121–130 of 163 posts
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> I suspect most CS students these days start around web technologies using VS Code in stock Ubuntu More likely, Visual Studio Code on macOS.
haven't the google chromebook kids hit the college market yet? wonder if they'd go for macOS at all
It is only a thing on US school system.
And now with latest changes at Google, eventually not even that.
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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…
> But UNIX is so embedded now it would be a purely academic exercise 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 bo…
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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…
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…
Do you have any suggested reading to learn more about the more ambitious visions from the 70s and 80s, and why they didn't pan out?
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> 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.
Rereading 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!?
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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…
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…
So, unix is like kudzu, if you also could somewhat eat kudzu.
Dennis 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
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 awk '/^To:|^Cc:/ { for (i = 2; i By inverse grepping for myemail@example.com, there will not be mysterious behavior if $USER is in another person's email address.
"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.