Six More Tech Cults 179
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Dan Tynan takes a humorous look at six 'sects' of fanatical tech loyalists. 'Fandom, devotion, obsession — certain technologies have a way of inspiring an extremely loyal following. So committed are these devotees, you might as well call them technology cults,' Tynan writes in this update to last year's list, which included fans of the Newton, Commodore, and Ruby on Rails, among other technologies. 'Sometimes these cults are inspired by elegant lines of code. Other times it's dedication to an ideal. Some are looking to transform the way software is made. Others hope to transform humanity itself. And some just want to argue about it all — endlessly and at great length.'"
Vi uber alles (Score:5, Funny)
The sinister emacs must be purged.
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Biggest cults in tech (Score:5, Funny)
Steve Jobs, Kevin Warwick, Nicholas Negroponte.
Oh, sorry. Cults.
Re:Biggest cults in tech (Score:5, Funny)
Once again Theo De Raadt fails to get the recognition he deserves.
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Cults involve not being able to leave the cabal. You need a different term for groups where you can't join.
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Cults involve not being able to leave the cabal. You need a different term for groups where you can't join.
That would be "Cliques", just for the alliteration.
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So a Cult Clique would be suffering deadlocks?
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... and Steve Ballmer, with his mantra "Developers, developers, developers"
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That is why the ordering of threads should be done using more logical criteria, such as the most gratuitous use of the word floccinauccinilihilipilification* in a serious screenplay. *Ok, this should be a different and somewhat shorter f-word, but this seems so much better somehow.
Not to be taken seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple isn't #1.
To be fair to the Jobsian cult, though, the most rabid extremists I've ever come across are old-skool SGI admins. Don't even try to suggest putting Linux on ancient SGI hardware; according to sacred lore, it will turn a venerable super computer into a PC. Then they'll send you an angry email as well, just to make sure the point gets across.
Well they might have a point (Score:5, Insightful)
"t will turn a venerable super computer into a PC."
SGI might not have had the best marketing but back in the day it had some of the best hardware designers and OS/driver writers in the world as far as graphics was concerned. What they didn't know at the time wasn't worth knowing. I'd be pretty amazed if Linux could get the same performance out of the hardware even if it used SGI written drivers.
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Probably, but although SGI hardware is readily available and even cheap for the enthusiast, Irix is not. It's actually not easy to get hold of, and SGI isn't helpful at all. So to make use of the fancy old hardware (SGI made nice boxes years before Apple), people tend to be attracted to the alternatives: NetBSD and Linux. An Indy can either be a fancy but inefficient dust collecting device, or a low-end Unix terminal running Linux/BSD. Architecturally, it can't really be a PC. But considering that SGI aband
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yeah. and ruby was included, while postgresql was left out ;)
just take a look at any mysql article on /. for a proof.
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You should have listened to the tirade I got from EnterpriseDB (the Windows vendor for PostgreSQL). Because I need to do stuff too heavy for MySQL (and I don't like the problems Oracle has caused, nor the splintering), I'm increasingly interested in Ingres and other Open Source DBs.
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Cults are small non-mainstream groups, so it is accurate. Apple is a religion.
"A delusion held by one person is a mental illness, held by a few is a cult, held by many is a religion."
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I agree, we of EMACS and those of VI deserve our and their recognition!
But with VI mode in EMACS, who needs VI?
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Anyone with less than 8GB of memory in their machine. :)
Cult of Math (Score:5, Funny)
"InfoWorld's Dan Tynan takes a humorous look at six 'sects' of fanatical tech loyalists.
Tech cult No. 1: The Way of the Palm
Tech cult No. 2: Brotherhood of the Ruby
Tech cult No. 3: The Ubuntu tribe
Tech cult No. 4: The Commodorians
Tech cult No. 5: The Order of the Lisp
Tech cult No. 6: Monks of the Midrange
Tech cult No. 7: The Tao of Newton
THERE....ARE.....SEVEN....SECTS!!!!!!!!!!!!
What did you expect? (Score:2, Funny)
A Spanish Inquisition?
So fine, there are seven sects
Tech cult No. 1: The Way of the Palm
Tech cult No. 2: Brotherhood of the Ruby
Tech cult No. 3: The Ubuntu tribe
Tech cult No. 4: The Commodorians
Tech cult No. 5: The Order of the Lisp
Tech cult No. 6: Monks of the Midrange
Tech cult No. 7: The Tao of Newton
Tech cult No. 8: The Amiga Gurus
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It kind of irked me that the 'Commodorians' section droned on and on about the Commodore 64, whose enthusiasts are pretty much a group of modest hobbyists with a realistic view of the world, then only mentioned the real nutcase cultists, the Amiga cranks, at the end like an afterthought. Maybe it was viewed as too dangerous to bring up 'the A computer' prominently.
(And probably an Amiga crank or two will respond to this comment, or have one of their friends tag it flamebait.)
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Palm and Ubuntu not not Apple? Seriously? I'm supposed to take this list seriously?
Re:Cult of Math (Score:5, Informative)
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Sadly, nobody appreciates the CRC32 value of "On purpose to anger the Next Generation cultists." anymore.
OT: Re:Cult of Math (Score:2)
rather off-topic, but anyway....
regarding the moon head towards earth, not sure i understand what you mean. the moon is currently moving away because of the tides: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon#Tidal_evolution [wikipedia.org]
Kinda old news isn't it? (Score:2, Informative)
From article:
By Dan Tynan
Created 2009-05-04
I became suspicious when he predicted the resurgence of palm.
Re:Kinda old news isn't it? (Score:5, Informative)
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Oh heavens I fit into a few of those categories.
I think they left out a few.
What of NetBeans vs Eclipse.org?
The anti Monoites. Those that hate all things Mono and C# like that pollutes the purity of Linux.
The Church of Theo
The Brotherhood of St Clive of Sinclair.
The Flash haters which now seem to be having issues that Apple has joined them since many are also Apple haters.
The Flash faitful or those poor fools that that don't understand that the only reason people keep Flash is Farmville.
And the Twitteroti.
Infoworld Astroturf Knows No Calendar (Score:2)
Seriously, it doesn't. Snydeq is their PR flack, and he's got a weekly slashdot quota (check out his submission history). Quality of article doesn't matter, he just has to hit his numbers. Hey, it's a living, right...?
Re:Kinda old news isn't it? (Score:4, Informative)
From article: By Dan Tynan Created 2009-05-04
I became suspicious when he predicted the resurgence of palm.
That's why it's also a dupe: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/04/2039219 [slashdot.org] - note that it was posted on the same day.
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spam bot?
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Commentary, like news, does have an expiration date. Who could write a tech cult article today without mentioning Android? I guess this goes to show how fast info in the tech world seems dated.
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I noticed that too. Hardly counts as News for Nerds when it's a year old.
Depends on the topic. Female anatomy is millions of years old, but it would still count as news for nerds.
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Depends on the topic. Female anatomy is millions of years old, but it would still count as news for nerds.
Huh? What is this "Female" thing of which you speak?
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Huh? What is this "Female" thing of which you speak?
The things you rescue from dragons/demons/flame-breathing-spike turtles in old video games.
Highly sought after by males, regardless of economic, social, or intellectual status (some groups are exceptions).
Often pleasant to look at.
Exist outside of determinism. AVOID.
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Depends on the topic. Female anatomy is millions of years old, but it would still count as news for nerds.
As long as you're referring to learning about it on the computer screen, then, no, I don't think that'd be new, either.
Ruby's younger, sleeker sibling? (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article:
"Programming language Ruby and its younger, sleeker sibling, Ruby on Rails..."
LOL
Such quality investigation and journalism!
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I guess you didn't read the article. He does mention that it's a web framework.
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I guess you didn't read the article. He does mention that it's a web framework.
That doesn't make Ruby on Rails a sibling of Ruby.
Unless you count the associative array library I wrote in C as a sibling of C?
No, of course not.
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A bit of journalistic license. At least the later description was correct, which is better than most Infoworld articles.
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Hey, just because it follows the house-of-cards scalability model, it doesn't mean it is not sleek!
As well there should be! (Score:2, Interesting)
Seems to me the key is tolerance. We tolerate the currently-enthused, because we know we were once them and, Linux willing, will be again.
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Enthusing its supporters? MS DOS? Windows 3.0? (I mean, later versions may have had their points, but even Microsoft themselves would only call Windows 3.0 a commercial success.)
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Right. But note that the linked article is pre-release hype. Windows 3.0 was going to be good. I saw even worse hype for Google's ChromeOS even before it was officially announced, though. Not by fanboys, but by "journalists" trying to sell "news" by making it up. It's just an attempt at drumming up enthusiasm for "the next big thing" so that readers will be want to read more about it later.
Nonsense (Score:5, Funny)
Computer fanatics don't have sects.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Funny)
Computer fanatics don't have sects.
That explains the article... "Tech cult No. 1: The Way of the Palm"
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Commodore 65 (Score:4, Insightful)
Another gem from the article:
Sacred relic: Commodore C65
Ah, yes, I fondly remember my C65...
Wait, what?
(Did they even bother to proofread their work? It has dozens of mistakes.
Re:Commodore 65 (Score:5, Funny)
You are just jealous because you were stuck with the C64 while all the cool kids had a C65
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You are just jealous because you were stuck with the C64 while all the cool kids had a C65
The really cool and dedicated-to-the-cult kids upgraded to the C128.
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No, we upgraded to the C=128D. Actually, I've used and owned both. The 128D may be the best 8-bit computer of all time, and I say that because it was, essentially, almost every 8-bit computer that came before it, all rolled into one.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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The really cool and dedicated-to-the-cult kids upgraded to the C128.
Hah! All the really cool kids had the C129! At least according to InfoWorld they did.
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Give me your C65 or I'll detonate the C4.
Re:Commodore 65 (Score:5, Insightful)
Commodore 65 [wikipedia.org]
(Did you even bother to read the article?)
What seems silly to me is including C64 users as a cult and only jokingly mentioning Amiga advocates in an aside. Hard to believe any tech observer including the former instead of the latter. Diehard AmigaOS advocates much more deserve "cult" status.
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(Did you even bother to read the article?)
Why, yes. I did.
I'm old enough to remember when the Commodore 64 came out. I owned one. I had bunches of friends who owned one. We loved them.
The article says this:
Their most sacred relic: the Commodore 65, an improved version of the C64 that never made it past the prototype stage.
Um...no. The C65 is not a sacred relic. That's asinine. It was never even released. The mere mention of the C65 in the article is foolish. It was the Commodore 64 we loved and revered, not the vaporous C65.
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Yes it is, please check comp.sys.cbm or any Commodore-forum before you try to sound as if you have any idea what you're talking about. There is nothing as sought after as a C65 among Commodore-collectors - not even the Commodore MAX. Last year I offered around US$2000 for one of them, but unfortunately the seller wanted more. Latest C65 on ebay (dec. 2009) went for around US$7800.
It was never even released.
Roughly 500 prototypes were sold after Commodores ba
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I think its dieing off though - its been a long time since I handed out leaflets at the airport.
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I agree! We Amigans are definitely a cult. I LOL'd when I read this: "These are people who worship the Commodore Amiga operating system and expect that one day its superiority will cause it to rise again. Some of them are really annoyingly crazy."
That should be our new motto: It's superiority will cause it to rise again!
... or maybe: The Once and Future Operating System?
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Or maybe "We're really annoyingly crazy"?
No insult intended, I think that would be a really great motto personally.
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I think it's important to differentiate fans and the cult.
The AmigaOS was literally the last OS I actually loved, and that love came at a price: I had to watch an inferior operating system trundle forward clumsily, finally taking on many of the best aspects of the AmigaOS, but doing so very tentatively, awkwardly, or downright poorly.
But I'm a realist and a rationalist: The Last Chance for the Amiga was for a well-managed company to take it over. Escom bought it, and I suspect that even by that time, it
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I do think that if Commodore had used Concurrent for the OS of the Amiga things would have gone better.
Truth is a huge amount of it was just marketing. Commodore never got the press it deserved of the developer attention. One simple reason is that no PC magazine could risk giving good coverage to the Amiga.
Think about the Amiga compared to a PC of the time. Dos was single tasking, limited to 33MB hard drives and offered NO memory protection as well.
Graphics? You had to write code for every graphics card on
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Having worked both at Amiga and at ESCOM's Amiga Technologies spinoff, I do think that was the last real chance the Amiga had. They actually took their time to study the problem, enlisted me and Andy Finkel to run hardware and software development groups, respectively, and had the right idea about how many people and how much time this was going to take, the right place in the market for new Amigas, etc. No guarantees... as I said, it was a chance.
I don't think any effort to resurrect the Amiga beyond that
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Editor Link Failure (Score:5, Informative)
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Slashdot not in the list... (Score:4, Interesting)
... I'm actually surprised Perl isn't in the article.
Never met a Perl fanatic (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, I've met people who were enthusiastic about Perl, but just about all of 'em know There's More Than One Way To Do It applies to language choice, too.
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Yeah, I think TMTOWTDI might be a big part of the "problem" that prevents perl from becoming a cult. Another, which sorta surprised me when it started happening to me, is that there are a lot of companies that actually look for "perl" on resumes (and think it's a good thing ;-). When I first learned perl back in the early 90s, I never thought it would ever help me get a job; I just thought it looked like something practical. When people started using it and saying how useful it was, I was afraid for a wh
Perl & Prolog (Score:2)
But I do keep running into situations where I find myself muttering "This would be so much easier if I could just resolve a prolog expression
Perhaps AI::Prolog [cpan.org] or Language::Prolog [cpan.org] would be helpful. Or you could take advantage of some of Perl's dustier corners and write Prolog-like Perl [perlmonks.org].
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... I'm actually surprised Perl isn't in the article.
Especially since it has an official cult: The Perl Monks [perlmonks.org]
Haskell... (Score:3, Interesting)
I cordially loathe Perl. it is a grotesque collection of shell tools held together with gaffer tape. However, I must admit it is one of only two of the many languages I have used where I learned it from a book from scratch and did a useful medium-sized job in the same day. Most languages are good for something. I have even found a job that Prolog was absolutely perfect for (I have never found a second example, but every dog has its day). And yet...
Have you ever met Haskell programmers? I have met some re
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I'd imagine it was a job that required changing part of a prolog gui environment... right?
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+1 like
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pah, such blatant mistakes... (Score:2)
How many? (Score:2)
Are.
Four.
Cults.
obscure [youtube.com]?
No Apple? (Score:2)
What? a list of tech cults without apple at the top? Granted apple today isnt so much about tech as it is about shiney and 'it just works', but come on....
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The iPad was there, right - the older version called the Newton? I can remember tech friends heralding the Newton as the world-changing platform.
Sigh... (Score:2)
Enthusiasts are not Cult members. (Score:2)
People in real cults wear sneakers, chop their genitals off and commit suicide. People who like Newtons/Ruby on Rails/Linux/Macs/whatever to a level disparate with the rest of society are called enthusiasts.
Only 6? (Score:2)
Only 6? And why those 6? The ones they pick seem like a subset I might have picked in the early 2000s. I'd be surprised if there are more than, oh, 5 working Newtons out there, and Palm is pretty damn dead, still. Palm, if anything, should only make the list because of a lack of backward compatibility/application support elsewhere.
How about:
* Apple (wanton consumerism and bling?)
* Ubuntu (obviously they picked wisely on this one; there are quite a few people who cling to their Ubuntu as bad as the Apple peo
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I'd upgrade Ubuntu to "desktop Linux users in general". All the hallmarks of a cult are there, way more so than Apple for example.
Wrong on the facts (Score:2)
"From 1982 to 1994, the Commodore 64 was the most successful personal computer ever made"
The Commodore 64 was replaced by the backward compatible Commodore 128 in 1985. Production ceased on the latter in 1989. The Amiga and Atari ST "cults" were far stronger than any C-64 cult by then.
If we are going to include (nearly) dead cults, what about the ones for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit, TRS-80, TI 99, and so on?
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When the Commodore 64 came out, it wasn't cheap either. $595 was a lot of money in 1982.
I stand corrected on the production dates. In the US, at least, there wasn't much happening by the late 1980s. I worked at a video game company from 1987-1989 and C-64 games were on the way out.
The C-64 was a nice machine for its time, certainly cost effective in its later years. I just am dubious that it has a "cult" at this point that remotely compares to the Amiga one. Mostly because the C-64 is obsolete in every wa
Why Ubuntu (Score:3, Insightful)
Tech cult No. 1: The Way of the Palm (Score:3, Funny)
Damn, they just threw every male computer geek into a cult. I personally don't see a prob - oh wait. Palm, as in the company from the 90's.
*Ahem*
OS/2 Virtualizaed on Macs? (Score:2)
"Tech consultant Jamie Wells says a client he works for still uses OS/2 to run its homegrown ERP and CRM systems, only instead of PCs they run it virtualized on Mac Minis."
Please tell me you're joking. If I were brought in to work on a system like this, I'd run away screaming.
Most hypervisors have pretty shoddy OS/2 support. The latest versions of VMWare dropped it, I don't know if it works on Parallels. It does work on VirtualPC, but that's Windows only now, so no luck on the Mac-Mini....unless you're d
Hardware? (Score:2)
So what's this article doing under "hardware"? All of the so-called "cults" in both articles are centered around specific software. And scanning the discussion supports this, since "hardware" is a relatively rare string in the rapidly growing page.
Is there a clean way with the /. software to unobtrusively reclassify an article and its discussion? Though I suppose we don't have a "cult" classification. Maybe we should.
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Whatever he can best fit up his ass, I'm sure.
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This is a good question. I was a Gentoo user for years, contributed code, etc., but things got chaotic and stuff broke too much for it to be useful anymore. You hardly ever hear about it now. What happened to all the Gentoo users?
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What happened to all the Gentoo users?
They're at home, compiling their kernels!
(insert Danny Elfman's Batman theme here...)
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They must have gone somewhere, but I don't see Ubuntu. Ubuntu is all about the ease of use, and bringing Linux to the masses. Gentoo compiled every package from source as it installed them for Gods' sake. I thought about installing it once, then thought "You know the last time you had to recompile X11 from source, it took three hours. That was years ago, when it was much smaller, and that's just one package in Gentoo." Then I downloaded whatever Red Hat or Fedora was current at the time.