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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
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.
I stopped reading after this.
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
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
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!
Object-oriented programming. And yes, I expected to get done for heresy.
Brett
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.
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.