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The Biggest Cults In Tech
bobby f. writes "Infoworld has published its list of the biggest cults in tech — including Palmists, Newtonians, Commodorians, the Brotherhood of the Ruby, IBM power systems fanboys, Ubuntu-ists, and Lispers. A pretty fun read (unless you really are a cult member)." Although I think it's pretty clear that the Apple camp isn't an opinionated cult, they're just always right. Fire away.
http://www.infoworld.com/print/73433
I'm not so sure, from what I can tell Perl is just a really good community, they know their limitations.
Name: The Cult of Apple, Orthodox
Gathering of the Tribes: None since the diaspora
Major Deity: Steve Wozniak
Antichrist: Steve Jobs
Sacred Relics: The original Apple I, green screen monitors, the Disc II
Mantra: Apple II Forever
Not all X users are X fanbois. I have a ubuntu using friend who hates it. He switched away from windows awhile back. Why does he stick with ubuntu? It sucks less, in his estimation. And it makes more intuitive sense (He's a chemist without much computer knowledge, but still technically-minded.)
I love linux and think it will solve all the world's problems from swine flu to windows vista. I am a fanboi.
But very few windows users are fanbois. Only a few actually like windows. OS X, nearly all its users seem to be drooling fanbois, but as you say this seems to be changing, and this may just be the set I know.
Linux is somewhere in between I find, but I'm at a tech school, and around here linux outnumbers windows anyway with os x being a clear leader.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
The language with a "bless" command -- definitely one for cults!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The consistency and attention to detail in the UI, and the great applications.
Some of this consistency was due to Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, which specified minute details like how many pixels there should be between a button and the edge of a dialog box, as well as more generally what to think about when choosing labels for the buttons, and when it's appropriate to use modal or modeless dialogs.
Some of it was because Steve Jobs oversaw much of the design of the Mac OS personally, and if he wasn't happy with it he would throw things at people until they got it right.
When Windows 3.1 was limited to eight character filenames with only a few non-alphanumeric characters allowed, Macs allowed 31 characters, were case-preserving (but not case-sensitive) and could contain almost any character except a colon. You could have different files of the same type (e.g. a JPEG picture) that would open in different applications (e.g. one would open in GraphicConverter while another would open in Photoshop) depending on which application created the file. You could organize your files by physical layout, grouping a few files together on the left side of a window and others on the right, then use labels to make some files red and others blue.
And then there were the applications. BBEdit and GraphicConverter come to mind as great apps that are still actively developed. Apps like Photoshop and Excel were Mac-first. I've forgotten most of the apps that we used back then, but there was a very active Mac shareware community.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Established: 1983
Gathering of the tribes: Brainshare
Major deity: Ray Noorda
Minor deities: Drew Major, Dale Neibaur, Kyle Powell, Mark Hurst
The Antichrist: Bill Gates
Tool of the downfall: TCP/IP? What's that?
Holy Relics: IPX/SPX
Most arcane incantation: dsrepair
Just saying, it should have been on the list at least.
def fib(n):
if n == 0 or n == 1:
return n
else:
return fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)
for i in range(36):
print "n=%d => %d" % (i, fib(i))
real 0m20.272s
user 0m20.225s
sys 0m0.024s
#include <stdio.h>
int fib (int n)
{
if (n == 1 || n == 0) return n;
else return (fib (n - 1) + fib (n - 2));
}
int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
register int i = 0;
for (i; i < 35; i++)
{
printf("n=%i %i\n", i, fib(i));
}
}
real 0m0.476s
user 0m0.472s
sys 0m0.004s
No OS/2 shows an obvious lack of knowing the history of computer software and operating systems.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Pretty much anyone I've met doing OOP knows that it's about using the right tool for the job. The ones that don't know that would be twits in any programming style, they just happened to learn OOP first. The times where it's used for something where another language would be better, it's usually work inertia - not having to change the IDE and mentally switch syntax - or to keep a homogenous code base.
Of the mindsets I've met in the work place, I would argue that Extreme Programming and its children are much more of a cult. They're almost exclusively of the One True Way mindset.
Yeah, but try running fib(100) and your answers are still wrong. Lisp gets the right answer. And does it quickly because you can compile it, too.
That is all.
Name: Commodore Amiga OS
You mean Commodore Amiga as whole.
During the second half of 1990s, after the original chipset started to show its age, a faction appeared insisting that the true value was the OS itself.
The OS was great (the kernel, datatypes, installable filesystems, the modularized structure etc), but I think what made the machine mythical was the whole stuff. It was an overload of perfection.
Major Deity: Jay Butterfield
I guess you mean Jay Miner.
Believed Antichrist: Commodore management True Antichrist: Wintel empire
I think it was the opposite. Amigans loathed x86 and DOS/Windows (it was indeed crap), but what really killed the platform was those Commodore management dumbasses.
It's a long history but basically they wasted lots of money in bad or plain stupid products (PC clones, x86-compatibility boards, A600...) and let the platform development stagnate (the stillborn AAA chipset, the switch from 68k processors to PA-RISC the engineers were considering etc).
Major religious rituals: Multitasking 100 programs at once,(...)
I personally liked to emulate a 68k Mac (actually it was more like a virtualization), then inside that emulate a x86, then inside that a DOS ZX-Spectrum emulator playing a game.
In parallel, a number of programs (like www browser, IRC client etc), as usual.
Sounds like no big deal nowadays, but back then it was different.
Mac OS was a joke (it lacked preemptive multitasking for years, programs used static memory alocation, it crashed if you coughed nearby etc), no comments on Windows 3.x, Windows 95 was not immediately viable. OS/2 worked well, but it was heavy and lacked apps (then it died).
I wonder how this got modded up, as it's demonstrably false. There are no secret books of the Bible, or secret doctrines relating to the Catholic faith. There are, however, many writings throughout the centuries that the Catholic Church has deemed heretical and censored. Big difference between the two. Anyone caught practicing or even reading of those heretical beliefs that were censored in the Church's heyday would have been burned at the stake or worse. Everything, however, relating to orthodox Catholic doctrine has always been openly and freely exchanged to anyone who wanted to practice the religion at least ever since the Roman persecutions ended in 311 AD. There is nothing of the hierarchical initiations you see in Freemasonry or Scientology for instance, where secret mysteries are revealed as you ascend.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
You appear to presume that it was practiced in latin because it was desired to keep it secret. If this were the case, it would likely have been practiced in a language of the church's own invention rather than one that was, at the time the r/c church appears to have originated, a still living language. Indeed, its use was maintained for as long as it was not because of any particular desire for secrecy, but because they placed importance on the precise manner in which they traditionally practiced their rituals since the time that they started. I won't deny that it created quite distinct feelings of distancing people from the contents of the roman catholic faith, however. But, this can easily be seen as a side effect of their values, rather than deliberate intent except insomuch as one wants to read deliberate intent into their reluctance to change how they practiced their rituals, which I had already said, they had placed a high level of importance on.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'