Hackers Hall of Fame

Mass Media Idiocy strikes again by grub · 2004-02-10 03:22 · Score: 4, Insightful

They don't do the oft-maligned term "hacker" any justice by including convicted criminals in that list. They should have distinct lists, IE: a "Hackers Hall of Fame" and a "Crackers Hall of Shame" rather than lumping the two together. Mind you, these are the people that forgot the "L" in TLC stood for "Learning" and started filling the channel with home decorating shows.

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I dunno by fjordboy · 2004-02-10 03:22 · Score: 5, Insightful

I'm not so sure about the validity of the list. Wouldn't the best hackers be the ones that pulled off a great hack that went unnoticed and the hacker didn't get caught? Just a thought...

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Bjarne Stroustrup by savagedome · 2004-02-10 03:25 · Score: 4, Insightful

Shouldn't Bjarne Stroustrup be on the list next to Ritchie and Thomson?

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Re:Bjarne Stroustrup by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

No. OO had been done before. C had been done before. Bjarne just took an existing language and made it OO; hardly a groundbreaking premise.

Now, if you thought the guys who developed Smalltalk should be on the list you might be closer to the mark.

I'd nominate Doug Engelbert perhaps, but then he was doing more human interaction and psycology work than he was hacking..

But isn't language defined by usage? by HarveyBirdman · 2004-02-10 03:29 · Score: 5, Insightful

If 99% of the world uses "hacker" in a negative context, I think the real hackers had better find a new term, because language is driven by those that use it. I feel your pain, but I think it's a losing battle. There's many cases of word meaning evolving from one thing to another.

And one minor admonishment: just because home improvement isn't something that interests you does not mean it isn't learning. I got into home inprovement projects a couple years ago, and have learned a lot from those shows. Built my own deck and redid a bathroom all by my lonesome, and the results are beautiful. Even just home decorating is a pretty dense topic, with centuries of data and styles to consider.

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Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po by Aneurysm · 2004-02-10 03:34 · Score: 5, Insightful

This is very true, but would you consider Bill Gates more of a hacker or more of a businessman? I agree that Bill Gates has changed the face of modern computing an awful lot, but as a businessman than as any form of system hacker

Good publicity / Bad publicity by dkleinsc · 2004-02-10 03:34 · Score: 5, Insightful

I don't think people like Richard Stallman, Ken Thompson, and Eric Raymond want to be put in the same category as Kevin Mitnick and Cap'n Crunch. Lumping them together seems to me like an opportunity for Darl McBride to go "Look! All the Linux people are really crooked hackers!"

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Re:Good publicity / Bad publicity by hetairoi · 2004-02-10 04:24 · Score: 4, Insightful

while I'm sure most /. folk can make the distinction between bad guy/good guy/grey guy hackers I did find it disturbing that Woz is listed right after Vladimir Levin.

Many hackers, including Woz, have delved into the dark side, if just to gain more understanding of it. But because of poor laws and public perception many good computer professionals get lumped in with criminals. Look at it this way, could Dennis Ritchie break into your computer and steal your credit card information? The answer is yes, he's a smart guy and if he put his mind to it he could likely figure out a way to do it. Most people would freak out and say he is an 'evul hacker' but just because someone has knowledge of how something works doesn't mean they will use it for criminal purposes. Would Dennis Ritchie actually do that? Certainly not, but not because he lacks the knowledge.

To many people computer professionals are wizards. Casting archaic spells that create something from nothing on the screen in front of them. They don't understand it and they fear it. Just like in my last job as a network admin, the owner of the company found out I had access to all the accounting info. He wanted to limit my access to it and I had to explain to him the power I held over his network. I don't think it was comforting to him, but he did finally realize I had access to everything and why I had that access.

So yeah, putting Stallman, Thompson, Ritchie and other non-lawbreaking profressionals into a list with with criminals and publicity seekers like Mitnick and Levin doesn't help the public image of computer folk in general. But it's hardly a fine line of good or bad. I do wonder though, if it were the 'Engineers Hall of Fame' would Said Bahaji be on the list?

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Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po by inode_buddha · 2004-02-10 03:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

I agree with the parent post about Bill bringing computing to the masses even though my earliest computing experiences have nothing to do with wintel or even PCs for that matter. IMHO BillG's single greatest hack isn't technological; it's social/business.

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Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po by imr · 2004-02-10 03:42 · Score: 4, Insightful

The most famous hacker in their original team was probably Paul Allen.

Hacker vs. Cracker by JohnGrahamCumming · 2004-02-10 03:53 · Score: 4, Insightful

When is this stupid argument going to die? It's now totally pointless to try to force the definition of hacker to be someone who writes code and cracker to be what the mass media calls a hacker. Languages are living things and just because Eric Raymond would like to define hacker as it was at one point in time is irrelevant to current usage. Even conferences like H2K are more about hacking in the cracking sense than hacking.

This is similar to trying to argue that the word gay is not associated with homosexual men now; it's time to get over the old definitions of words (particularly slang words) and move on.

Otherwise we'd all be walking around using the word ace to describe things that are currently considered phat.

John.

Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po by Aardpig · 2004-02-10 03:58 · Score: 4, Insightful

Now, be honest. How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1?

Probably less than you might think. While our parents were doing boring crap such as wordprocessing on their drab IBM PC, we were hacking away on our Sinclairs, Commodores, Ataris, Amigas, Dragons, Tandys, Amstrads, Acorns, etc. Those were what the young computer geeks were using in the 1980s.

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Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po by Tarwn · 2004-02-10 04:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

Got my vote. Then again I don't really follow what they're listing.

I mean if we were listing hackers, there's a bunch of names that don't belong on there. If we were listing crackers, well, then the page has the wrong name (and has for some time).

And for those of you that think the fact that Gates is a business man now, and that MSN should disqualify him, I have only this to say:
Should we now start removing people from places like the baseball hall of fame after they retire?

The fact is that they did something at some point to be honored in the hall of fame, it doesn't matter if they proceeded to never get on base again in the rest of their career.

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Re:Stealing the Mona Lisa... by fruey · 2004-02-10 04:02 · Score: 4, Insightful

Bill Gates has done more to retard the computer industry than any man alive !

You are so wrong about that. What Bill Gates (or at least Microsoft) did was to give computing to the masses. The PC revolution was completely Microsoft driven. They made stuff simple. They took away all the beauty of a real computer system, but they made it dead easy. They gave us:

CTRL-ALT-DEL... Abort, Retry or Fail?... OK, Cancel... Press any key to reboot...

That's all rubbish compared to proper error messages, but the upshot is that your Grandma can use a computer because Microsoft dumbed it all down enough and made it easy to work with PCs.

Sure, they gained a monopoly too, and such a position of power as to exclude others... but their time will come, and their contribution will rise from the ashes as being a real, tangible one. Even if it was copied from elsewhere! It certainly didn't "retard" anything. Dubious business practices maybe, but you don't get to the top without stepping on a few people.

Disclaimer: I prefer to run Linux, but I'm interested enough to work it all out, and fascinated by the intricacies. But it's not ready for your Grandmother yet.

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Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po by leomekenkamp · 2004-02-10 04:03 · Score: 4, Insightful

I'm a little annoyed with people saying things like: "Well, since person A was the first to do X, we would not be doing X right now, if it wasn't for A.".

Without the Wright brothers, we still would have aeroplanes today. If Pythagoras died in infancy, someone else would have come up with A^2 + B^2 = C^2. If Bill Gates' mother did not have ties with IBM, someone else would have headed the company that provided IBM with an 'OS' for its PC.

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Nomination by PMuse · 2004-02-10 04:04 · Score: 4, Insightful

I hereby nominate this site for the Most Annoying Interface of All Time Hall of Fame. Do I hear a second?

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WRONG! think for yourself (was Re:Al Gore!) by spoonyfork · 2004-02-10 04:48 · Score: 4, Insightful

Why isn't the inventor of the internet, Al Gore, on the list?

OMFG, I'm sofaking sick of this stupid joke. First of all, it isn't even true. Secondly, anyone that keeps repeating it sounds like a moron. MORON.

I'd use mod points to bring the parent post down but no doubt some meta-moderator will be cluesless and mark my moderation as 'Unfair'. Oh, the irony.

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Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po by segmond · 2004-02-10 05:03 · Score: 4, Insightful

He was once a hacker, read "Hackers" by Steve Levy.

They wrote it without having a machine, they had instruction set for the 8080 chip, and a Popular eletronics schematics, they had to make it fit in 4k of memory, and they had to make it less since the memory needed space to hold programs/data.

page 221. "but Gates in particular was a master at bumming code, and with a lot of squeezing and some innovative use of the elaborate 8080 instruct set, they thought they'd done it"

Gates speaking, "We rewrote the assembler, we rewrote the loader ... we put together a software library"

so, in his early days, he was a hacker, more so than many slashdot people are in respect to things today.

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Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po by Endive4Ever · 2004-02-10 05:25 · Score: 5, Insightful

by his early concern for copyrights when others were sharing everything,

Actually, the 'others' who where 'sharing everything' were not the copyright holders. The user community of the time was widely sharing things that weren't theirs to share. Bill spoke up, but his company wasn't the only victim of said 'hackers.' There was plenty of other commercial software being spread around without paying for it.

And the 'hacker culture' comes from a different social set than the early 'home computer' enthusiasts anyway. The 'hacker culture' comes from the computer labs of Universities. The 'homebrew computer' culture was a seperate social set entirely.

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