111–120 of 163 posts
I 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 am…
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What's wrong with nfs v4? It was quite a bit faster than the alternatives last I checked.
As the book says: > There’s only one problem with a connectionless, stateless (file) system: it doesn’t work. > Example #1: NFS is stateless, but many programs designed for Unix systems require record locking > Example #3: If you delete a file in Unix that is still open, the file’s name is removed from its directory, but the disk blocks associated with the file are not deleted until the file is closed. (Example #2 is…
* https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=385927363&oldid=38...
There has been a lot of literature published on the problems with NFS, and the mismatch with POSIX file semantics, since 1988. Some of it was even in the original paper from Sun, in fact. To this day, Wikipedia has nothing on the subject. The words "stateful" and "stateless" appear once each in the entire article, with no indication of their pivotal importance, made much of in the actual literature on the subject.
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Eh, what? At the time (1994) the handbook was written reasonably priced alternatives were MacOS and Windows, both of which froze all the time and had horrible programming environments. AIX, non-free, was notoriously horrible, too. And the Wirth systems that you promote here were actually free. So what exactly is the great stable commercial alternative in the 90s?
So what exactly is the great stable commercial alternative in the 90s? OS/2 was pretty solid...
Workplace Shell was so cool though.
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Eh, what? At the time (1994) the handbook was written reasonably priced alternatives were MacOS and Windows, both of which froze all the time and had horrible programming environments. AIX, non-free, was notoriously horrible, too. And the Wirth systems that you promote here were actually free. So what exactly is the great stable commercial alternative in the 90s?
Digital Research produced some nice usable systems in the early 80s. MP/M was a multitasking version of CP/M available by 1981. In the mainframe world, TOPS-10/20 and VMS were both exemplary. From the user POV, the former was one of the best command-line systems ever created, with none of the insane user-hostility built into UNIX command naming. Dave "VMS -> NT" Cutler absolutely hated Unix, and it shows. But we're r…
I guess I'm less pessimistic, because I don't think that's true. I think there are quite a few people like me who are fed up with the shit that exists today and really want a good alternative. I think we'd be willing to make quite a few sacrifices for something with a whole lot of potential.
What seems to be true is that there are very few people both capable of making that happen and bold enough to try to make it something people can actually use instead of just a toy academic project.
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I'm slightly too young to have lived through it myself, but from what my dad told me, pre-GNU Unix and post-GNU Unix are almost completely different in their user experience. Prior to GNU, Unix (the tools and the kernel) used to simply crash a lot, or drop data. It was not an especially good system in any regard. As the GNU coding standards say: > Avoid arbitrary limits on the length or number of any data structure,…
Yes, using standard POSIX tools wasn't the best experience of the world. What helped Unix succeed was that originally Bell Labs wasn't allowed to sell it, so they gave it to universities for what was a symbolic price in comparisasion what a standard OS used to cost, alongside its source code. So naturally many stundents from those universities went out and started businesses based on UNIX, like Sun for example. One o…
Where does the MS operating system fit in here? Arguably the worst general-computing OS, but by far the most popular. For purpose of discussion, do you consider it free due to being widely pirated?
I'll say that the developer experience on Windows was excellent around the 1995-2005 timeframe. But the user experience was horrible, yet it remained an almost monopoly on the desktop.
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Pretty sure installing Kmspico is faster than buying a serial key.
Or 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/... slmgr /ipk XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX slmgr /skms kms.digiboy.ir # just an example of many KMS servers that exist slmgr /ato
This is a hilarious book, even if you're a *nix supporter. Highly recommended.
There's this relevant joke about Linux which is that Linux is very user friendly... it's just very picky about who its friends are.
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Or 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/... slmgr /ipk XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX slmgr /skms kms.digiboy.ir # just an example of many KMS servers that exist slmgr /ato
What can the operator of a KMS server do to my computer though?
2. Installing kmspico requires admin access to your machine. What kmspico does is that it installs a local KMS server which works the same way the remote KMS server I've suggested to use does: it activates everything you throw at it. But as I said it needs admin access to your machine, and it's up to you whether you trust kmspico or not.
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Yes, using standard POSIX tools wasn't the best experience of the world. What helped Unix succeed was that originally Bell Labs wasn't allowed to sell it, so they gave it to universities for what was a symbolic price in comparisasion what a standard OS used to cost, alongside its source code. So naturally many stundents from those universities went out and started businesses based on UNIX, like Sun for example. One o…
Eh, what? At the time (1994) the handbook was written reasonably priced alternatives were MacOS and Windows, both of which froze all the time and had horrible programming environments. AIX, non-free, was notoriously horrible, too. And the Wirth systems that you promote here were actually free. So what exactly is the great stable commercial alternative in the 90s?
In fact, GCC only got traction after Sun introduced the idea in the UNIX world of selling the developer tools instead of bundling them wiht the OS.
Back in 1994 the Wirth systems were mostly only available at ETHZ.
Had Linux not come up into the scene, with the ongoing BSD lawsuit, and the UNIX landscape would have looked much different nowadays.
[1] - "free" here meaning several factors cheaper than buying a VMS or OS/360 timesharing system for the university campus.
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Yes, using standard POSIX tools wasn't the best experience of the world. What helped Unix succeed was that originally Bell Labs wasn't allowed to sell it, so they gave it to universities for what was a symbolic price in comparisasion what a standard OS used to cost, alongside its source code. So naturally many stundents from those universities went out and started businesses based on UNIX, like Sun for example. One o…
> People have a tendency to gravitate towards free stuff regarless how bad the quality happens to be. Where does the MS operating system fit in here? Arguably the worst general-computing OS, but by far the most popular. For purpose of discussion, do you consider it free due to being widely pirated? I'll say that the developer experience on Windows was excellent around the 1995-2005 timeframe. But the user experience…
Regular consumers just handle their computers like appliances, getting a new one with whatever OS it gets bundled with.
The monopoly worked both ways, any OEM was free to ditch Microsoft agreements, they just cared to improve their profits by getting into bed with Microsoft.