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> Testament, I suppose, to the sound elegance of the > ideas embodied in Unix, that thirty years on it still > more or less works.
I will certainly not disagree with this statement. Even MS finds it necessary to rips off a lot of concepts from *nix such as Winsock (their re-implementation of the BSD socket interface) and of course they all but embraced TCP/IP and went ahead and wrote their own complete implementation.
However, one must realize that Unix also has its fair share of real flaws which are why it is less popular today than Windows. (It's not all due to marketing is my point.) And what better book to expound on those flaws than the Unix Hater's Handbook (free download at http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/uhh-download.html) which I happened to be browsing through the other day. Written not by Mac or Windows aficionados but rather TOPS/Lisp machine fans (reallly old hands in other words), it's a great antidote for those of us who have been drinking too much of the *nix / Open Source Kool-Aid. ;-)
One of my favorite chapters is the one on X Window. Very funny and oh-so-true. Coincidentally I managed to find the following James Gosling interview
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/03/26/gosling_on_csharp_why_x/
and there's some juicy info and insight on why the *nix world is stuck with this overengineered monstrosity (because Sun was too cowardly to push Postscript-based NeWS...)
After reading this, one realizes that the immense pain of dealing with X at a time when GUIs were all the rage (back in the late 80s to early 90s) was a big factor in holding back *nix's popularity for the desktop. All the warring and politics back then between the *nix vendors certainly also helped them shoot themselves in the foot as well as giving MS the opportunity to entrench their platform further.
One part of the book puzzles me though and that is the chapter that rags on NFS. I dealt with NFS back on SGI Irix networks before and I felt it was so reliable and easy to use.
But then here's a question: why has ripped-off-from-Microsoft Samba (whose creator has declared that he personally hates the SMB protocol) seemingly become the most popular choice for network file sharing in the Linux world when NFS afaik is actually easier to use? /Only/ reason I can think of for wanting to use Samba is if you are in a mixed *nix-Windows environment. So for those people out there on an all *nix environment, does Samba actually hold any advantage over NFS?
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