61–70 of 316 posts
For all of the usability flaws pointed out here, to what would you ascribe Unix's proliferation and modern ubiquity? - Giving it away to universities? - The C programming language? What am I missing?
While entertaining, I'm left with the following question: if not UNIX, then what? Are there any successful non-UNIX-y OSes that are worth checking out? I may embarrass myself here, but I was under the impression that BSD, Plan 9, Solaris and HP-UX were all UNIX-y ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but try and figure out how you'd do better... efficient.ly. Over the network...
You can't do opengl efficiently over the network. At least xorg can't. Most applications uses opengl these days. For me, I've been using Linux fulltime for the last 15 years and I have never, not even once, had the need to connect to a remote X11 server. ssh has always been enough for me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but try and figure out how you'd do better... efficient.ly. Over the network...
You can't do opengl efficiently over the network. At least xorg can't. Most applications uses opengl these days. For me, I've been using Linux fulltime for the last 15 years and I have never, not even once, had the need to connect to a remote X11 server. ssh has always been enough for me.
Now 'most' is a relative term, but I do not think that's true at all. There are very few applications that use OpenGL. Obviously games are an exception, but if you count in all GUIs I would say mostly target X11 (via Gnome or KDE).
If I ever need to feel good about myself as a software developer, I only ever need to read this book's chapter about the X window system.
An office I worked in in the early 90's had a shelf with a ten(?) volume set of X windows books - and each individual book was a thick bugger. I'd only had fleeting experience of it, but remember thinking "how complex can this thing be ?!"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct. And the last time I came across one of those I compiled and used modern tools. Because even 20 year old Linux versions had tab complete and a vi that worked with directional keys
Assuming one has the access rights for it. I do occasionally ssh into boxes were I am a lame user without compilers installed.
(At least they have ssh and not telnet)
What you can sometimes do is pick an alternate shell or find some other editor someone 'left lying around' (even typing vim instead of vi can give you something different)
And sometimes "tab completion" works with \ or ESC or something similar, I don't remember exactly
I think that quite a bit in this book is outdated by now, but it's still a fun read, even as Unix person. Especially the chapter on NFS was a fun read. When I first set up my home server, I had my desktop lock up completely a few times when the server became unavailable, because of NFS. (Then I found out one can mount NFS shares in interruptible mode so the requests will eventually time out... but it was so annoying…