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This reminds me of the Unix Haters handbook. a favourite topic back in the 90s amongst certain groups. https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf https://web.mit

This reminds me of the Unix Haters handbook. a favourite topic back in the 90s amongst certain groups. https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf I'd encourage the author to have a look at Plan 9 and GNU Mach as well, which in some shape or form do implement many of these. But none of them ended up being a viable reality.

Beijinger 3y ago
The best part is still: I have succumbed to the temptation you offered in your preface: I do write you off as envious malcontents and romantic keepers of memories. 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, collectives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost compatible 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!
BarbaryCoast 3y ago
Mach was created at CMU, and later development moved to the University of Utah. This work became the basis of the NeXT operating system, which then turned into Mac OSX. So I'd call this a "viable reality". PS -- I think you meant "GNU/Hurd", not "GNU Mach".
- wrs 3y ago
  Except that in the process, Mach absorbed BSD and became a weird hybrid of the two. I worked on Mach as an undergrad at CMU when the BSD server was intended as a temporary expedient to port the Unix userland tools quickly. Instead, it made its way into the kernel.
  - Ericson2314 3y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761195 Called something similar, "recidivism" which I think is a very apt word! We have to think critically about reform and how to have smooth/cheaper migrations without sloshing back and forth while making no progress.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Beijinger 3y ago

The best part is still: I have succumbed to the temptation you offered in your preface: I do write you off as envious malcontents and romantic keepers of memories. 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, collectives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost compatible 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!

BarbaryCoast 3y ago

Mach was created at CMU, and later development moved to the University of Utah. This work became the basis of the NeXT operating system, which then turned into Mac OSX. So I'd call this a "viable reality". PS -- I think you meant "GNU/Hurd", not "GNU Mach".

wrs 3y ago
Except that in the process, Mach absorbed BSD and became a weird hybrid of the two. I worked on Mach as an undergrad at CMU when the BSD server was intended as a temporary expedient to port the Unix userland tools quickly. Instead, it made its way into the kernel.
- Ericson2314 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761195 Called something similar, "recidivism" which I think is a very apt word! We have to think critically about reform and how to have smooth/cheaper migrations without sloshing back and forth while making no progress.

deleted 3y ago

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