Around 2000 or so, I used to work in tech support for a software company who had like 5000 Windows-based customers and 5 running Solaris. My boss chose me to learn Solaris when the previous “expert” left. I bought this book and started hacking. Good times!

        • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          what does it mean if intent is “low” or “high”?

          Also this is either quite old, or they’re just delusional boomers ranking google, amazon, facebook and youtube above the “crap” line. I haven’t even touched Yahoo in ages, so I’m just giving them the benefit of the doubt there

          • OpenStars@startrek.website
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            11 months ago

            I did not make it but I presume it is old yes, bc e.g. Amazon at one point used to have trustable reviews, but it’s been a minute since then!? I assume intent means production effort e.g. making things shared on Facebook takes seconds, whereas to shoot a porno takes at least minutes to hours. An alternate explanation could be to have intent be a surrogate for Web Traffic - although in that case, wouldn’t Facebook be much higher? Unless this is once again bc it is so old, prior to when it started taking over people’s lives e.g. games that stay-at-home mothers could play all throughout the day. Similarly, YouTube at one point looked poised to take over television itself back when the videos made were more of less simply using YouTube as another delivery vehicle, but they were funny as hell, or perhaps informative like a college class, etc. Now… I don’t know what happened, but TV sucks and YouTube sucks and we all merely look at memes, apparently.:-P

            Anyway I liked how it shoved porn into only a single corner, as in it is high in one dimension but not all such, but for the rest of the details yeah it is too old to have any further relevance to modern society:-).

            • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
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              11 months ago

              Oh yeah, re-reading my comment I didn’t make it obvious enough, but I assumed this was something you found and didn’t make yourself. When I said “they” and “them” I was talking to you about the creator, not talking about you (and past you) to the rest of the community.

              I remember when all the named sites were good. Facebook was once the gold standard because they kept out the young’uns and boomers. Amazon not only had trustworthy reviews, but also only sold from trustworthy sellers—e.g. you didn’t have to put up with shady sellers mixing in lower quality merch with the generic stuff that goes into big grab bins in the warehouses. Google searches were good for finding information beyond the most surface level of any topic without getting slammed by SEO procedurally generated blogs. Yahoo outperformed google in everything but search for a hot minute; I remember using it for email, news, and watching the latest music videos on their embedded RealPlayer java applet!

              Youtube got monetized is what happened. The original owners sold off to Google because Google Video sucked, and the owners couldn’t keep up with the growth of the site. Google decided that they should make money off of their shiny new toy. It stopped being about sharing videos, and became about keeping you engaged with “Content” so you could see more ads. YouTubers got incentivized by the algorithm to go with what appeals most to the broadest possible audiences, and the algorithm evolved in the direction of showing people whatever kept them watching ads. The front page, which used to be about highlighting odd, unique, and (most importantly) new ideas became about showing you whatever was most like whatever you had already sunk the most time into. It’s like how once you buy a product, all the targeted ads change to selling you the same type of product. Their algorithms don’t understand one-off purchases nor limited reserves of interest in a topic.

              And on top of that mound of removed, they changed the community to enable their greed: once being a “Content Creator” was a sustainable source of income production values increased, which drove a need for a future guarantee of further income. This wave of videomakers attracted a userbase that, on average, cared more about quantity and style than substance. In turn, these types of users became instrumental in maintaining revenue for youtube-based businesses, so catering to their expectation of high-volume with ever-increasing production values became the most important factor to creators, which drove a need for increasing revenue streams. That’s why even with an ad blocker, youtube is still mostly ads: sponsored segments, product reviews, and soooo much shallow pop culture engagement—references and reviews and critiques and thought pieces about media and people that won’t matter in 5 years’ time.

              Ironically this is exactly what went wrong with analog TV and then cable, and it’s what’s going wrong with streaming services now. The iriny being that that is precisely why they had a large influx of users early on: it was all thevTV watchers who were tired of 1/3 of their valuable time being wasted with ads. They learned nothing and refuse to acknowledge the shortcomings of the For-Profit model, electing to blame the ad-blockers, pirates, and “striminals” who make up a percentage of their viewers—instead of ever introspecting and considering that it’s really their fault for pushing away the even larger subset that simply just stop watching entirely. Those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it, just faster and in a more spectacular way.

              • OpenStars@startrek.website
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                11 months ago

                Do you know any replacements for these btw?

                Like Lemmy somewhat replaces “social media”, except I also used Facebook as a bit of a LinkedIn (b/c the latter was never good, it was instead always predatory), but people in general simply aren’t going to make an account on Lemmy, no matter how much you might wish that.

                And Amazon, I basically don’t buy stuff anymore except from brick-and-morter stores these days - it’s like I’ve gone backwards two decades b/c you can’t trust anything online anymore! (maybe the online equivalent of the brick-and-morter I suppose)

                For Google I use DuckDuckGo. Ironically AI is poised to somewhat clean up search results by putting those up top, except soon enough those will start to become monetized too, like you can have the “free” search results but if you want the AI-enhanced ones then you gotta poney up the dough, in a manner analogous to YouTube these days.

                As for how all this happened, the story that I heard was that companies exploited legal loopholes wherein if they reinvested their profits into creating new ventures, they could effectively avoid paying a great deal of their taxes. Thus, like mushrooms beneath a forest, they grew and grew and grew and grew and now you cannot take one step without them lying underneath. Like how virtually the only competitor to iOS these days is Android, which at one point was an open-source project!!! They lay in wait, pretending to be a friend - maybe even thinking themselves that they were - until it was time to monetize, and then they pounced. Before YouTube, there were several other video hosting sites. But. Not. Anymore. They under-cut the competition, “donating” their profits from other enterprises into making them awesome, and now they own us, instead of the other way around. And now today, as you say, there are all these 10, 11, 12 minute videos (b/c there’s an incentivization to hit that “10” mark), out of something that would have worked far better as a 1-5 sentence text paragraph, so now you have to watch 10 minutes of unsearchable video to find the same information that 30 seconds of reading would have told you far better. Don’t get me wrong, SOME videos are freaking AMAZING! But most are total crap.

                And… I do not know of a replacement for YouTube. Yes, I know of some other video hosting sites, some even grab YouTube videos directly, but nothing else comes even remotely close to allow a realistic comparion. e.g. Kursegat is AMAZING, and they put their videos onto YouTube, for their own monetization. I can bypass YouTube, but to watch what, not just go where?

                And TV too as you said - there’s very little worth watching, see e.g. Stranger Things. Oh well, we all need to work our butts off anyway, to save up for the impending apocolypse or whatever.

                At one point I literally walked away from a cushy job to try and help people (thankfully I got it back when that did not pan out), and do you know what I learned? That you cannot help people who refuse to be helped. Ignorance is trivially easy to cure (by comparison) - all it takes is knowledge. Whereas obstinancy… I do not know that there is a cure. MAYBE motivation, through personal pain unlocking a willingness to consider new possibilities that comfort previously made unnecessary? If so, then there is “hope” for us after all… b/c we are all about to suffer great pain as the internet, and in the wider view the enremovedtification of MANY areas of life, continue to get MUCH worse.

                No matter who wins the next USA election. Though not equally.

                • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
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                  11 months ago

                  Can’t answer most of your questions, rhetorical or not, but don’t have much to add or argue with either. One caveat I want to make is:

                  Before YouTube, there were several other video hosting sites. But. Not. Anymore.

                  Don’t think that for a second. There are more now than there ever have been. The problem isn’t simply that YouTube choked out all the others, it’s that YouTube moved the goalposts so we wouldn’t even consider the others. E.g. back in the day if you wanted videos about a very specific topic—say, you need a new phone and you want to find out if the PinePhone is right for you—you would have to go to all the video sharing sites and, if you were lucky, you would find a video or two somewhere. Nowadays you just check youtube. Youtube shifted the goalposts from “hosts videos” to “hosts videos about everything,” and now people won’t consider adopting alternatives unless their community just spontaneously exists, and is big enough to have everything, and also it doesn’t show them people they hate, and also it has this ambiguous list of features that youtube mostly has, and also…

                  And who can blame them? Who wants to check 8 different websites with 8 different interfaces and 4 different apps and 2 without apps and 2 that don’t work on mobile at all and partially overlapping communities and offerings and STILL risk not finding anything when checking one unified platform will guarantee you the video?

                  Do you know any replacements for these btw?

                  It depends on what you mean by “replacement,” as I mention above. As far as I know, there are no exact replicas of “[website], but only the good parts.”

                  Every Social Media alternative is either too small to be attractive to the people who expect a very full social experience (e.g. Lemmy instead of Reddit), or it’s just recreating the same flaws again, but more subtle and insidious (e.g. Threads instead of Xitter). The problem there is that the will of the herd doesn’t make smart choices, so you’re either left with site that’s just like the last one and doomed to recreate its downfall in a few years (because the average person likes what they already know and liked) or a site that is too forward thinking and will never have more than a few hundred thousand followers in your lifetime (assuming it can last)—a number that might seem large in a stadium or a BBS forum, but seems small on a site like facebook.

                  That being said, I like where the fediverse is going with services like Matrix, Mastodon and Lemmy. Maybe one day we’ll see a more fb-like experience

                  As you said, DuckDuckGo is a fairly good search engine. Better than Google currently, sadly. I remember when it was definitely a harder choice and really required strong values. 'Nuff said.

                  For Amazon, I like using Ebay, Etsy and specialized online stores. Brick-and-mortar is only necessary if it’s groceries or not a large chain (which all have websites anyway). The trade-off is the guarantees: some baseline of quality, and a definite refund when you get scammed. Hasn’t been an issue for me yet, but I make it a point to not buy online if I can try in-store.

                  Yahoo and Youtube: not really. As aforementioned I don’t use one, and I too am suckered into the pretty multicolored void of the other.

                  TV and streaming: cough !piracy@lemmy.ml cough (follow the checklists in the megathread first)

  • 0xED@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    Is this just my copy? The cover was put on backwards, so all the text is upside down…

    Edit: Pics or it didn’t happen. Edit-2: Formatting.

    Book 'Unix in a Nutshell' with cover folded to demonstrate cover was printed upside-down from text.  Book is placed sideways on a kitchen countertop

    • magikmw@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      In polish we have an idiom for rare books that directly translates to ‘white crow’. Incidentally French say ‘merle blanc’ - ‘white blackbird’. French influenced polish a lot during late modernity. Anyway where was I.

      Ah, yeah likely not very rare, they must have messed a whole print run and decided to sell it off anyway, maybe at a discount, since it’s not a limited hardback illuminated Shakespeare’s works in 5 tomes.

      Then again… Weirder things have collection value.

  • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    Nice! I picked up a good classic myself at a thrift store a couple months ago.

    I like one of the first lines in the first chapter: “The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.”

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        11 months ago

        About 260 if you don’t count the function reference at the back. There sure wasn’t much to it back then. Compared to the monster that is C++. I can maybe see why Linus doesn’t like it and prefers C. There’s a hundred different ways to do one thing, and it could get out of hand, and there’s a lot of complex stuff in the libraries that you’re dependent on. For low-level programming it’s basically like “trust me, bro”.

        It’s great for me though that can’t program worth a removed and have all the algorithms ready to go.

  • zcd@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    In high school I had Sun sparc 5 And then an ultra 60, Solaris was a pretty sweet OS back in the day

    • Ramin Honary@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      How did you get a Sun Sparc 5 and Ultra 60 as a high school student? You were able to get them used from a college that had recently upgraded or something?

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        11 months ago

        In the late 90s they were a couple hundred bucks on eBay. Passed their usefulness as workstations. I still have the ultra 60 but couldn’t find a scsi three hard drive to replace the original when it died

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      Solaris is actually kinda cool now. It was based on a great OS and actually has been improved since.

      We can’t do much about who owns it, but I’m glad to see someone’s looking after it – unlike when IBM found the loophole and reverted AT&T Unix ownership back to novell to just rot. Good job.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      11 months ago

      That went to removed as soon as Adobe took over.

      I didn’t like that the iPhone never supported it, but in hindsight they did us all a removeding favour.

  • fin@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    Here is one of my collection of O’Reilly books. Not actually mine, but my father’s. It’s published in 1995 by a Japanese publisher.

    photo of “learning the vi”

  • meiti@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Cool. I noticed I have seen the author’s name in TUHS mailing list. He’s still posting there sometimes.