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.'"

Comments

Interesting

[TheSpoom]

I like it.

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.

Re:Interesting

[Gonoff]

010 001 111

How about 217 then? Nice and easy to remember - like when I chmod something...

Rule 30

[sleepingsquirrel]

I personally think rule 30 would be a better logo, but may we should pick something from the Game of Real Life.

Re:how about a secret handshake instead?

[DeborahArielPickett]

1) it needs color

2) doesn't need the grid lines, looks too much like tic-tac-toe. keep just the dots.

You mean like this (from a 2001 conference)?

Some ideas just happen spontaneously, I suppose.

Depends how you look at it; also, tiling?

[Atario]

In many computer graphics systems, the X/Y coordinate system starts in the the upper left and goes up in the right and down directions. So, in a way, the glider would be going "up" both ways. ("Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we hold dear are only true from a certain point of view.")

Also:

It could be varied, combined with other emblems, or modified and infinitely repeated for use as a background.

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.

Identity

[Praeluceo]

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.