> From: Jon Rust <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 17:36:56 -0800
>
> Heh, I have that book. I picked it up one day after struggling to get
> ClearCase running on HPUX 8 (or was it 9?) for about 2 weeks. Not
> good for the UNIX newbie. It will really unnecessarily skew your
> opinion against the OS. So many of the UNIX "features" they listed
> were out of date, even back then (1994). It took me several years to
> get over some of the bias I picked up in that book. :-)
>
> And they never offered a solution for all of UNIX's short-comings. If
> a better OS can be made, why hadn't it? More of a "Whiner's Handbook"
> than anything, but still pretty funny in some parts. Hmm... I think
> I'll try to find it tonight...
Well, it does require some context. First off, although the book was
published in 1994, most of the stuff in it was about 5 years old even then.
As far as why a better OS hadn't been made? Well, that's also part of the
context. It's kinda a VHS beats Betamax or Microsoft beat Apple kind of
thing. The *reason* most of us were griping about Unix so much is because we
had been using better OSes and had to switch to Unix because our favorite OSes
lost market share. I was a Lisp Machine administrator and before that worked
for Symbolics. The Symbolics LispM was a great OS sold by a company that had
no concept of marketing whatsoever. We used to talk about how the system was
ten years ahead of the rest of the industry. Well, 15 years later, there are
still things that it did better than anything out there. It's a terrible
shame that it didn't get the opportunity to evolve into the era of the world
wide web.
See some of my entries in the book for more opinions on this topic (although
they are 11 years ago now).
And yes, there is a lot of whining in the book.
Chris
--
Chris Garrigues virCIO
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Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft,
but they could get fired for relying on Microsoft.
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