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Unix conspiracy n. [ITS] According to a conspiracy theory long popular among ITS and TOPS-20 fans, Unix's growth is the result of a plot, hatched during the 1970s at Bell Labs, whose intent was to hobble AT&T's competitors by making them dependent upon a system whose future evolution was to be under AT&T's control. This would be accomplished by disseminating an operating system that is apparently inexpensive and easily portable, but also relatively unreliable and insecure (so as to require continuing upgrades from AT&T). This theory was lent a substantial impetus in 1984 by the paper referenced in the back door entry. |
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In this view, Unix was designed to be one of the first computer viruses (see virus) but a virus spread to computers indirectly by people and market forces, rather than directly through disks and networks. Adherents of this 'Unix virus' theory like to cite the fact that the well-known quotation "Unix is snake oil" was uttered by DEC president Kenneth Olsen shortly before DEC began actively promoting its own family of Unix workstations. (Olsen now claims to have been misquoted.) |
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[If there was ever such a conspiracy, it got thoroughly out of the plotters' control after 1990. AT&T sold its UNIX operation to Novell around the same time Linux and other free-UNIX distributions were beginning to make noise. ESR] |
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Unix weenie n. [ITS] 1. A derogatory play on 'Unix wizard', common among hackers who use Unix by necessity but would prefer alternatives. The implication is that although the person in question may consider mastery of Unix arcana to be a wizardly skill, the only real skill involved is the ability to tolerate (and the bad taste to wallow in) the incoherence and needless complexity that is alleged to infest many Unix programs. "This shell script tries to parse its arguments in 69 bletcherous ways. It must have been written by a real Unix weenie." 2. A derogatory term for anyone who engages in uncritical praise of Unix. Often appearing in the context "stupid Unix weenie". See Weenix, Unix conspiracy. See also weenie. |
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unixism n. A piece of code or a coding technique that depends on the protected multi-tasking environment with relatively low process-spawn overhead that exists on virtual-memory Unix systems. Common unixisms include: gratuitous use of fork(2); the assumption that certain undocumented but well-known features of Unix libraries such as stdio(3) are supported elsewhere; reliance on obscure side-effects of system calls (use of sleep(2) with a 0 argument to clue the scheduler that you're willing to give up your time-slice, for example); the assumption that freshly allo- |
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