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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.
It's been a very long time since I met a Newton or Palm cult member! Time to update the list.
Allow me to change the definition of "cult" slightly to "whatever belief your smart friends want you to give up". Then cult #1 is:
Name: Windows
Established: 1995
Gathering of the Tribe: InfoWorld and other magazines that pretend that everything except Windows is a "cult"
Major Deity: Bill Gates
Sacred Relic: 30-letter authorization keys
The Antichrist: Linus Torvalds
I belong to the Cult of Single Page Views, not 8-page clickfests.
Not so much fun, actually.
Strange to have 'cults in tech' and no mention of gamers, console vs pc, mmorpgers in WoW etc.
If anything was a cult it would be WoW and Evercrack.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -- Leo Tolstoy
Why did they list the same group twice?
especially if we're mentioning Ubuntu. Seems like windows is missing too.
A fanboi is a fanboi, even if their product actually is better.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Strangely enough the article read much the same.
http://www.infoworld.com/print/73433
very big mistake - the author forgot to mention slashdotters
I think this line is especially fitting: "The Commodore 8-bit crowd is the computer world's analogy to old-time Volkswagen bug fanciers in the car world..." Just because a technology or a product is outdated, it doesn't mean that people won't fancy it for one reason or another. A Commodore certainly isn't the most powerful computer out there anymore, but people probably still like it for the same reason they like the old-time Volkswagen beetles - it reminds them of their youth, a time when things were better than they are now, or perhaps they just haven't bothered to move on and see new things the world can offer.
What about Perl? Seems a lot more cultish (in a good way) to me than Ubuntu or RoR.
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
..are more like Scientologists than an cult....
In an earlier stage of life I worked at RadioShack, when they actually sold electronics and radio equipment. One of my co-workers was a ham radio enthusiast and would spend hours talking about the rise of the Amiga and how it would come back. It was always just a few months away from releasing a new OS or platform. I would wager if I went back to that store... Or perhaps the store that replaced it, since RadioShack is just a shell of its former self he would still extoll the virtues of Amiga and it's imminent resurgence. Then he'd mutter about how Gateway killed it because the technology was too advanced for the average PC user to accept.
We friars of Forth our outraged at your constant disre...Hey, I'm talking here. Hey, pay attention, I'm talking here! Hrmph, Forth gets no respect. No respect at all.
Demented But Determined.
Anyone who's ever worked in an org w/ full-time Oracle DBAs can attest to how fanatical they are in allegiance to Oracle, even to the point of ruin.
And it's funny, too, because you think they're interested in databases, relational concepts, data integrity, and all of this in general, but they're not, they interested in Oracle products, period. They'd quit before they managed a SQL Server or PostgreSQL database for you.
Cultists.
Off the top of my head I can think of quite a few groups that have a similar strong following including:
Slashdotters
social networking site addicts
vim/emacs wars
*nix in addition to Linux
FOSS
net neutrality
Wii
Xbox
KDE/gnome
Firefox
Halo
the chans
etc...
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I stopped reading after this.
Amen! My first machine was a Performa 400. While I'm sure there's plenty of people here with older macs than that, I think that puts me firmly in the "old skool" category.
Though I suppose mentioning Guy Steele would have confused the Johnny-come-lately Java people.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Name: IBM
Established: 1896
Gathering of the Tribe: Share, Common
Major Deity: Herman Hollerith
Major Prophet: Tom Watson, Sr.
Sacred Relic: 80-column card
The Antichrist: Bill Gates
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
Yes, and all of you who loved macs in the mid the late 90's were flat out insane. The hardware stunk. The software stunk. And you had to pay a premium for all of that crap. Its okay to like apple now, because their products no longer suck. Hell, they even work with two button mice. I complained about every thing that was mac, but now I use one. Because everything I complained about (mutlitasking, memory protection, ppc cpu, one button mice, lack of software, lack of programing languages) they fixed. Though the filesystem is showing its age. I hope they make a full transition to ZFS soon, or I'll have to start bashing them again.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
And 1 kill-ring to rule them all!
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
C'mon, the Commodore 8-bit machines had some enthusiasts but are nowhere nearly the in same league of cultism as the Amiga. And I should know, as an ex-Amiga cultist. That was a beautiful platform, and it was really hard to work with one and not get your mind warped with the belief that it could come back and start kicking asses. C64/C128 so-called "cultists" might get a little excited about some anachronistic development, decades after the platforms' prime, but I don't remember any religious fervor that the C64 was going to put Microsoft in its grave. For that you need an Amiga believer.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
They mention the Commodore fans, but not the Amiga fans. Newton Fans, but not the Apple Fanbois. That'd be like listing the World's religions and failing to mention Catholicism and Mormons.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
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
"Quantity has a quality all its own." -- Joseph Stalin
Size matters. Within the topic of mysticism, when you get to the mainstream stuff like Christianity/Judaism/Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, they're not cults, regardless of any of the beliefs within them. Likewise, neither is Windows, for the same exact reason. You have to be a persecuted minority to be a cult. Being crazy isn't enough; if you have enough votes, insanity is irrelevant.
Apple is approaching loss of its culty flavor as well. Sure, they're still minority, but they're a big rich one, and certainly not persecuted (except maybe the gamers).
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
No, no, no. If you didn't have a beige box, you're a poser.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Brief description of matlabite's commitments:
-Everything is a matrix of complex numbers
-World's complete mathematical knowledge is contained in matlab's help file
-If matlab cannot handle it, it's impossible to do
-There is no need to study numerical methods, it's enough to know matlab functions
-Everything, including databases should be managed through matlab, use of any other software is blasphemy
-Any IDE should be developed in Matlab so the infidels cannot access it
Apple was hands down the king from 1984 until Windows 95 came out. Like it or not, that changed everything. The OSes have been running neck and neck ever since.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
It's pretty clear as evidenced by Twitter, and some other major RoR disasters, that RoR is currently incapable of scaling to ginormous proportions. Your better off using Stackless Python, Java, or even plain old Perl for enterprise apps.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
InfoWorld readers.
1. Early Newton owner :-)
2. long time Lisp developer (and I wrote 2 Spring-Verlag Lisp books, back in ancient history)
3. right now, Ruby is my favorite language
4. I am typing this on Ubuntu (installed on my MacBook)
100 comments and no mention of Linux as a cult, the big elephant in the room. Yes, it's a cult.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Those guys seem to think everything should be coded in C, even if it takes 10 times longer than coding it in another language, and results in a program filled with memory leaks.
C is great, but lets be honest - at least 80% of C programmers shouldn't be programming, let alone programming in a low level language!
I've seen more horribly malformed C than VB!
I am a high priest in the cult of BeOS, and I am frankly incensed that fine operating system was not included in the list.
I strongly suspect that Microsoft strong-armed the authors of the article to keep BeOS off the list, in order to maintain their monopoly.
Thank you.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Object-oriented programming. And yes, I expected to get done for heresy.
Brett
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.
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
are freaked out by amigans. "THOSE PEOPLE are craaaaaaaazy"
i wrote hypertalk on my mac plus. stfu n00b.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
> Apple was hands down the king from 1984 until Windows 95 came out.
(coughing violently, gasping for breath)
(wipes soda from keyboard and panel)
No. It wasn't. The Amiga was.
Even the lowliest Amiga 500 with 512k and a floppy spanked Apple's (not even GRAYSCALE) faux Etch-a-Sketch(tm) excuse for a real computer -- and its punishingly slow & brutally expensive (yet mentally-stunted) color NuBus sibling -- like unloved children with meth-addicted parents in an Appalachian trailer park.
Well, OK... It DID have ONE compelling app worthy of running on a cracked copy of A-Max... MacPlaymate. At least, until Bedroom Olympics and sliced-HAM Pr0n arrived :-D
How many people actually read Doonesbury when the Newton was introduced? I don't think I've ever bothered to read an entire strip, and it's not like people stand around the "water cooler" talking about it (like, say Dilbert or Peanuts in their heyday). Yet every story I've ever read about the demise of the Newton references the Doonesbury strip series. If they're going to point out a cartoon, maybe they should reference the Simpsons "eat up Martha" reference. At least people other than tech writers would know what they are talking about.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
The cult of Pragmatism:
Name: Pragmatics
Established: Time Immemorial
Gathering of the Tribe: Anyplace shit has to work.
Major Deity: It Works
Sacred Relic: It Works
The Antichrist: Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work.
"Being crazy isn't enough; if you have enough votes, insanity is irrelevant."
True, but externalities have a way of really limiting such a parade of craziness. It could be a natural disaster, belief-caused famine, or an invasion of enemies - but eventually any insanity will be limited in scope.
I couldn't agree more about Apple in the mid to late nineties. I helped both my brother and my father migrate to back to PCs. Then in the last couple of years, I helped them migrate back to Macs, now that they no longer suck, and I bought one for my GF, too.
The one button mouse is pretty close to the top of my ridicule list, but I have no real grudge against Apple when the products don't suck.
Mark of the beast: that one Photoshop benchmark where PowerPC trounced x86.
Fortunately the pragmatist crowd, Gandalf performed an exorcism on Steve Jobs.
Name: GNU Emacs
Established: 1983
Gathering of the Tribes: http://www.gnu.org
Major Deity: Richard M. Stallman
Sacred Relic: GNU Emacs Manual
Antichrists: Bill Joy, Bill Gates
So many words to convince the Mac guy on the Amiga superior capabilities.
You could just say that a lowly A500, 68000 7 MHz, when emulating a Mac with A-Max, scored 1.7 times (I saw that in front of me) the speed of the reference 68000 8 MHz Mac in a Mac benchmark tool.
I think it was meant as a gay joke.
Standing in awe at the historical wonder that is the Amiga, OS and hardware, is a natural human reaction, and therefore not the sign of belonging to any cult. The emotions that I've felt considering the Amiga are not unlike those I've experienced standing at the foot of the temple of Jupiter at Baalbek, or what I'd imagine would be the sensation of laying one's mortal eyes on the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Actually, come to think of it, the Amiga was more Golden Pavilion than Baalbek: harmonious; perfect even in its flaws. So perfect, it should not exist on this flawed earth. A crazed monk burned the Temple of the Golden Pavilion -- that's cultism. There are folks who believe the AmigaOS will rise again to rule us all -- that's cultism. But admiring the sheer perfection of the Amiga as a computer system of its generation, and marveling at its unparalleled run as the most elegant and best-performing PC on the market? That's just appreciating historical reality.
Well, the difference is that the newbs now have a good reason to like Macs.
This is from someone who had a powerbook 170, and only recently got back onto the Mac bandwagon.
Are there still people denying quantum mechanics?
Oh wait, it's about the kind of Apple that doesn't fall from trees.
**TODO** [X] Steal someone elses sig.
You forget the biggest cult of them all, the illuminati of the interwebs,
the bridge the trolls long to dwell under,
Name: Slashdot
Established: 1997
Gathering of the Tribe: slashdot.org
Major Deity: CowboyNeal
Major Prophet: CmdrTaco
Sacred Relic: 4digit Slashdot ID
The Antichrist: (Legion) Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Church of Scientology
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
on mouseUp
if word 3 of the last line of paragraph 1 of card field "foo" is "bar" then
answer "Foobar?" with "Cancel" or "Ok"
if It is "Ok" then put "foo" into word 3 of the last line of paragraph 1 of card field "foo"
else
answer "No foobar." with "Cancel"
end if
end mouseUp
Something like that look about right?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
sounds about right. (it's been fifteen years, but applescript's not that different.)
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Jobs, Gates, Jack Thompson. Oh... it said cults.
I would think that the cult of free software would have as its sacred document the definition of free software, not its implementation.
Similarly, its antistallman (right?) would be non-free software, not non-gpl software.
The antiperens of Debian would be the iPhone: functional and with lots of bling, but it locks you down and restricts your freedom to control your device(s). (Other Apple products may be a good antiperens candidate.)
The Biggest Cults In Tech
I stopped reading after this.
Well, for the sake of historical honesty and integrity, I remember that there *was* one computer that got the grudging respect of Amiga owners: the color NeXT cube. Especially WordPerfect for NeXT. I had a friend at UM (you'd never guess it from my name *grin*) who owned one (he also had a complete harem of Amigas, including a Toaster-equipped 2500 w/'040 card and a base A500 he used as his videogame console). He had a major love-hate relationship with it... WP for NeXT was the best word processor available at the time, bar none... but god, that computer was slow. Sinfully slow. (Yes, I know NeXT ultimately evolved into the core of OSX).
It's just a shame Jay Miner wasn't able to talk Amiga's original backers & Commodore into letting him go just a *tiny* bit farther with the original chipset and give it 320x240x256, non-interlaced 640x480x16, and 512k onboard (with another 512k of chip ram in the A1000's expander) from the start. At the very least, that tiny extra bit would have given the Amiga another year or two of life, and spared me the two years of tribulation I endured with OS/2 before Win95's arrival at World Wide Live in May '94.
I'm also mystified as to why consoles were left out. When I was at school it was a clear cut Sega Megadrive vs. Super Nintendo cult war.
I suppose it was appropriate that they didn't include Emacs in the list of cults, since it actually has its own church.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
I agree, I hated the "old" Macs. I find it amusing that after years of arguing with Mac users about it, Apple themselves ditched the OS.
The irritating thing is that the greater success of OS X is sometimes used to allude that Macs were great all along (such as the people in this thread telling us how long they've been using their "Macs"). They've now changed the OS, the hardware, everything about it - claiming it's the same platform is just like Trigger's broom... If there's a "cult", it's more over the trademark name, than anything tangible. I might as well put a sticky label on my dual core multitasking PC and call it an Amiga.
While this might go against the Church of the Anti-Religion (Gathering of the Tribe: here), maybe the fact that those of you who admit partisanship in yourself or among those who use the same technologies you do, could concede that systems of morality--including those which justify themselves on supernatural inspiration and use that to enhance its effect (indisputably quite frequently for good), while admittedly broader in scope (and power) than technology fan-clubs, are not themselves inherently to blame for fanatics and fundamentalists any more than Linux or the like is inherently to blame for the type of dude who kicked me out of a chat room for the FUD blasphemy of joking to the effect that if I couldn't get help from them testing a potentially useful open source Firefox extension on Linux that Linux users might otherwise cede territory to the "Dark Side".
It shouldn't be such a marvel to people who recognize that our ubiquitous use of a brain--however much you may joke that religionists do not have any (isn't treating and taunting others as a whole a sign of fervid attachment and insecurity, btw?; most cults don't even go that far)--in filtering reality, with its propensity for emotional and/or communal attachments, will apply such a propensity, more or less universally, for good or ill, across all subjects. I am in you, and you are in me...
For some reason I kept reading "cult" with an "n"
: useless
dup swap drop ;
No sig? Sigh...
I think you'll find being us Apple maniacs are not part of a cult - it's a bonified religion. We even have our own celebrity center! Heck - Tom cruise is even an apple maniac. Beat that, non-believers.
Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. Only, I didn't know about the amiga until 96 or so. I think he meant if you were only comparing a "PC" to a mac. Even then, I preferred PC because it was sort of easier to program, though I wish I was on the 386 BSD train earlier.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The Apple camp is not only a cult, but it's the Scientology of tech cults.
I've never had the opportunity of seeing a NeXT running. But I'm not surprised it was slow, it always seemed to me that NeXT prized elegant engineering over performance.
About the A1000, the legend says Commodore wanted it to ship with 128kB and, after lots of protests from the engineers, they agreed to ship with 256kB instead. So it was already a win. Though Commodore management was composed of cheapasses, memory was quite expensive back then.
Amiga was originally meant to have YUV (not RGB) color registers and HAM mode made even more sense such way. Unfortunately (IMO) Commodore decided they had to use RGB because everyone else was using that.
The doctrines of the Catholic Church have a rather complicated relationship to the Bible. Unlike some Protestant sects that subscribe to Sola Scriptura (the belief that the Bible is the sole infallible authority for Christian faith), the Catholic Church considers the Bible merely the first and most important source of divine revelation, and hence doctrine (i.e. Prima Scriptura). Yes, you are absolutely correct that they tried to hide the Bible behind Latin, but certainly they never tried to keep their own pet interpretation of the Bible secret from anyone, nor any of the other doctrines based on the Church's sacred traditions.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Which reminds me...
"Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it was naught but a follower." --from The Book of Mozilla, 11:9 (10th Edition)
The cults aren't the problem, it's the fad diets... e.g. Ruby on Rails.
I stopped reading after this.
I stopped reading after that page. As a serious Ruby programmer, I don't recognise much in that description. I've certainly never heard of MINSWAN. I thought DRY was the main credo of the Ruby community. (Or is that the Rails community? I'm not cultish enough to tell them apart.)