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My freakiness score is: 337 Are you a freak? Find out your freakiness level. |
Day: May 1, 2003
This, however, by the same folks as in my previous post, is cool…
Foreword to The Unix Hater’s Handbook
By Donald A. Norman
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook? Why? Of what earthly good could it be?
Who is the audience? What a perverted idea.
But then again, I have been sitting here in my living room—still wearing
my coat—for over an hour now, reading the manuscript. One and one-half
hours. What a strange book. But appealing. Two hours. OK, I give up: I
like it. It’s a perverse book, but it has an equally perverse appeal. Who
would have thought it: Unix, the hacker’s pornography.
When this particular rock-throwing rabble invited me to join them, I
thought back to my own classic paper on the subject, so classic it even got
reprinted in a book of readings. But it isn’t even referenced in this one.
Well, I’ll fix that:
Norman, D. A. The Trouble with Unix: The User Interface is Horrid.
Datamation, 27 (12) 1981, November. pp. 139-150. Reprinted in
Pylyshyn, Z. W., & Bannon, L. J., eds. Perspectives on the Computer
Revolution, 2nd revised edition, Hillsdale, NJ, Ablex, 1989.
What is this horrible fascination with Unix? The operating system of the
1960s, still gaining in popularity in the 1990s. A horrible system, except
that all the other commercial offerings are even worse. The only operating
system that is so bad that people spend literally millions of dollars trying to
improve it. Make it graphical (now that’s an oxymoron, a graphical user
interface for Unix).
You know the real trouble with Unix? The real trouble is that it became so
popular. It wasn’t meant to be popular. It was meant for a few folks working
away in their labs, using Digital Equipment Corporation’s old PDP-11
computer. I used to have one of those. A comfortable, room-sized machine.
Fast—ran an instruction in roughly a microsecond. An elegant instruction
set (real programmers, you see, program in assembly code). Toggle
switches on the front panel. Lights to show you what was in the registers.
You didn’t have to toggle in the boot program anymore, as you did with the
PDP-1 and PDP-4, but aside from that it was still a real computer. Not like
those toys we have today that have no flashing lights, no register switches.
You can’t even single-step today’s machines. They always run at full
speed.
The PDP-11 had 16,000 words of memory. That was a fantastic advance
over my PDP-4 that had 8,000. The Macintosh on which I type this has
64MB: Unix was not designed for the Mac. What kind of challenge is there
when you have that much RAM? Unix was designed before the days of
CRT displays on the console. For many of us, the main input/output device
was a 10-character/second, all uppercase teletype (advanced users had 30-
character/second teletypes, with upper- and lowercase, both). Equipped
with a paper tape reader, I hasten to add. No, those were the real days of
computing. And those were the days of Unix. Look at Unix today: the remnants
are still there. Try logging in with all capitals. Many Unix systems
will still switch to an all-caps mode. Weird.
Unix was a programmer’s delight. Simple, elegant underpinnings. The user
interface was indeed horrible, but in those days, nobody cared about such
things. As far as I know, I was the very first person to complain about it in
writing (that infamous Unix article): my article got swiped from my computer,
broadcast over UUCP-Net, and I got over 30 single-spaced pages of
taunts and jibes in reply. I even got dragged to Bell Labs to stand up in
front of an overfilled auditorium to defend myself. I survived. Worse, Unix
survived.
Unix was designed for the computing environment of then, not the
machines of today. Unix survives only because everyone else has done so
badly. There were many valuable things to be learned from Unix: how
come nobody learned them and then did better? Started from scratch and
produced a really superior, modern, graphical operating system? Oh yeah,
and did the other thing that made Unix so very successful: give it away to
all the universities of the world.
I have to admit to a deep love-hate relationship with Unix. Much though I
try to escape it, it keeps following me. And I truly do miss the ability (actually,
the necessity) to write long, exotic command strings, with mysterious,
inconsistent flag settings, pipes, filters, and redirections. The continuing
popularity of Unix remains a great puzzle, even though we all know that it
is not the best technology that necessarily wins the battle. I’m tempted to
say that the authors of this book share a similar love-hate relationship, but
when I tried to say so (in a draft of this foreword), I got shot down:
“Sure, we love your foreword,” they told me, but “The only truly irksome
part is the ‘c’mon, you really love it.’ No. Really. We really do hate it. And
don’t give me that ‘you deny it—y’see, that proves it’ stuff.
I remain suspicious: would anyone have spent this much time and effort
writing about how much they hated Unix if they didn’t secretly love it? I’ll
leave that to the readers to judge, but in the end, it really doesn’t matter: If
this book doesn’t kill Unix, nothing will.
As for me? I switched to the Mac. No more grep, no more piping, no more
SED scripts. Just a simple, elegant life:
“Your application has unexpectedly
quit due to error number –1. OK?”
Donald A. Norman
Apple Fellow
Apple Computer, Inc.
And while I’m at it:
Professor of Cognitive Science, Emeritus
University of California, San Diego
Today is turning out pretty weird.
For starters, one of my coworkers, Susanne, just told me she is pregnant. She was ecstatic about it (rightly so) and I am very happy for her. I am apparently the first person she has told outside of her immediate family and husband.
I’m kinda flattered, but, at the same time, I feel awkward. I like Susanne a lot, but I never considered her that close that she would choose me as the first person to break news like that too.
Then I walk in, and this is waiting for me in my inbox:
Screen all Patients Presenting with Fever and Respiratory Illness for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)
A suspect case of SARS is a person presenting with:
1. One or more signs or symptoms of respiratory illness, including cough, shortness of breath, difficulty breathing, hypoxia, or radiographic findings of pneumonia or acute respiratory distress syndrome
AND
2. Documented fever that measures greater than 38ºC or 100.4 oF
AND
3. Travel within 10 days of onset of symptoms to an area with documented transmission of SARS* OR close contact** within 10 days of onset of symptoms with a person with possible SARS
* Areas with documented or suspected community transmission of SARS as of 4/22/03:
• People’s Republic of China (i.e. mainland China, including Hong Kong)
• Hanoi, Vietnam, Singapore, Toronto, Canada and Taiwan
For the most up to date list of affected areas, see the CDC website: www.cdc.gov/ncidod/sars/
** Close contact is defined as having cared for, having lived with, or having direct contact with respiratory secretions and/or body fluids of a patient known to be a suspect SARS case.
If you are evaluating a patient with a suspect case of SARS:
1. Place a surgical mask on the patient immediately.
2. Put the patient in an airborne infection isolation room immediately.
3. Notify Infection Control Beeper #7497 (9 AM-5:PM, Mon-Fri).At all other times contact the ID fellow/attending through the page operator.
4. Report all cases of suspect SARS to the NYCDOHMH Bureau of Communicable Disease by calling (212)-788-9830. After hours or on weekends, call Poison Control at 212-POISONS (212-764-7667).
5. Contact and airborne precautions should be implemented. Contact precautions include the use of gloves, gown and eye protection. Hands should be washed with warm water and soap after leaving the room and removing gloves. Airborne precautions require the use of N-95 (or equivalent) disposable filtering respirators for all individuals entering the negative pressure room.
Feh.
Anyhow, some comics to try to lighten up the day.
I think ima go see Xmen2 tonite.