I remember reading the book when I was first learning Linux. Linux was very hard and awkward at first. Especially back then in 97. A simple concept as a sdk meaning just a compiler and not an ide was strange and a negative for me. Now I laugh at this. I did not understand the concept of using an editor and using a compiler to turn it into code. This was because I was brainwashed with Windows. I understand the weaknesses now of this thinking.
The arguments about Unix are old in this book and lot of them base it on the"Unix is so hard and broken..." phases.
Well I have never used VMS so please excuse my ignorance but doesn't VMS have like 200 options just for the set command?
Isn't VMS also written in C?
Didn't unix come out first and of course be behind?
Doesn't Linux/Unix today have journaling filesystems, raw i/o, clustering, smp support, etc that VMS advocates claimed that only there OS had?
Also does VMS have the everything is a file metaphore like Unix? If not then its a disadvantage to adminster.
VMS also suffers from X because its the only gui that is standard like Unix. It really sucks and I chuckled at that section. With modern hardware today its somewhat bareable.
Linux has changed and its alot easier to use.
For hacking and customizing its the best available. The Windows registry blows and I can not customize Windows like i can with Linux.
I remember posting a very old post here back in the 20th century before kde was even stable.I stated that unix commands were designed due to limited hardware and offered no real advantage over gui's. They are more powerfull and barely needed for regular desktop use today. I was wrong and the desktop is also here finally for those who fear the CLI.
As far as I can tell the disadvantages are gone and no other os is as easy to both use as well as hack and customize as Linux/Unix.
Re:so, why didn't you do something about it? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't remember that being the case. I certainly remember extensive issues in Unix trying to set environment variables and shell variables and finding that each of the different shells seemed to treat what is a pretty simple concept entirely differently.
At least in VMS you could always ask for HELP. In Unix you can't even consult the manual until you pretty much know what you are look
Re:so, why didn't you do something about it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Dennis Ritchie did just that: witness Plan 9 and Inferno. Or even those versions of Research Unix after V7. Unfortunately, the focus of AT&T and later Lucent was on commercialization, so the innovations found in these products were essentially in
Re:so, why didn't you do something about it? (Score:5, Interesting)
An obvious but incorrect analogy. First, Windows isn't displacing for UNIX/Linux at all--UNIX/Linux is going strong, in spite of Microsoft's business tactics. Second, most people don't explicitly choose Windows at all, they just get it by default.
So, how UNIX displaced VMS/Multics isn't at all analogous to the relationship between Windows and UNIX/Linux today. And the thing I criticize Microsoft for isn't primarily the quality of their software, it's that they are not playing on a level playing field. If they were, then I think market forces would take care of Microsoft's software quality issues one way or another.
Re:Windows Hater Book, Entry 1 (Score:3, Insightful)
And even if you mean within Windows, then you'd expect it to hang, too, as it's the operating system that has the problem, not the application.
You're confusing two different things: an application may hang, that's just dodgy code in the application somewhere (which is what you're referring to) but there is no reason for an operating system to hang. That's dodgy code in the OS, and th
Starting with Unix (Score:5, Funny)
"I liken starting one's computing career with Unix, say as an undergraduate,
to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your
body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you
suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East
Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live
within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They
already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act."
-- Ken Pier, Xerox PARC'
Re:Starting with Unix (Score:5, Interesting)
There are quite some interesting points in that book. It reads:
I just tried that on my Debian/testing system - and yes, that still works!
That was quite a laugh - I really learned something about our Operating System from the Seventies today :-)
Re:Starting with Unix (Score:4, Insightful)
But this is not true today. Today EVERY SINGLE TERMINAL IN THE WORLD understands ANSI escape sequences at full speed and will not choke (and will likely display) on all ISO-8859-1 characters. It is time to scrap every single option in the editing portion of the terminal driver. And start accepting *both* ^H and ^? as backspace.
I would agree that in this area, morbid fear of being incompatable is completely freezing development. Sometimes advancement is achieved by DELETING code, not just by adding it. Just to be sure Windows also has this, why the hell are "text" files still different from binary (hint to Gates: make the READER ignore ^M and remove all stuff from the writer, and "text" files will be gone in a week. Until MicroSoft can figure out this simple step, they have no right to insult Unix for it's equally-stupid things).
Re:Starting with Unix (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't know about you, but in my days typical ruptime for a heavily used unix box was a few days. For Linux was a few hours (remember linux watch-dog cards in vogue in 1994-1995 who would reboot your linux box if it hadn't paged to disk for 40 seconds?)
Re:Starting with Unix (Score:4, Interesting)
Assuming you mean something like 4.2BSD running on VAX, you are quite right: the kernel had memory leaks, mostly in its experimental networking code, and it often crashed after a few days of heavy usage. Of course, that was with dozens of simultaneous users running on a machine with a couple of megabytes. And most of those bugs got fixed quickly. Do you really think VMS, NT, and Multics were born bug-free? Do you want to argue that VMS, NT, or Multics managed to fix their bugs quicker?
The sad fact is that while there are many aspects of UNIX/Linux that could be improved, and using a better environment for kernel development is high up among them, sadly, no other commercial or free OS effort seems to be doing much better.
Worth Reading (Score:5, Interesting)
The other good reason to read it... you get a reminder about offshoots of technology, directions things could have gone. It's not a bad idea to look back in the corners for good ideas.
At least, that's what this 15 year UNIX user (who just keeps coming back for more) thinks.
Nothing to do with Microsoft... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nothing to do with Microsoft... (Score:5, Funny)
I was about to type that I parsed the negatives and found Jesus, but I thought I'd get modded troll.
(Pardon me, I'm in the middle of exams, so I'm not entirely in charge of myself.)
Re:Nothing to do with Microsoft... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that's insane, it must be a conspiracy.
Announced on ``The Online Books Page'' a while ago (Score:5, Informative)
That's, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ for those who aren't familiar with this wonderful site.
It lists a number of other out-of-print books which're of interest to geeks (and some which are in print such as the
_Unix Text Processing_
Norman Walsh's _Making TeX Work_ (which is on Sourceforge)
Eckel's book on programming Java
and for those with kids, _The Great Logo Adventure_
William
Oh the irony... (Score:2)
"As for me? I switched to the Mac. No more grep, no more piping, no more SED scripts."
Re:Oh the irony... (Score:2)
No more automating of tasks that you can't find a GUI to do for you ...
Re:Oh the irony... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oh the irony... (Score:3, Insightful)
From the forward (Score:5, Funny)
Oh well. I guess he really can't escape Unix.
Re:Mac OS X is not UNIX (Score:2, Interesting)
From the preface (Score:5, Funny)
Modern Unix is a catastrophe. It's the "Un-Operating System": unreliable, unintuitive, unforgiving, unhelpful, and underpowered.
Now, who has the URL to that Microsoft company picture from the 70's where everyone looks high?
This one? (Score:2, Informative)
Go Figure (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Go Figure (Score:3, Informative)
Eh? so what. SOme of us don't think of unix as a place to do gui, but instead as a place to do work ;)
Re:Go Figure (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, he's in management now. He needs the NT box so he can read all the microsoft format documents he has to interact with for work.
he mentions these things on the link you, posted. Were you being intentionally misleading, or did you just not read it?
Where are they now? (Score:5, Funny)
Simson Garfinkel [simson.net] eventually became a hermit and withdrew from public life after too many people mistook him for Art Garfunkel. He now lives in a cave in southern California.
Daniel Weise [microsoft.com] went on to work at Microsoft. He distinguished himself as the first non-Samoan to ever pick up Bob Barker after winning the Showcase Showdown on "The Price Is Right."
Steve Straussman (no website, sorry -- anyone?) left the Unix-Hater's list after it was revealed that he had fallen in love with a woman who loved Unix. He has come to terms with the past, and now teaches "How to Shell Script in Linux" classes at his local community college.
John Klossner [jklossner.com] went on to a successful career making cartoons for Lucas' Skywalker Sound company newsletter, until fired for printing one that suggested an unnatural intimacy between Luke Skywalker and Chewbacca.
Donald Norman [jnd.org] won the coveted "Golden C< Prompt" award and retired from public life.
Dennis Ritchie [bell-labs.com] became something of a celebrity on the web for his many and varied contributions of photos to Engrish.com [engrish.com].
Scott Burson [uni-trier.de] became a monk and moved to Iceland.
Don Hopkins [donhopkins.com] ran for office in Lousiana and lost. He is now a semi-successful insurance salesman, and plays harmonica regularly.
That was all I could find out about -- anyone got any more?
Re:Where are they now? (Score:3, Informative)
William
Ironic (Score:5, Funny)
Now Mac OS X is based on UNIX!
Re:Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
would care about the /. effect (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft has more bandwidth than god anyways.
Re:would care about the /. effect (Score:3, Interesting)
slashdotted (Score:2, Funny)
It's a good read (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Probably my favorite quote that really needs an update: "Unix was no designed for the Mac." (page 18 of the PDF)
Michael
Actually a really good book about Unix (Score:5, Interesting)
I read this book when it came out, when I was just a mere youth in the world of Unix. I actually learned a lot about Unix, both the history and actual day-to-day usage. It's clearly authored by a collection of people who love to hate unix and hate to love unix.
In the intervening nine years, a lot of the criticisms in this book have been addressed. Even at the time it was released, this was becoming true. A lot of the issues in the book have a solution, and its name is "Perl". But don't fool yourself; Unix still sucks in a lot of ways. The chapters criticizing X, for example, are unfortunately far too true today.
I hope the people who read this get the joke; that only a group of people intimately familiar with Unix could have produced such a book.
Re:Actually a really good book about Unix (Score:3, Funny)
Oh boy, if Perl is the solution, please, please don't expose me to the problem !
You too.. (Score:2)
That server seems to be holding up surprisingly well, I wonder how long until someone realizes the R&D department's bandwidth usage went through the roof and deletes the file...
Re:You too.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:You too.. (Score:2)
Microsoft is indeed a real company. And I don't think they'll take to kindly to one of their employees unoficially posting up a 3.5 MB file and then having thousands of slashdotters download it. Guarunteed this'll get pulled before the end of Monday if not sooner.
Have a nice day.
Re:You too.. (Score:3)
unix haters? (Score:2, Funny)
favorite part thus far - Unix & C were a prank (Score:5, Funny)
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:
"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 Switzerland,
and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and
power. Dennis had just finished reading Bored of the Rings, a hilarious
National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien Lord of the Rings
trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment
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' frustration
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:
for(;P("\n"),R=;P("|"))for(e=C;e=P("_"+(
8)%2))P("|"+(*u/4)%2);
"To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that
allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually
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.
Re:favorite part thus far - Unix & C were a pr (Score:3, Informative)
Re:favorite part thus far - Unix & C were a pr (Score:4, Funny)
Later, a fellow by the name of Rob Malda helped fashion SlashCode, a piece of code so bloated and confusing that it could disable a whole server.
Stupid argument (Score:4, Insightful)
The Problem with Hidden Files
Unix's ls program suppresses file whose name begin with a period (such as
Windows' dir program suppresses file whose are attributed with H (such as...what you see in attrib *.* with H with them) by default from from directory displays. Attackers exploit this "feature" to hide their system-breaking tools by giving them attribute H. Computer crackers have hidden mega bytes of information in unsuspecting user's directories.
Using file name that contain spaces or control characters is another powerful techniques for hidding files from unsuspecting users. Most trusting users (maybe those who have migrated from the Mac or from MS-Windows) who see a file in their home directory called system who't think twice about it - especially if they can't delete it by typing rm system. "If you can't delete it," they think, "it must be because UNIX was patched to make it so I can't delete this critical system resource."
Using file names that contain spaces or control characters is another powerful technique for hiding files from unsuspecting users. Most trusting users (maybe those who have migrated from whatever-OS-on-earth) who see a file in their system directory called system.dll won't think twice about it - especially if they can't delete it by typing del system.dll. "If you can't delete it," they think, "it must be because Windows was patched to make it so I can't delete this critical system resource."
The entire article is stuffed with argument as such. Worth reading only for a laugh.
Ahem (Score:3, Informative)
Also, pointing out that idiotic mistakes such as "hidden" files have been perpetuated by newer operating systems does not negate the point that it was an idiotic mistake. (Quite the opposite, actually.)
Foreward by Donald Norman, Apple Computer.. (Score:5, Funny)
And now all Apple Systems ship with it!
I [heart] Irony
Great read! (Score:2)
Re:Great read! (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't ever claim that they are. I would, however, claim that I can work far faster with a Unix CLI than my Windows coworkers can with their GUI. There will always be exceptions, but I've known many people who found Unix far easier to use once they overcame the initial barrier. I find this usability more important than being intuitive. (By the way, as someone who has always used Macs or Unix systems, I certianly don't find Windows at all intuitve, GUI or no.)
Re:Great read! (Score:3, Interesting)
Qualification: a while a CLI can manage files, its major function is not as a file manager.
CLIs may not be intuitive, but they are powerful in that they can run commands with various changable options. And they make debugging/testing programs a lot easier.
What CLI's are not good fo
A HOWTO on fixing Unix's user interface (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Mirror (Score:4, Informative)
It even has an HTML converted version for all of us that hate PDF's.
Some very good points... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, many of these problem have been resolved since this book was written. Unfortunately, far too many have remained and have many their way into Linux.
A) Cryptic Command Names. Still there in Linux
B) "Unix was like Homer, handed down as oral wisdom."
Man, this is so true. I got most of my UNIX knowledge passed down to me by upperclassmen and professors. It is amazing how much training it takes in UNIX to do something simple in Windows. For example, recursively searching through a subtree for some text in a file.
C) Terminal Insanity. Still there in many ways. VT100 pops up its ugly head decades after it should have been killed.
D) The X-Windows Disaster. X-Windows is what first made me question UNIX's superiority. Dang X sucks. Bad. What a mess! "Motif Self-Abuse Kit" made me laugh because my brief experience programming Motif was one of the worst in my life. It was a mess of void pointers and pointers to functions that was an absolute pain to program.
E) Make "Unfortunately, in their zeal to be general, many
Unix tools forget about the quick and easy part."
I've never found a make that I liked. You should not have to spend hours programming the freakin makefile. Nor should you have to debug whitespace because you have an extra space or tab.
Re:Some very good points... (Score:3, Insightful)
It does take some training. If you're just a casual computer user and never intend to go beyond that stage, you might find that annoying. However, let's compare some similar tasks:
Re:Some very good points... (Score:5, Insightful)
Toddlers might sometimes wonder why people need to learn so many words and learn to speak in complicated phrases, when it seems that all you really need to do is point and cry to get what you want. Then we grow up.
The power of Unix is that you can use it to do things that its designers did not (nor did they have to) think about. Your example is flawed in its purpose because you will find it increasingly difficult to do tasks the UI people did not anticipate you would need. Such as doing something with those files you found, rename them to .bak or resize the .gifs or whatever. Until someone writes a Visual Basic program to do it and sells it for 29.95.
Re:Some very good points... (Score:4, Interesting)
This is bullshit. Powerful command line functions does not mean they have to be named cp or mv instead of copy or move. Or that their powerful options have to be turned on using cryptic single character options (something that RMS fixed in GNU btw with long form "--" options).
It is typical of a unix ditto-head to come back with a lame "it's the user's fault" excuse for any sensible criticism of unix.
Re:Some very good points... (Score:3, Insightful)
but you see, my job as a user shouldn't be to fix the operating system.
Re:Some very good points... (Score:4, Interesting)
No. It is not that either.
For example, in Windows it's quite likely that you change the screen resolution and font size to make it more comfortable to you.
Actually the vast majority of users never tinker wtih any setting whatsoever. So we better ship a system that would be useful for 95% of the users, and then the remaining 5% out will have to tinker with the system.
Now you tell me, what would the vast majority of users out there would find easier to comprehend cp or copy? mv or move?
Which also brings us to another problem with Unix. Default settings assume that you are super-advanced, know-unix-warts-and-all user. Whereas in practice, almost by definition, the average user won't be an expert (in contrast elm get's this right. It defaults to novice, and it is the expert who has to tweak the configuration to make elm more terse).
Re:Some very good points... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Some very good points... (Score:3, Funny)
"Growing up" should never be taken as either a positive thing or a way of obtaining enrichment or as a manifestation of intelligence.
Even as a linguist, an individual who truly loves the power and diversity of language, I'm just delighted to know that a toddler can point and cry to express a wi
Re:Some very good points... (Score:3, Funny)
Unix makes the easy things hard and the hard things possible.
Windows makes it hard to condense its design philosophy into a similar statement.
I guess I could have said this: (Score:5, Funny)
Unix makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks possible. Windows makes easy tasks easy and hard tasks $29.95.
Re:Some very good points... (Score:5, Insightful)
A) Cryptic Command Names. Still there in Linux
Sure, there are cryptic commands in Linux, but there are equally cryptic commands in DOS/windows. Start with "dir". Sure, its short for "directory", but imagine someone who has never used a computer before, and they want all the files in a certain place on the computer. Do you think they would ask for a "list" of files? Or a "directory" of files? Once you're in the UI, its not much better. If you use more than one version of windows you'll notice real quick that the File Explorer is completely different from version to version starting with win98 (98 worked like 95's browser with some html extensions)
B) "Unix was like Homer, handed down as oral wisdom."
I'll just take a moment to point out that this has been a tried and true method for several millenia now. Your example is pretty moot, since it took several revisions of windows before it could search into the text of files (without buying Microsoft Office and using its Find Fast utility)
C) Terminal Insanity. Still there in many ways. VT100 pops up its ugly head decades after it should have been killed.
Have you ever used a UI and wished that someone had added a checkbox for a feature you knew was possible? Added extra blanks in window's Find Files panel/dialog to do boolean searching? Unfortunately, when designing a UI, you're designing the limits of the human's interaction with the system. Someone said "I'll just put one blank there, therefore people can search for only one thing at a time." While the same goes for console user interfaces, things like screen real estate are no longer an issue, the only worry is if the user is willing to type the entire command.
D) The X-Windows Disaster.
Do you have a better idea? Something that works portably across many systems? Runs on a thin client over the network? Supports multiple color depths including monochrome? Extensible by modules? Operates transparently locally or remotely?
Doesn't have a per user licensing restriction? Doesn't use "foundation classes" that change every version of the compiler?
I hardly call X a disaster, when you consider its goals. I'm sorry you had to use Motif, but nowadays we get to choose from plenty of different widget libraries and languages, and can choose one we like.
E) Make
I don't know what you're doing to make using make so hard. Automake is tough, but for a single project, which you dont intend to be porting to other systems, a Makefile containing the targets, the sourcefiles, and the commands to compile each takes about 30-60 seconds of typing per target (especially with copy and paste and variables for compiler options), assuming you know how your source files fit together. If you want to do fancy stuff, buy a book. (See B. Not all wisdom is oral.)
Re:Some very good points... (Score:3, Insightful)
That, and XML configuration files for IIS.
Windows is no longer a joke. Don't laugh at it.
The Linux community laughed at Windows for the past five years. In that time, it went from a joke to a serious contender.
Re:Some very good points... (Score:3, Interesting)
"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em"
I assure you that most of the people who laugh at windows are doing so with a very critical, cautious eye. Sure, there are a few people on COLA and
Some times I've been bitty by unix: (Score:3, Interesting)
I dual boot between Linux and windows. At the time I had a Fat32 partition for windows, and linux could write to it.
About 4 in the morning I meant to remove the mount point to the fat32 drive (something like
2 -
I had been coding away on a java project that was due in about an hour, and having just finished it, compiled it, tested it, I got ready to jar it up and submit it (per requirements):
$ jar cvf *
Oops! I forgot to specify which file to output the jar file to... and since the shell interprets *, it overwrote my first file... which was the guts of the assignment.
cryptic commands? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm... last I checked, MS-DOS commands were not intuitive either. "dir," "deltree," "chkdisk," etc., were not the most intuitive either. Granted the viewpoint of the book is obviously anti-UNIX and all, but non-objective points like this seriously detract from the arguments.
Command line commands suck, what can I say? But UNIX commands are no worse then other system commands.
Re:cryptic commands? (Score:5, Informative)
You kids amuse me. I worked on an AS/400. Command interface was WONDERFUL. Basic form was :
3 letter verb (e.g., MOV for move, CPY for copy, etc.) 3 letter object (e.g., PFM for physical file member, etc.)
Depending on the meaning of the command, you might have an optional second object type, or a single letter "adjective" (e.g., "A" for "attribute")
For example, to copy a file was CPYF, to copy a spool file was CPYSPLF, etc. Lots of times, just knowing what you had to do and the nature of the object you were working with was enough to guess the right command. And if you remembered a command but not the options, you typed in the command, hit PF4, and got a nice documented prompt. Much better than having to scroll through man pages.
I heven't touched one of these machines for many years, but I can still come up with all the basic commands on the spot. I now work more with UNIX, and still have a hard time remembering commands and argument ordering for many common tasks.
The AS/400 commands were developed by folks who saw what old 1970's mainframe commands were like and knew they had to improve on them (IEBGENER to copy a file? come on!). They knew what they had sucked, and that they had to improve on it. UNIX users, on the other hand, made a virtue out of necessity, and figured if someone else couldn't figure out their system, then they must not be smart enough to deserve to use it.
Simplicity is a virtue with UNIX. Consistency unfortunately isn't
Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are tempted to dismiss this book as petty grousing or sour grapes, you have entirely the wrong idea. These authors elevate unix hating to a high art, and we of the GNU generation should study their tracts. None may call himself a true unix user if he does not harbor a passionate enmity for some facet of this hodgepodge, drug-induced kluge of a system we love and endure.
so what if these problems also exist elswhere (Score:5, Interesting)
Many here have pointed out that alot of these very same problems exist elsewhere. Hidden files are a social-engineering security problem on Windows and Mac as well; likewise with undeleteable files.
So what? Saying, "well, their OS sucks too" doesn't make our OS any better. Since when is it ok for me to accept my own flaws just because everyone else around me also has those same flaws, or others?
The stuff written in this book shouldn't be seen as MS/Mac propaganda. I think most people who are going to be reading it are GNU/Linux users, and aren't going to be switching anytime soon, irrelevant of how much the authors hate *nix. (btw, if *nix sucks so much, why is Mac basing OSX around it, and why do we keep hearing rumors about MS doing such as well?).
There are many valid and important criticisms of *nix in that book. We should consider ourselves lucky that this book is narrowly targetted to *nix and doesn't address any of the same problems win Windows and MacOS -- we've received solid constructive criticism which others haven't, and that's a good thing.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
HAHAHA (Score:3, Funny)
Best quote (Score:3, Funny)
"If this book doesn't kill Unix, nothing will."
Mirror (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OK, so? (Score:2)
I checked the wrong link.......
Re:Dear Microsoft... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Unix Hater's Handbook is a classic, and should be read especially by UNIX/Linux fans. I always used to force my minions^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstudents to read it (until one of my students kept it) so they would have a better understanding of where UNIX had been, and what aspects of it were suboptimal.
A lot of what TUHH rags on has long since been improved.. who mucks around with /bin/sh, sed and awk now that we have Perl and Python, after all?
Other things haven't been improved much on the UNIX side, and TUHH includes some important lessons about why that is, and what the real world benefits and costs of that are.
I'm glad that this is available in some form again now, but it's not the same without the friendly UNIX Barf Bag bound into the back cover.
Jesus Man, Spamming Ad's AGAIN (Score:5, Funny)
I hope enough other people/admins see this ridiculous spamming and ban you. If not then I hope a thousand sand fleas infest your armpits.
Re:Jesus Man, Spamming Ad's AGAIN (Score:2, Funny)
Thank you, GamezCore.com for bringing this controversial topic to light.
Re:Hopelessly outdated... (Score:5, Funny)
macho bullshit attitude (Score:5, Insightful)
There are no such things as "rm disasters". There are only mistakes, stop making them, or at least think before you execute.
Exactly the kind of bullshit macho attitude I was talking about.
Why don't you try doing that if you're a car company, and sell a car that can so easily be fucked up? Oh, yea, instead of having an out of-the-way hard break lever, we put a hard-break button right next to the defog button...but don't fucking bitch at us if you accidentally press the hard-break button (which is right next to the defog button) when trying to defog your windows, and your car spins around and crashes on an icy road.
Does that kind of bullshit macho attitude apply for companies making airplanes? When people making airplaies discovered that slats switches were being turned on accidentally, did they say:
"Yea, so what the slats extention switch can be accidentally turned on by an unintentional movement, possibly causing passenter-injury. Tell the pilots to be more careful and not fuck up."
No, they didn't. They said,
"Ok, so this is a problem. Why don't we cover the slats switch with a spherical clear cover that has to be unhinged before extending slats -- that way, they won't get extended at 500mph and cause the plane to trolly."
Just because many of these problems are socialogical not technological doesn't mean they're not problems. People are not robots. People fuck up -- quite a bit actually. To you perfect people writing a reply to this boldly telling me that people shouldn't "fuck up", how many times did you have to use backspace in writing that response?
Re:macho bullshit attitude (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, you seem to assume htat user's individual documents aren't important. Well, they are. And individual users certainly aren't as perfect as you.
When making something, it is simply *bad engineering* to not consider social phenomena. Technically, there would
Re:Bullshit macho attitude (Score:3, Insightful)
No. The purpose of the computer should be to on average allow the user to get work done as fast as possible. If -- because the computer stupidly executed a destructive typo -- it destroys a days worth of work, it has completely defeated it's purpose: to allow work to be done faster. Part of the way to resolve this is simply to have more intelligent command-line options. Command line options that perform destructive tasks should use letters that are *phy
Re:Bullshit macho attitude (Score:5, Insightful)
How often is someone going to 'rm -rf
I do it a lot.
But that's because I use chroot a lot
But as is always my policy when doing large rm's, I begin with an ls of the same arguments first so that I can see what it will delete, then arrow-up to the command again and change the 'ls' to 'rm' to do it for real.
Correct. A truly careless user will tend to fuck things up, even if you prompt him "really want to recursively delete entire home directory?" (shorter is better...the longer a message, the less likely the user will read it). However, you can at least put a speedbump along the road to oblivion. It might actually stop a semi-conscious user from deleting all their important info, and save them time. This is good.
The "are you sure y/n" method is ONLY useful if it is an uncommon message. If you are always prompted for each and every time you attempt to use the command, then automatically saying "yes" becomes part of your automatic unthinking processes, and it doesn't help matters to have the message there. It has to be a message that when it appears indicates something DIFFERENT from normal is happening. For this reason I never bother with aliasing "rm" to "rm -i" like a lot of people do. It's a useless step that just trains you to hold down the 'y' key after doing an 'rm' command.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:unix lovers/haters commands (Score:3, Insightful)
Because that'd be ambigious. That could mean both find all files in test.txt, or as you wanted find files with name test.txt. Making behaviour like that depend on what's on disk is generally a very bad idea. If you use it a lot, put "alias fi='find . -name'" in your shells rc-file.
Re:So Happy (Score:4, Interesting)
Genera was a completly open, object oriented environment. There were no barriers, not even a distinction between a kernel and applications - just a bunch of Lisp objects talking to each other, and some of them to the hardware, too.
For example, when something went wrong in Genera, there was no "core dump" or something - the user would have the choice either not to bother, or to drop in a source level debugger, chasing the problem down, possibly to the device driver level, fixing stuff, and telling the system to go on from the point where the error occured, using the fixed definitions. I.E. just because you stumbled over a buggy network driver while sending email, it doesn't mean you have to restart you mailer.
The "command line" (Genera used bitmapped display, but was quite text-oriented), the Interactive Lisp Listener, was based around the idea of "presentations" of objects. If you typed a command that needed a filename as an argument, you didn't have to type the name, you could also click on everything on the screen that represented a file, be it the output of the equivalent of "ls", some icon in another application, or whatever. These commands took objects as arguments, not just strings - imagine how cool it would be if in the Unix CLI, you could not only pipe text around, but arbitrary, living application objects!
It's a shame that so much cool stuff is lost in history.