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Maybe someday phones will get so powerful that you just plug them into docking stations and they become your PC or console.

Hah! And maybe someday someone will create a C compiler that actually spawns nasal demons when invoking undefined behavior. I wouldn't hold my breath for either.

Because they are one of the only 3 decent gaming consoles (2 if you only care about HD)

There are three consoles and one device that is not a console but can be used like one: Wii, Xbox 360, PLAYSTATION 3, and Wintendo (a compact gaming PC running Windows Home Premium). Drop Sony and drop SDTV and you still have two different Microsoft choices.

And then they will cry piracy.

If people don't buy a Sony console, how can Sony claim mass copyright infringement of games that only run on a Sony console?

Where could Drupal patent the use of 'hooks' to let developers interact with the core of the application? (If they invented this, I am not really sure.)

No they did not. Hooks are ancient.

Despite your relatively low uid, you must be new to hacker slang.

from the Jargon File:

On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything ending in ‘x’ may form plurals in ‘-xen’ (see VAXen and boxen in the main text). Even words ending in phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated this way; e.g., ‘soxen’ for a bunch of socks. Other funny plurals are the Hebrew-style ‘frobbotzim’ for the plural of ‘frobbozz’ (see frobnitz) and ‘Unices’ and ‘Twenices’ (rather than ‘Unixes’ and ‘Twenexes’; see Unix, TWENEX in main text). But note that ‘Twenexen’ was never used, and ‘Unixen’ was seldom sighted in the wild until the year 2000, thirty years after it might logically have come into use; it has been suggested that this is because ‘-ix’ and ‘-ex’ are Latin singular endings that attract a Latinate plural.

Now get off my lawn.

[item]en has been around for quite a while, and has gained a certain amount of penetration. Just because you haven't heard of a term doesn't mean it's use (or inclusion in the English language) is incorrect.

No no no no, people are starting to realise that digital means you can't claim that sort of nonsense about cables anymore.
No, you have to blame everything on jitter nowadays! Yep, them cheapy cables means that certain electrons will actually travel at a different speed somehow (fat electrons getting stuck in the kinks?) so the clock signal and the data become desynchronised. And of course nobody has ever even heard of a phase-locked-loop.

Ladies and gentlemen, I remind you about how well-documented this sort of thing is: the wheel of reincarnation. Personally, I'm betting that hardware is now so disposable that we'll eventually get to having our machines in one hunk of silicon, and the wheel will stall.

Exactly. I'll bet it will be called a "Tablet".

Actually, I envision the day when all phones will have a compatible interface that will allow for keyboards, mice and monitors to be hooked up to them. You take your "phone" to work, plug it in, do work. Pull it out, browse the web on your way home and plug it into your dock at home where you play games or whatever it is you do with your current PC at home. You go and visit your buddy and want to show him some new whiz-bang-app you have, you plug your phone into his dock and use your pc/phone as you did at home and work.

When ARM processors become comparable to the current x86's we use in our PC's, the above scenario is not at all implausible. The Motorola Atrix is an example of this in action, but it is too slow and expensive to be practical. Once the ARM is fast enough and if phone manufacturers can agree on a dock standard and third parties get involved in making the docks, your phone will push your PC out of you home and office. And like you said, cell phone hardware is more or less disposable.

Ladies and gentlemen, I remind you about how well-documented this sort of thing is: the wheel of reincarnation. Personally, I'm betting that hardware is now so disposable that we'll eventually get to having our machines in one hunk of silicon, and the wheel will stall.

I think that's what the author is complaining about: everyone with any interest in foo calls themselves a foo geek

I pity the foo. Not the bar, though. BTW, it's a fine line between a foo geek and a faux geek. (OK, enough PUNishment.)

Too many people call themselves food geeks, when all they do is watch Hell's Kitchen regularly. They can't tell a paring knife from a filet knife, but they don't care about that distinction. I don't know Miss USA, but judging from past contestants, it's quite possible that she's overselling her geek credentials. Is it guaranteed? No - brains and beauty are not mutually exclusive, more like orthogonal to each other. But I think it's fair to say that judging from past contestants, her claim of being a huge history geek should at least be tested.

FWIW, self-identification of geekdom has long been held suspect by actual geeks. See also "wannabee" and "script kiddie", neither of which is typically a form of self-identification and both have been in use since at least the 1980s.

I think that's what the author is complaining about: everyone with any interest in foo calls themselves a foo geek

I pity the foo. Not the bar, though. BTW, it's a fine line between a foo geek and a faux geek. (OK, enough PUNishment.)

Too many people call themselves food geeks, when all they do is watch Hell's Kitchen regularly. They can't tell a paring knife from a filet knife, but they don't care about that distinction. I don't know Miss USA, but judging from past contestants, it's quite possible that she's overselling her geek credentials. Is it guaranteed? No - brains and beauty are not mutually exclusive, more like orthogonal to each other. But I think it's fair to say that judging from past contestants, her claim of being a huge history geek should at least be tested.

FWIW, self-identification of geekdom has long been held suspect by actual geeks. See also "wannabee" and "script kiddie", neither of which is typically a form of self-identification and both have been in use since at least the 1980s.

Yeah, Ruby is not what I would do either. Ruby is dying fast. While I'm not a huge Python fan, it's not a bad language. If you're on the UX side you should look at learning HTML5 and javascript libraries like jQuery and javascriptMVC.

Funny, after attending RailsConf last month, I'd say that reports of Ruby's demise are greatly exaggerated. In fact, if your perspective comes from a UX-oriented side of things, I couldn't imagine a better language/framework for you to get started with than Ruby/Rails.

It's only moving more in that direction. Rails 3.1 will include jQuery as the default JS library, supports CoffeeScript and Sass by default, and the new asset pipeline makes it easier than ever to build out your app with a backend REST API and do the heavy lifting on the client with MVC frameworks like Backbone.js

What you should learn first depends on your goals. Are you just curious about programming? Or do you really want to make a shift in your career path? If you work in a Ruby/Rails environment, and really want to get into the coding where you work, then that's the obvious choice. If you're completely new to coding, Ruby is also a marvelous first language to learn. I started with C and Perl, and I WISH Ruby had existed then.

If you just want to understand the dev side of things better, you could start by learning the basics of web development from something like Code School. Their Rails for Zombies course is a great place to start, and better yet, it's free. If you want to get your Ruby up to snuff, try Edge Case's Ruby Koans.

IMHO, much of the Ruby-hating is jealousy. If you're new to programming, you might be unfamiliar with holy wars. Coders develop religious issues over everything from languages, to tooling, to operating systems. You'll have to decide for yourself where you want to start. But Slashdot opinions are probably not the way to make that decision. My advice: Pragmatic Programmers has a very basic intro-to-Ruby book called Learn to Program. It might be too basic, it might not. But then you can check out Seven Languages in Seven Weeks and decide whether you prefer Ruby, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, etc.

I heartily encourage you to learn to code, whether you find it professionally or personally rewarding. Maybe you can contribute to some open source projects, even if you decide it's not right for your career. Either way, have fun with it.

In interest of full disclosure, I'm a committed Rubyist. We tend to be opinionated loudmouths. But also beware the Pythonistas. They tend to be disgruntled contrarian CS students.

They can't because it would break people's code

Then perhaps C++ and Java are overdue for a flag day. Visual Basic had one from VB6 to VB.NET, and Python more recently had one from Python 2 to Python 3.

Well, in fact Linus Torvalds was used as counter example to FSF in the "Cathedral and the Bazaar". Most open source projects prior to Linux was either horribly fragmented or horribly centralized by requiring copyright assignment to FSF or some other organization. In that way the manner in which Linus let others contribute to and influence Linux, he actually demonstrated another model of development (which inspired to the "Cathedral and Bazaar" text, read it if you haven't). People seem to think that Linus is a celebrity by choice - from what I have experienced, he is rather uninterested in those things. I think there is a big difference between idol worship and admiration/respect to/for someone who does something really well. Since Linus is not trying to sell us something like ideology (RMS) or shiny trinkets (Jobs), I tink he is worthy of some admiration. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

You probably meant Cracking not Hacking. See http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/cracker.html

What, no INTERCAL? It could have blown away the competition; it has "COME FROM"!

OK, I concede the fact that saying "spoon fed" may have been too strong a phrase. It was a poor choice of words that many people here took as a challenge, or proof that I was biased against higher education. Both are incorrect.

However, unlike many of the rebuttals I received after my post, I have some evidence to cite; namely the Hacker's Jargon file section on Education-

The self-taught hacker is often considered (at least by other hackers) to be better-motivated, and may be more respected, than his school-shaped counterpart.

This is located at http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/education.html and was created with the help of a survey that went out to Usenet way back in the day. Yes the data is old. Yes, the data and/or editor may be biased. But this jargon file was put together by many hackers and read by countless hackers in its many years of existence. And I said nothing about college not having any benefit; nor do I agree with you incorrectly attaching the "anti-intellectual geek" label to me. I love knowledge in nearly all its forms, and I only say 'nearly' because I don't really want to what my own feces tastes like.

OK, I concede that fact that saying "spoon fed" may have been too strong a phrase. It was a poor choice of words that many people here took as a challenge, or that I was biased against higher education. Both are incorrect.

However, unlike many of the rebuttals I received after my post, I have some evidence to cite- namely the Hacker's Jargon file section on Education-

The self-taught hacker is often considered (at least by other hackers) to be better-motivated, and may be more respected, than his school-shaped counterpart.

This is located at http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/education.html and was created with the help of a survey that went out to Usenet way back in the day. Yes the data is old. Yes, the data and/or editor may be biased. But this jargon file was put together by many hackers and read by countless hackers in its many years of existence. And I said nothing about college not having any benefit; we can all certainly agree it is easier to have a career with a degree than without.

You have to play out the DePew debacle of early 1993! This generation needs to see the replay of one of the worst software lasers of all time!

gorilla arm: n.
The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized - the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; "Remember the gorilla arm!" is shorthand for "How is this going to fly in real use?

Sure, versioning has been around forever. But autosave, and preserving system state through a restart? I've seen both done on a per-application basis, but not systemwide.

Then I guess you missed Lisa 7/7 (also the world's first integrated office application(s)). That lighted power switch on the front of the Lisa? If it was running the LisaOS (instead of MacOS), pressing that button performed a system save and shutdown, and pressing it again did a restart and reboot. This two-part video here and here shows just how advanced the Lisa was. In fact, that (and the hideous price) was (were) the two main reasons the Lisas became landfill, instead of a household name. And there's no denying that it paved the way for the desktop/windowing metaphor.

BTW, notice that even in the first incarnation of the Lisa OS, it allowed for heirachical folders. That feature didn't appear in Windows until Windows 95. Amazing.

Designed starting in 1978. Released in 1983. I think they won.

And before someone starts all that bullshit about "Apple stole Xerox PARC's work", let me say this: 1) Apple PAID Xerox for to use their work. And 2) Without the improvements (not the least of which was pulldown menus!) that some very talented engineers made, that preliminary GUI work would not have become really useable, let alone nearly ubiquitious.

Ah, good, I was wondering how long we'd have to wait on this article for one of the ever-shrinking, increasingly desperate brigade of people suffering from an N900 Persecution Complex to start evangelizing again.

Someone really needs to update that entry, the Amiga folks have actually quieted down in recent years, only to be replaced by N900 diehards.

Geeks say "Search for the answer first; ask if you need help finding it."

No, but according to ESR, station wagons and 747s do. Don't worry, young pedant; we all go through this phase.

Your point is well-constructed... but it also shows that you have a bias towards content over presentation.

The fact that it's all one long paragraph, is missing occasional letters, and may have small grammatical errors is absolutely irrelevant to the point that you are making. You used concrete examples and came to a logical conclusion.

But the rest of the world is biased toward presentation over content. It's sad, sure... but it's been that way since the Eternal September, and it's not going to change. In fact, the short-attention-span web is hurtling forward 140 characters at a time, thanks to look-a-birdy sites like Twitter and Facebook.

And in that web, you have to know what browser your visitor is using, so that you can give them the brain candy they want before they lose interest and look, a birdy.

What is the difference between a shill and a fanboi?

A shill is paid whether he likes the product or not, generally follows some sort of script and is usually an account manned by more than one person. It's really a coordinated attack on the truth. A fanboy genuinely likes the product and, though extreme, is actually representative of the true fan base. It's the difference between grass-roots and astroturf to use the terminology generally associated with the phenomenon.

Real fanboys don't bother me because it's all in good fun but shills are pure poison and the practical differences are significant as what happened on usenet during the OS/2 NT wars. Say a product comes out and there are 10,000 people roaming around on the internet that actually care about it and post to message boards with a 50/50 distribution of for/against. Then a "relationship management" firm gets in the game with multiple shill accounts on the most important sites, i.e., Engadget, Slashdot, Zdnet, etc. It's not that hard to turn the conversation on its head with a coordinated campaign on a few target sites with the right kind of money in a specific time frame. Those 5000 people out of our hypothetical 10,000 can easily be drowned out by a room full of Indians shilling full time for the company du jour. This happens all of the time and has been going on for a while.

It's nice that you tear apart his grammar, while at the same time screwing up your quote tags so as to make your post far less readable than his.

Screwing up a quote tag can happen by accident. talking like tis cuz u knwo its the inteweebz is not. Obviously one can make grammatical errors (specially when writing in haste), but you at least try to capitalize. It is the internet, thanks for pointing the obvious, a place where it has been typical to point people out about writing. And since we are in the interweebz, here is a link for you.

Under no circumstances I ever thought about ripping this guy's grammar out. I pointed something that I think can hinder him. It is you (for whatever reasons) that decide to interpret that as an act of ripping a new asshole.

Gosh you'd almost think no one is perfect. Also you have have several dangling participles. (Before anyone comments, yes, there probably will be grammatical errors in this post. That just reinforces my point. This is an Internet forum post, not a cover letter or engineering document).

Yes, it is the internet where it's has not been unheard of to call people on their writing style either.

Going on to the main topic: You know what? I'm good at what I do.

Good for you. How does my post applies to you? Do you fit in the category of people who "don't have anything to show" and that they need to because either they cannot code or are coming right out of school w/o an iota of experience? Because that's who my post was targeted at (in line with the topic of this thread). If this is not you, why are you replying back? Did it hid a hidden nerve or something?

I can say that as objectively as possible in a career field that lacks any real objective criteria for "good". I have a fairly senior level position, with a good company. They like me and my work well enough to offer a substantial raise to keep me when I got another offer. I get fairly regular contact from recruiters, and when I follow up I get interviews and even offers more often than I don't. I also really love my job. I love being able to play round on computers the likes of which would stagger most people to think about, and make them do things that people don't realize they can do.

You know what else? I do that eight or nine hours a day. Sometimes ten or twelve on a bad day. I do it everyday, even the days that I'm not really feeling it. That's way more time than I spend on any hobby, any other area of interest, my wife.. hell that's more time than I spend sleeping. I'm not doing it when I get home. Period. Not unless I get a wild hair up my ass and decide that something really needs to be done. If that makes me a bad engineer, a bad employee, well you better talk to my boss. He seems quite happy with my terrible work habits.

Again, good for you.

Would you take investment advice from someone who confuses "where" with "what"?

No, but I would take investment advice from someone who knows 1. investing and 2. asking and answering smart questions. Here, the replacement of "where" with "what" reframed the discussion from the step to the goal.

Would you take investment advice from someone who confuses "where" with "what"?

No, but I would take investment advice from someone who knows 1. investing and 2. asking and answering smart questions. Here, the replacement of "where" with "what" reframed the discussion from the step to the goal.

Just once is fine. It's a rhetorical device.

It's "cracker", not "hacker". Come on /. You should know better.

Deciphering some of these formats is, as I've said, non-trivial. Your "start building tools/filters" step is where I take fault, especially when some combinations of closed tools can produce files that aren't lossless, e.g. a Windows metafile of a graph embedded in a FileMaker Pro database. How do you get the data points back out of the graph?

It also doesn't stop the world from continuing to produce files in formats with non-open specifications, even if you've fixed the institutions that have hired you, because you're only treating the symptoms, not the root problem. It ultimately is in the best interest of vendors to be compatible and open, because it's far more convenient for users, and what they want. (And, many organizations and companies are already moving this way, so it's not like no one's ever thought about it.) Consider that this same situation has happened in a number of IT arenas: video encoding being a recent prominent example. When there are open alternatives close enough in quality to closed software—which use widely-supported formats—people tend to prefer them by default. There's no de facto closed standard here, unlike Microsoft Office documents, which is why we often shuffle DNA around in the very simple FASTA format (one line starting with a > for the title of the sequence, and then another line containing the nucleotides, which lacks many useful features.)

As to your other comment: most university IT departments aren't well-prepared for application-specific material. They do things like make sure everyone has a network connection, that the computer labs all work, that every department has its own web-accessible site (which most departments write and maintain themselves), that course scheduling proceeds as normal, etc. Professors are too self-important—and university IT staff are too content to focus on their own material—for their paths to ever cross. The computer situation in most labs I've been to resembles a home LAN, and is generally completely under the control of the lab staff. They wouldn't generally tolerate externally-managed machines, as the time to resolve complications would mean a significant hit to productivity.

To make your batch idea work, you'd have to do the conversions as part of a nightly backup process, requiring no intervention on the part of the user to produce the record. You then have to hope to the gods that you get informed whenever a professor adds a new obscure format to his or her roster, and then personally know enough field-specific information to interpret the format involved. This is a great way to ensure you remain employed forever, but it's not a solution to the problem. And you can bet that running overnight wouldn't be good enough for their every-day conversion needs—many labs are open 24/7 so that staff can get exclusive access to equipment, just like the hackers of the seventies staying up to wait for mainframe access. We need to have a file format flag day, but there's too much mass to do so efficiently.

obJargonRef: Big [Blue] Room

There's well-established connection between hackers and very hot foods, as documented in the Jargon File. See, for example, the entry on food and laser chicken. I know numerous nerds who are obsessed with the Scoville ratings of their condiments.

Also, as an AC noted, SCIENCE! But in this case, science that touches on a common nerd obsession.

There's well-established connection between hackers and very hot foods, as documented in the Jargon File. See, for example, the entry on food and laser chicken. I know numerous nerds who are obsessed with the Scoville ratings of their condiments.

Also, as an AC noted, SCIENCE! But in this case, science that touches on a common nerd obsession.

Old, actually.

Really old.

I think there's something else I'm supposed to say. About my lawn or something, but who can remember anymore?

The current vulgar definition of "hacker" is not what the original term meant back in the days. And it's also not Eric S. Raymond's definition either.

Most people miss the point that they're not comparing the church with the "hackers" that do DoS attachs on some major servers to prove a point, or those that crack into major databases to expose private intel.

See Eric's definition here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

"What Is a Hacker?

The Jargon File contains a bunch of definitions of the term "hacker", most having to do with technical adeptness and a delight in solving problems and overcoming limits. If you want to know how to become a hacker, though, only two are really relevant.

There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture originated the term "hacker". Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today. Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make the World Wide Web work. If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker.

The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them "hackers" too and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that originated the term "hacker".

There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren't. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people "crackers" and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word "hacker" to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.

The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.

If you want to be a hacker, keep reading. If you want to be a cracker, go read the alt.2600 newsgroup and get ready to do five to ten in the slammer after finding out you aren't as smart as you think you are. And that's all I'm going to say about crackers.
"

I smell Microsoft.

Go here to download the Android source code. Then read the license here:

The preferred license for the Android Open Source Project is the Apache Software License, 2.0 ("Apache 2.0"), and the majority of the Android software is licensed with Apache 2.0. While the project will strive to adhere to the preferred license, there may be exceptions which will be handled on a case-by-case basis. For example, the Linux kernel patches are under the GPLv2 license with system exceptions, which can be found on kernel.org.

As others have already suggested, the FSF friendly way to "gain control of and final say over customization" is through the trademark, not the software license. There is no evidence in this article that this is not the path Google is taking, yet we got a plethora of posts saying "On noes! Google has become evil!".

You know the funny thing? This is yet another example when Google does something very good (standing against software patents in this case) and then gets slamed with make-believe charges that they are doing something evil. It is clear, to me at least, that is is just another foray in Microsoft's attacks on Google because they know they can't complete technically. It's like this decade's version of what was reported in the Halloween documents

If people are coming into video game programming without a working knowledge of the data structures and algorithms taught in second-year undergraduate computer science curriculum, then I agree, that's another thing entirely. Perhaps they've been able to get away with lack of such knowledge so far after years of having done the simplest thing that could possibly work on toy data sets. But having to know data structures and algorithms isn't the same as having to know "roll in the mud" C++, especially when your deployment method (BlackBerry App World, Windows Phone Marketplace, or Xbox Live Indie Games) doesn't allow standard C++.

The "rotating ring" style throbber has been around for a bit in other GUIs and has come to replace the old hourglass animation.

I reluctantly agree that it's been a subtle replacement to XP wait. So subtle that I've been experiencing it for 3 years without realizing Vista did kill the hourglass completely. I'm sure all those claims that 'Seven is sooo fast' come from people who just skipped over Vista and had even less time to notice this small (and not the only) subliminal message that no hourglass on the same OS means you have a faster OS. Don't get me wrong, I do accept that some changes are nice, but I've tried all three OS's on this old dual-core laptop and Seven didn't seem faster than XP and Vista; just crisp and lean.

Someone'll need to check me on this, but I actually think the rotating ring came about before Windows started using it as their general "busy" indicator.

Well, I haven't found any article describing the history, but let me be the first. You are referring to an animation based off of the MacOS X "spinning gear". That image's waiting circular concentric circles was an evolution obviously made monocrome after the bad reception its "filled-in" predecesor, the MacOS inadvertently created with their creation of the rainbow ball of doom got. The Jargon file puts it that back to MacOS 10.2 days, it has darker origins. The ball had once been black and white, in the Hypercard or Applescript days and was a quarter divided ball. That goes back to the OS 7 days, prior to 1998.

Funny that MS adopted the new doughnut progress metaphor from Apple, since the latter made a slow evolution away from Windows' hourglass metaphor, from a black and white wristwatch to a pinwheels that ended back as a doughnut marker that MS stole.

Imminent death of the net predicted!

Worth noting: The fearmongering about the death of the 'net actually pre-dates the Internet. It originally referred to Usenet. The more things change...

If it was developed offshore it would be a Crock Store.

According to the Jargon file 37 is the most random number.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/R/random-numbers.html

Kenny

i use 4 web browsers

airplane rule: n.

"Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane."

By analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness. It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you've built a really good basket.

Jargon File

Ah. It's been a long time since I've thought about sacrifices to the line eater.

An old religion worshiping an unforgiving and primitive god.

I guess if your online writing style was incubated in the Usenet era, it might have enough quirks and idiosyncrasies to be identifiable.

Ah. It's been a long time since I've thought about sacrifices to the line eater.

An old religion worshiping an unforgiving and primitive god.

I guess if your online writing style was incubated in the Usenet era, it might have enough quirks and idiosyncrasies to be identifiable.

"No it doesn't: Your script is "locked" into transforming 127.0.0.1 to 0.0.0.0 only..."
So, yeah, just change 's/127\.0\.0\.1/0.0.0.0/' to 's/127\.0\.0\.1/0/' ZOMG! So locked!!!

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.html
-----
“And who better understands the Unix-nature?” Master Foo asked. “Is it he who writes the ten thousand lines, or he who, perceiving the emptiness of the task, gains merit by not coding?”
Upon hearing this, APK just went on another rant about how some of his malware got a 2-line mention in a magazine in 1997. He remained unenlightened.
-----

You fail it. It is programming.

No, the difference is that a CLI is nearly impossible to use if you aren't familiar with it

Have you ever used VMS? I used it once or twice to edit, compile and run a FORTRAN program in 1994. In c1999/2000 I was presented with a Micro VAX and asked "can you find out what the IP address of that system is?"

All I could remember was "DIR" and "HELP." After typing HELP and going through the topics presented, I found the command that gave me the IP address.

No GUI required, virtually no prior knowledge required.

If a CLI responds to obvious commands in the user's native language (like "help" for example) and if's done right, it shouldn't be that difficult.

Ridiculously untrue, particularly in the context of non-specialised, non-expert users.

I shall leave you to ponder the wisdom of Master Foo on this very subject.

courtesy of Appendix A of the Jargon File.

Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

I'll give you "Windoze", but you're really complaining about boxen?

As of when I post this, noone has mentioned http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html and I rather doubt the author at infoworld has ever read it.