On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 08:02, Andy Sy wrote: > 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. ;-)
Don't forget that the real intention of UHH was _humor_. The ideas that MS for a better technology would have been great, if they haven't screwed up on the specifications and implementations though. Good ideas don't really mix with bad defaults and flawed implementations. > 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...) NeWS, while being technologically superior (being based on PostScript, is vector-based instead of rasterized like X Window, aside from being faster and lightweight), wasn't published as an open standard for adoption. Sun was unwilling to disclose the specification to other vendors, until it was too late. To paraphrase ESR's 'The Art of Unix Programming' - a real threat to superior technology is technology that is good enough. X satisfied the most of needs for a graphical engine. > 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. The biggest factor however is that major Unix vendors didn't really want to make Unix a commodity product on the desktop market - focusing on the fatter profit margins from big customers. > 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. NFS was punned to be the 'nightmare filesystem' - the lack of file locking in the early implementations is one real pain especially for content that is distributed across many users (ex. mailboxes). > 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? That's also the only reason I could muster as well. Although... NFS wasn't really designed with security models in mind may count as another. --
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