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The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]
- alwillis 8y agoI loved this book back in the day—it even came with its own barf bag. But how things change. This was before macOS became BSD-based and before I really got into web development because today, I spend so much time at a shell prompt inside of the Terminal app. I certainly appreciate the elegance of Unix a lot more today.
- GnarfGnarf 8y agoThis is a hilarious book, even if you're a *nix supporter. Highly recommended.
- dataflow 8y agoThere's this relevant joke about Linux which is that Linux is very user friendly... it's just very picky about who its friends are.
- DonHopkins 8y agoLinux is only free if your time is worthless. ;)
- mehrdadn 8y agoTruer words have never been spoken. ;)
- w8rbt 8y agoIt's like a free puppy.
- jimmaswell 8y agoOr a free boat
- quickthrower2 8y agoFree as in beer and free as in poops everywhere.
- sls 8y agoWindows 10 Pro is only $200.00 if your time is worthless, is the flip side.
- marcosdumay 8y agoAnd privacy...
- quickthrower2 8y ago... and you didn’t get an OEM licence.
- DrScump 8y agoAnd bandwidth...
- TeMPOraL 8y agoIf your time is worthless, Windows can - and always could - be free. But if your time is worth something, it's better to shell out that $$$, and also be legally and morally on the safe side.
- mruts 8y agoPretty sure installing Kmspico is faster than buying a serial key.
- 0w4u2a 8y agoOr changing the KMS server to a "customised" one that accepts all activation attempts. Much more secure than giving root to kmspico. Find a proper key for your edition here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/kmsclientkeys https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/... slmgr /ipk XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX slmgr /skms kms.digiboy.ir # just an example of many KMS servers that exist slmgr /ato
- gnu8 8y agoWhat can the operator of a KMS server do to my computer though?
- sandov 8y agoUsing computers is free if your time and patience are worthless.
- anoncake 8y agoAt least its not user-hostile, e.g. it doesnt spy on its users.
- vermilingua 8y agoIt's a joke comment, on a joke thread, about a joke book. I wholeheartedly agree, but lighten up.
- sureaboutthis 8y agoThat's a line about Unix. I believe before Linux ever came along.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoYes, it's a great illustration of why people don't like Linux users: they're full of themselves and believe they're better than everyone else.
- sagartewari01 8y agoEspecially for *nix supporters.
- yebyen 8y agoI've just skimmed the TOC and, having never seen this book before, I'm a little in love. Here's why It's a cynical UNIX manual from the 1990's. Here: > 14 NFS..............283 > Nightmare File System > Not Fully Serviceable............284 > No File Security...........287 > Not File System Specific? (Not Quite)..........292 Here also: > The Oxymoronic World of Unix Security .......243 > Holes in the Armor ........244 > The Worms Crawl In ..........257 I work in IT systems development in a University IT department. I want to read this take on UNIX from 1994, just to see how much better things haven't gotten. OK, the state of the art has gotten better, but if I compare my work environment which is byzantine complexity and full of bespoke garbage sometimes, to the hells apparently described herein, I bet I can find more similarities than differences. And that will hopefully make me a more effective communicator about how to make things better with modern convenience technologies that we're not using enough. (Dare I say Kubernetes is the one big thing that is actually majorly different today, compared to UNIX in the 1990's.)
- marcosdumay 8y ago> I bet I can find more similarities than differences. Most of what's on the book has been fixed (not NFS, this one is forever), and we have an entirely new set of things to worry about. The book is funny, but every part of it feels old.
- hyperion2010 8y agoRereading the section on NFS again, I suddenly realize that I was foolish to have skipped it as out of date. Since my last read I have encountered some incarnation (heh) of every single one of the problems listed in that chapter. I'm betting v4 isn't much better either. Is there a good network file system solution!?
- shaklee3 8y agoWhat's wrong with nfs v4? It was quite a bit faster than the alternatives last I checked.
- darkpuma 8y agoMuch of the book is very dated, complaining about things that have been rectified many years ago. However I think it still has a valuable lesson that many, particularly young CS students, would benefit from: Unix is not the perfect fundamental model for computing. C is not the gospel. Their prevalence today is as much a historic and economic accident as a rational consequence of their objective merits. Both are social artifacts, not manifestations of fundamental truths. Worshipers of Bell Labs (such as the cat-v or suckless folks) don't get this, and I've seen them pull a lot of people down that rabbit hole with them, particularly young and inexperienced students.
- simias 8y ago>particularly young CS students >C is not the gospel >Worshipers of Bell Labs I think you're one or two generations late, you'd have to be a hipster to be a CS student worshiping C and Bell Labs these days. I suspect most CS students these days start around web technologies using VS Code in stock Ubuntu, not hacking C programs using Emacs running in dwm on a heavily customized Slackware. I do agree that cat-v and the suckless folks should be taken with a massive grain of salt though.
- sitkack 8y agoI used to be a suckless person, not official, but I had branded them _my tribe_. I still appreciate them for their simplicity target, but the means and methods for me have changed. When I first came across the UHH, my systems exposure was AmigaDOS, DOS, Windows 95, Windows NT 4, Ultrix, FreeBSD and Linux. I had never used VMS in any meaningful way (David Cutler is a well known Unix Hater) and the idea of "Hating Unix" was off putting because it seemed so useful, and the pain inflicted I internalized as my failing for not properly understanding it. I had no idea how much of a patched together mess it was. Hell, I think if we had continued using DOS that it would have eventually gotten a scheduler, memory protection, pipes and signals and then ended up in largely the same place. At the part of the stack that most programmers are operating now, the operating system doesn't matter much. We can take the pain points from UHH and apply them to our own lack of system design.
- 8y ago
- Naac 8y agoThis is one of my favorite books, and I own the hard-copy. As I was reading it, I found that a lot of the problems mentioned seem to be affecting Windows and macOS, while Linux based distros have them resolved. I found the commentary and history both hilarious and informative. The anti-forward by Dennis Ritchie is also very funny. If anyone has found similar CS style humor books, please let me know!
- itronitron 8y ago"Mr. Bunny's Big Cup o' Java" offers a humorous take on Java, but it's not mind-blowing in the way that unix-haters handbook is.
- mistrial9 8y agoa ridiculous and sometimes hilarious poke at all things computers is "The Binary Bible of Saint Silicon" .. from long ago, when computers were fewer.. it makes fun of Catholicism and similar too, so be warned..
- DrScump 8y agoMy late sister actually worked with Saint $ilicon (Jeffrey Armstrong) at Seagate in the 1980s. I have an autographed copy of the book. I got my second ever hard disk drive through her employee-purchase discount. Eighty megabytes!
- depressed 8y agoI enjoyed "How not to program in C++". It's a collection of find-the-bug puzzles, and has hilarious war stories at the bottom of every other page.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- delish 8y agoAn excerpt from a job posting by Hal Abelson: > Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement.
- dboreham 8y agoStill have my copy..
- etaioinshrdlu 8y agoI think the success of Unix is much better explained by "Worse is Better" than the modularity/composability of little utilities called the Unix philosophy.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoAnd DOS was a lot worse than Unix.
- etaioinshrdlu 8y agoI love DOS and how utterly terrible it is :)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- waynecochran 8y agoI think it was jwz who said “Linux sucks, it just sucks less than everything else.”
- dredmorbius 8y ago"All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less." http://www.mutt.org http://www.mutt.org
- aboutruby 8y agoReminds me of "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others"
- smhenderson 8y agoAll operating systems suck! Linux just sucks differently every time a new kernel is released. http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/operating-systems/os-suck http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/operating-systems/os-suck
- charlesism 8y agoDennis Ritchie's "anti-preface" to this handbook contains the hard-to-forget 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
- delish 8y agoAnd: > Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with Windows or a Mac. No Gulag or lice, just a future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedgehog.
- eternalban 8y ago"a future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedgehog" Ironically, Unix won yet here we are..
- 77pt77 8y agoAnd sonic died...
- aarch64 8y agoOne of these "apposite observations" is in the section on pipes (p. 199 of link). The authors use this convoluted bash script to show that pipes are best suited for simple hacks and might fail mysteriously under certain circumstances: egrep '^To:|^Cc:' /var/spool/mail/$USER | \ cut -c5- | \ awk '{ for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++) print $i }' | \ sed 's/,//g' | grep -v $USER | sort | uniq Although this is hard to read, it can be simplified from 7 commands to 5: awk '/^To:|^Cc:/ { for (i = 2; i <= NF; i++) print $i }' /var/mail/$USER | \ sed 's/,//g' | grep -v myemail@exmaple.com | sort | uniq By folding the egrep pattern matching into awk as it is supposed to be used and starting from the second field instead of removing the first four characters with cut, this script is both easier to read and fewer lines long. By inverse grepping for myemail@example.com, there will not be mysterious behavior if $USER is in another person's email address.
- systemBuilder 8y agoThis is a tongue in cheek but also piece of shit MIT propaganda piece mostly written by the clowns who created the abortions that were Multics and LISPMs. Like as if every software engineer should start their next project by warming up their soldering irons to add obscure new features to their CPU's! I know because I attended that school and worked with the fathers of Multics. The sad fact is that MIT produces extreme bloatware that nobody understands nor needs (gnu emacs cough cough). MIT has almost ruined unix with bloatware like 'configure' and gcc 'extensionettes'. The repeated rant about memory mapped files (a Multics bedrock feature) has been refuted as showboating hundreds of times by OS designers like my manager at Xerox OSD, the designer of Pilot, and an ex-MIT professor who never drank that Kool aid! What's happening in OS's right now is that European bloatware is strangling Linux ... The reason Unix got people so thrilled is that it could 'terminate and stay resident' in one single human mind!
- cyberpunk 8y agoI'll assume you're talking about systemd here? How is linux being strangled? How is it Europe's fault? As far as I can see linux is booming and almost ubiquitous as far as backend OS's go...
- darkpuma 8y ago> "How is [systemd] Europe's fault?" The only way that makes sense is if they're referring to Lennart being German, but that's kind of a bullshit argument because SystemD was not some novel idea; launchd was around first and came from the American west coast.
- f2f 8y agocounterpoint: launchd works.
- dbdjfjrjvebd 8y agoWhat doesn't work about systemd?
- pts_ 8y agoI learned a lot about unix like systems and loved them even more after reading this, ironically. Or maybe because it's sarcastic.
- mtraven 8y agoI founded the mailing list the book was based on. These days I say, Unix went from being the worst operating system available, to being the best operating system available, without getting appreciably better. (which may not be entirely accurate, but don't flame me). And still miss my Lisp Machine. It's not that Unix is really that bad, it's that it has a certain model of computer use which has crowded out the more ambitious visions which were still alive in the 70s and 80s. Much as the web (the Unix of hypertext) crowded out the more ambitious visions of what computational media for intellectual work could be (see the work of Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson). That's a bigger tragedy IMO. Unix, eh, it's good enough, but the shittiness of the web makes humanity stupider than we should be, at a time when we can ill afford it.
- linguae 8y agoWhen I discovered Linux and FreeBSD as a 15 year old, I was absolutely amazed by what I saw, coming from the world of Windows with some elementary school memories of the classic Mac OS sprinkled in. My exploring these *nix variants and learning about their development and history led to my decision to major in computer science and pursue a career in systems software research. I still have a high level of respect for people like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Bill Joy, and Marshall Kirk McKusick. I had a dream of working for Sun before the Oracle acquisition and working on projects like ZFS. But lately I’ve been studying systems that for whatever reason ended up losing out in the marketplace despite having really interesting design decisions and features that would be welcome today. Although I like the classic Mac OS, NeXT, and the modern macOS, I wish Steve Jobs would have “copied” all of Smalltalk and then added Mac-like touches to it. I also wish that Genera were open-sourced instead of the current situation where it’s difficult to obtain legally and inexpensively. I have a dream of writing a modern OS inspired by Genera, Smalltalk, and Apple’s OpenDoc, but writing a new OS is a major undertaking. Maybe it’s my inner romantic speaking, or maybe I’m just drawn to beautiful things, but I’ve always been attracted to “what could have been” things. Hopefully one day we’ll have a “right thing” OS again, and maybe one day we’ll have an alternative to the Web that isn’t as much of a technology hodgepodge.
- pjmlp 8y ago
- gerbilly 8y agoI bought this book in print 20+ years ago. It came with a vomit bag.
- iheartpotatoes 8y agoI expected this to be tongue-in-cheek. Hoo boy was I wrong.
- towaway1138 8y agoI bought this when it came out, but thought it was horrible. The only good bit was the preface by one of the Unix authors (Ritchie?). The rest just seemed like whining by people that didn't really get the Unix philosophy.
- mruts 8y agoI mean, you could say that everyone hates Nazi's because they don't really get Nazi philosophy. Both your statement and my statement don't really mean anything.
- _kst_ 8y agohttps://homes.cs.washington.edu/~weise/uhh-download.html https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~weise/uhh-download.html "We wrote the contract with our publisher to have the copyright revert to us once the book went out of print. So yes, we have the right to publish it online. Feel free to mirror it where ever you want, print it out, and bind it."
- vermilingua 8y ago"C++ is to C as Lung Cancer is to Lung" has to be the best chapter title I've ever read.
- Smithalicious 8y agoI always have a very conflicted feeling about the Unix-Haters Handbook. It's clearly intended to make legitimate criticisms, but then there is a kind of tongue-in-cheek exagerrated part to it, but then behind that there's clearly a lot of very real bitterness and barely controlled anger. I think it's a good book and worth reading still, if not especially, in the modern world where to many people Unix and its family are the hot "alternative" that is often favourably compared against Windows and its ilk. But I also think that Ritchie's "anti-preface" was already quite on-the-nose when the book came out and has only become more true over time.
- rcarmo 8y agoI read this when it came out, and it's only improved over the years. At the time we were just graduated and it felt otherworldly and futuristic, especially considering we had been taught to use VAXen and used 680x0 Macs...
- phil9987 8y agoThis book is hilarious, love how the frustration is underlined with email conversations and just the right amount of sarcasm.
- jayalpha 8y agoTue, 15 Mar 1994 00:38:07 EST Subject: anti-foreword To the contributers to this book: I have succumbed to the temptation you offered in your preface: I do write you off as envious malcontents and romantic keepers of memo- ries. The systems you remember so fondly (TOPS-20, ITS, Multics, Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, the Dorado) are not just out to pasture, they are fertilizing it from below. Your judgments are not keen, they are intoxicated by metaphor. In the Preface you suffer first from heat, lice, and malnourishment, then become prisoners in a Gulag. In Chapter 1 you are in turn infected by a virus, racked by drug addiction, and addled by puffiness of the genome. Yet your prison without coherent design continues to imprison you. How can this be, if it has no strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collec- tives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost com- patible with the existing ones, albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulations of the prisons to which they have been transferred. Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with Windows or a Mac. No Gulag or lice, just a future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedgehog. You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining. 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. Bon appetit!
- fromthestart 8y agoAmusing read. Most of this material is before my time. But in geoscience grad school just five or so years ago, a number of older, but technically minded professors were still using Sun machines, and most of the manuals for geoscientific software tend to provide supplementary information for other modern exotic systems/OSes, so I wonder: has windows replaced Unix as the technically inferior/evolutionary superior champion?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- moomin 8y agoI still own my copy, and highly recommend reading it in conjunction with a more conventional text on operating systems design. It’s quite illuminating.
- wazoox 8y agoIndispensable website of the handbook, with the HTML version of the book, and the fantastic "unixux" server: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/ http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/ Try unixux. Really.
- nickpsecurity 8y agoESR did a modern review on this: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=538 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=538
- mcguire 8y agoP. 124: "We have tried to avoid paragraph-length footnotes in this book, but X has defeated us by switching the meaning of client and server. In all other client/server relationships, the server is the remote machine that runs the application (i.e., the server provides services, such a database service or computation service). For some perverse reason that’s better left to the imagination, X insists on calling the program running on the remote machine “the client.” This program displays its windows on the “window server.” We’re going to follow X terminology when discussing graphical client/servers. So when you see “client” think “the remote machine where the application is running,” and when you see “server” think “the local machine that dis- plays output and accepts user input.” Sigh.
- vagab0nd 8y agoGreat book. And what's funny is, some of the things it criticizes are features I'd not heard of and actually learned from the book itself. E.g. bare double dash.