Slashdot Mirror
Should Hackers Get Their Own Logo?
Ridgelift writes "Eric S. Raymond is proposing a new logo for Hackerdom. 'The Linux folks have their penguin and the
BSDers their demon.
Perl's got a camel, FSF
fans have their gnu and OSI's
got an open-source
logo. What we haven't had, historically, is an emblem that
represents the entire hacker community of which all these
groups are parts. This is a proposal that we adopt one - the glider pattern from the Game of Life.'"
I figure a lot of people are going to say something along the lines of "to hell with this, we don't ALL need a logo", but IMHO it's just a cool little thing that could easily be embedded (or hidden) in things like logos or programs (being just a 9x9 matrix).
Though I think it would probably be best and easiest represented as pixels rather than circles on a grid.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
0) why the heck does a disparate group of computer enthusiasts (excuse me, hackers) need any logo
at all? so we can "recognize each other"? I don't get it. seems creepy.
1) it needs color
2) doesn't need the grid lines, looks too much like tic-tac-toe. keep just the
dots.
3) how can it not be copyrighted or trademarked? if it's really in the public
domain, how can ESR assert that hackers (excuse me, crackers) and
advertisers aren't supposed to use it?
4) does anybody really care what ESR thinks any more?
Seeing as how certain people within government would like us all branded, all this seems to acheive is to further that goal for them.
I personally think rule 30 would be a better logo, but may we should pick something from the Game of Real Life.
If your a hacker your probabally with a group or something that has a logo.
Also: If you tiled them (with no extra space, or even with a one-cell margin between, probably), they'd cease to glide. Which brings up a great, though CPU-draining, and possibly annoying, possibility: a huge life-game running as your wallpaper.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Isn't it good enough to be able to flaunt your support of something? Even if you're not particularly good enough at it to be considered a useful part?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I can't really dispute the validity of the glider logo since, even if I never really got into the whole Game Of Life thing (my personal early-hacker obsession was fractals) but I don't really like the logo itself.
I'd go with a design that replaces the circles-in-squares with rectangles, about twice as wide as high and with the "dead" sectors completely empty. Something like this.
For black-and-white media, the red squares become whatever the foreground colour is supposed to be and if there are lots of colours available, the brightness of each rectangle could be adjusted to indicate the "aliveness" of that rectangle during some stage of the glider's life cycle.
A white hat (for 'bad' cr^H^Hhackers)
The actual type of hat could be modified geographically. Americans get a stetson, the English a bowler, Canadians a deer hunter, with the flaps, Moroccans a fez, etc etc. Us Aussies will take either an Akubra or a beanie.
Another idea is just a big machete, or possibly an axe. ie: 'hacker' maybe put it in the hands of a maniac, like the guy from here
Yay me!
I orginally had designed some ASCII art for submission, but slashdot didn't think that was such a hot idea. Fair enough, I guess.
anata sekai o kakumei surush ga nai deshou? Anata no susumu michi wa yoi shite arimasu.
http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.htm l
The R-pentomino is the first pattern Conway found that defied his attempts to simulate by hand. In fact, the pattern eventually becomes "stable" or easy to predict, but this does not happen until 1103 steps have passed. Some of the earliest computer programs for Life were written to determine the fate of this small pattern. This was a challenging problem for many computers of that time, but a modern PC can run the complete sequence of steps many times in one second.
I love this.
Looking at that glider brought back so many memories. I remember reading about Life in Scientific American, many years ago-- I think 19 years. I remember typing in the text version on my Apple II, out of "Basic Computer Games" by Dave Ahl and Creative Computing, sometime in maybe 1983 or thereabouts, and being amazed.
I remembered a program I wrote in the mid 90s where you could evolve rulesets, and all the bright colors and optimism that went along with the "Long Boom." All that came out of hackerdom, you know.
I remembered my personal experience with Wolfram. (Overwhelmingly negative, by the way...)
I think this is an excellent idea, I think it's a simple and graphically effective logo, and I can see it catching on. For me this was an iconically powerful image. Surprising what memories it evoked, taken in the current context.
It's an icon of simplicity and stubborn singleminded progress.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
What is the emblem? A glider. Duh.
Why have an emblem at all? What Eric says about community is true, but hackers recogize each other by their hacks (and posers, by the lack of). Not as easy as a logo, but authenticity is guaranteed.
Why this emblem? A glider isn't appropriate. A glider is "startling and unexpected" for about ten seconds. But nothing new spontaneously emerges from a glider. It just monotonously churns along - no change in speed or direction - until it vanishes over the edge of the screen. Hell, why not use lemmings!? At least *sometimes* they don't jump.
"Social engineering?" "mugs or t-shirts?" 3.Profit! anyone? I don't need a logo - I'm not being marketing. I don't need a "resident historian" - I don't care who used to live here.
I'm not a hacker either because it's cool or I choose to call myself such. I am one because I am: I write software that "scratches an itch." Whether somebody else considers me a hacker or cool because of it is irrelevant. I couldn't care less.
Somebody who calls themselves a hacker because they think it's cool probably shouldn't be one.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
I put this icon together in some 20 minutes or so. How's it look to you?
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
Of course hackers are in need of a logo. We are a disparate group of loosely knit geeks who all have a common passion.
I believe also that any true hacker will readily admit ESR's contributions to our community, and possession of the title of "hacker" himself, perhaps I'd even go so far as to call him an "Alpha-hacker".
What's to prevent us from clinging to some logo that we can use to at least superficially identify other people as like-minded. If I'm sitting at a cyber-cafe and see a glider taped to some guy's laptop as he surfs some C, I'm going to recognize that I'm looking at someone who just might be a hacker. This is not a "status symbol" in the real world, in fact most people in the real world will never acknowledge ESR's hacker logo unless someone does something Really Big And Stupid while publically displaying it.
And why not the glider? We're hackers, we all know who JohnConway is, and what fun his Game of Life is. I'm willing to bet half of us have had an infatuation with it at some point or another, and half of that has even written their own little implementation of the thing.
If you don't like the logo, go for the spirit and choose a Up-Left glider, or a Cross (although that might be taken religiously), or you could be really cryptic and slap a 3rd-generation glider on the back of your T-Shirt (a 6th-generation "pump" looks pretty good too).
Sure there will be posers, but as they say, "You will know them by their works". If the code doesn't back up the glider, then just laugh and show them what real "elite" hacking looks like.
Just my 2 cents worth, I like ESR's logo, and will probably be putting a glider of some form on my website in the near future. Just to set myself apart that little bit more.
photoshop gives me a 2-color gif of only 45 bytes. and this one is 224 bytes inline:
Are we talking about the "peace sign"?
No, that's the CND logo (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)
The Anarchist logo os also held within a circle, but is an upper-case A with the horizontal bar extended on both sides to reach the circle. The ends of each diagonal leg, and the angle at the top of the A also reach the circle.
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
I agree. And the terminology has become messed up. Misbehaving, idiot script kiddies might call themselves 'crackers'. Crakers used to be people who factorize impossibly fat integers...
A mandelbrot is recursive, some people might even argue they are pretty ;-)
I think a lot of people here are overlooking the purposes of a hacker logo. Apparently a lot of those who posted didn't even bother to read ESR's 2 short pages about the emblem. Here are a few points on some of the goals:
All in all, I like the idea and the logo. I suggest to those who don't like it that they simply not use it and not make a fuss about it, so that they won't ruin it for the guys like ESR who are trying to accomplish some great (seemingly quixotic to many) goals for hackerdom.
Mi klopodas varbi por Esperanto.
I hate to say it.. but since the common public and the press continue to slaughter the term Hacker... Maybe its time to come up with a new terminology.... After all.. Listing Hacking as a hobby on a resume is not good these days... But its one thing that should be able to be listed with no negitive connotations.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
If mine is still a glider, I can say "that's just my style", the way that different programmers can code the same thing and have the source come out completely differently.
Impressive as it is, it requires a whole foundation (a simulator for Conway's Life), just like Linux needs the GNU tools to compile and to be useful. And, just like GNU/Linux, everyone will ignore or disregard ESR's contribution once it becomes popular.
If you put more than one glider, of different orientations, on the same Life domain, they will either interact to do amazing things, ignore each other, or anihilate each other - just like different hacker's code!
And, of course, different hackers will say "the default sucks", and change the orientation, make fancier gliders, etc., which will work for them but not for anyone else, bringing shouts of "diversity if good!" and "why can't everyone just work on the same logo!"
I think ESR might be on to something.
You fucking idiot. The historical revisionism of idiots like Eric Raymond and Steven Levy has you brainwashed. Do a little research yourself into the history of crackers and you'll see that calling script kiddies crackers is just as wrong as calling script kiddies hackers. In other words: Your ignorance is astounding and the hypocrisy of people who should know better, like Eric Raymond, makes me fucking sick...