Slashdot Mirror
Six More Tech Cults
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Dan Tynan takes a humorous look at six 'sects' of fanatical tech loyalists. 'Fandom, devotion, obsession — certain technologies have a way of inspiring an extremely loyal following. So committed are these devotees, you might as well call them technology cults,' Tynan writes in this update to last year's list, which included fans of the Newton, Commodore, and Ruby on Rails, among other technologies. 'Sometimes these cults are inspired by elegant lines of code. Other times it's dedication to an ideal. Some are looking to transform the way software is made. Others hope to transform humanity itself. And some just want to argue about it all — endlessly and at great length.'"
The sinister emacs must be purged.
Steve Jobs, Kevin Warwick, Nicholas Negroponte.
Oh, sorry. Cults.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Apple isn't #1.
To be fair to the Jobsian cult, though, the most rabid extremists I've ever come across are old-skool SGI admins. Don't even try to suggest putting Linux on ancient SGI hardware; according to sacred lore, it will turn a venerable super computer into a PC. Then they'll send you an angry email as well, just to make sure the point gets across.
"InfoWorld's Dan Tynan takes a humorous look at six 'sects' of fanatical tech loyalists.
Tech cult No. 1: The Way of the Palm
Tech cult No. 2: Brotherhood of the Ruby
Tech cult No. 3: The Ubuntu tribe
Tech cult No. 4: The Commodorians
Tech cult No. 5: The Order of the Lisp
Tech cult No. 6: Monks of the Midrange
Tech cult No. 7: The Tao of Newton
THERE....ARE.....SEVEN....SECTS!!!!!!!!!!!!
From article:
By Dan Tynan
Created 2009-05-04
I became suspicious when he predicted the resurgence of palm.
While I suspect you are just trying to hit as broadly as possible with your trolling (and trolling Windows could risk to actually dilute your troll), is there a desktop OS and mobile OS you prefer personally? Windows/Windows Mobile?
From the article:
"Programming language Ruby and its younger, sleeker sibling, Ruby on Rails..."
LOL
Such quality investigation and journalism!
Every technology that became big started out enthusing its supporters. If we didn't become excessively enthused about technology we wouldn't be geeks.
Seems to me the key is tolerance. We tolerate the currently-enthused, because we know we were once them and, Linux willing, will be again.
Computer fanatics don't have sects.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Another gem from the article:
Sacred relic: Commodore C65
Ah, yes, I fondly remember my C65...
Wait, what?
(Did they even bother to proofread their work? It has dozens of mistakes.
No surprise, the editors put the wrong link in the article. All three links link to last year's article. Here is the new article.
--Obyron
Whatever he can best fit up his ass, I'm sure.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
... I'm actually surprised Perl isn't in the article.
[signature]
A Spanish Inquisition?
So fine, there are seven sects
Tech cult No. 1: The Way of the Palm
Tech cult No. 2: Brotherhood of the Ruby
Tech cult No. 3: The Ubuntu tribe
Tech cult No. 4: The Commodorians
Tech cult No. 5: The Order of the Lisp
Tech cult No. 6: Monks of the Midrange
Tech cult No. 7: The Tao of Newton
Tech cult No. 8: The Amiga Gurus
Agreed, there is nothing special or elitist about using windows. But that's exactly the point the windows apologetics make, and that's what the MS commercials hammer home again and again: this is for normal people, the others are elitist freaks. The aggressive Windows-User is the tea party supporter of the tech world.
I mean, they're OK running shoes and all, but come on. Then again this whole forefoot strike nonsense probably qualifies as a cult.
Oh, wait, this is Slashdot.
On initial reading, I thought I was reading something about Neo-Tech (an Scientology-like offshoot of Objectivism), which would be decidedly more serious and sinister than the fairly harmless fanboyism discussed heretofore. I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet on this story.
A greased up yoda doll isn't an operating system. It can't even run NetBSD.
the article was probably written with vi
Or did all the Gentoo fanboys migrate to Ubuntu? Like the Millerites became Seventh Day Adventists (well, those who didn't declare the whole thing batshiat crazy and leave after Jesus didnt' show back up in 1844).
"t will turn a venerable super computer into a PC."
SGI might not have had the best marketing but back in the day it had some of the best hardware designers and OS/driver writers in the world as far as graphics was concerned. What they didn't know at the time wasn't worth knowing. I'd be pretty amazed if Linux could get the same performance out of the hardware even if it used SGI written drivers.
And after the nuclear end of the world, the remnants of these cults join together to form the religious sect known as the Reavers.
Seriously, it doesn't. Snydeq is their PR flack, and he's got a weekly slashdot quota (check out his submission history). Quality of article doesn't matter, he just has to hit his numbers. Hey, it's a living, right...?
There.
Are.
Four.
Cults.
obscure?
Sure, I've met people who were enthusiastic about Perl, but just about all of 'em know There's More Than One Way To Do It applies to language choice, too.
Tweet, tweet.
Created 2010-06-07 03:00AM
Tech cult No. 1: The Slashdot Samurai
Who could make a list like that and not include the OS/2 supporters circa 1995?
What? a list of tech cults without apple at the top? Granted apple today isnt so much about tech as it is about shiney and 'it just works', but come on....
People, what a bunch of bastards
They forgot one...
Did the tests for the first cults except apple,I only eat apples not compute on them. Linux 16, Programming 14, and ho surprise, windows 17, I was so certain I was gonna suck on that... I guess some scars from windows admining just don't heal.
I cordially loathe Perl. it is a grotesque collection of shell tools held together with gaffer tape. However, I must admit it is one of only two of the many languages I have used where I learned it from a book from scratch and did a useful medium-sized job in the same day. Most languages are good for something. I have even found a job that Prolog was absolutely perfect for (I have never found a second example, but every dog has its day). And yet...
Have you ever met Haskell programmers? I have met some really creepy ones. The language is not a tool, it is The Way. If you do something useful with it instead of Silently Contemplating Its Perfection In Bliss, then you will never achieve Enlightenment. Or your Computer Science degree. Woo...
People in real cults wear sneakers, chop their genitals off and commit suicide. People who like Newtons/Ruby on Rails/Linux/Macs/whatever to a level disparate with the rest of society are called enthusiasts.
Only 6? And why those 6? The ones they pick seem like a subset I might have picked in the early 2000s. I'd be surprised if there are more than, oh, 5 working Newtons out there, and Palm is pretty damn dead, still. Palm, if anything, should only make the list because of a lack of backward compatibility/application support elsewhere.
How about:
* Apple (wanton consumerism and bling?)
* Ubuntu (obviously they picked wisely on this one; there are quite a few people who cling to their Ubuntu as bad as the Apple people do their iProducts)
* *BSD (closely pairs with Apple cult, but has other values as well; we're not sure what those are, but they hold them quite dear.)
* Silverlight (no sane moral would embrace this cult; it's the coolaid cult that shoots you in the back of the head if you try to leave. But it's getting wide adoption and nobody's leaving it...)
* Windows 7 (MCIEs who have had their careers and image revitalized by Windows 7 and 2k8SP2 and users who are glad to have a cheap computer that's prettier like a Mac. These types also use Bing.)
* IBM hardware types (where the adage, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" still seems to apply, despite the evidence of inferiority in many ways)
* Cloudites (Those idiots who want to move everything to the cloud. "The cloud is the future!" Often use Google products for everything; don't backup their data.)
I classify cult/cult members as a group which, if their "architecture of choice" were to get destroyed/changed drastically, they'd have an ideological/existential reckoning. These are, of course, my observations of fairly rigid groups.
Oh yeah, and TFA is OVER A YEAR OLD. WTF, Slashdot editors.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
"From 1982 to 1994, the Commodore 64 was the most successful personal computer ever made"
The Commodore 64 was replaced by the backward compatible Commodore 128 in 1985. Production ceased on the latter in 1989. The Amiga and Atari ST "cults" were far stronger than any C-64 cult by then.
If we are going to include (nearly) dead cults, what about the ones for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit, TRS-80, TI 99, and so on?
It's a pretty popular version of a pretty popular OS. Lots of people try it and most of the alleged cultists don't declare it the one true way. It's much closer to Buddhism than Scientology.
I find it odd that python missed the list.
If anyone cares to reference the relevant xkcd comics, they can do so here, I just don't feel like looking them up.
Cobol will be around when only the cockroach remains. I mean really have you ever met a dyed in the wool cobol programmer. Scary isn't the word.
Damn, they just threw every male computer geek into a cult. I personally don't see a prob - oh wait. Palm, as in the company from the 90's.
*Ahem*
There's a 68.71% chance you're right.
I’d actually argue that the Commodore 128, Commodore 65 and CBM-II series were all mediocre successors to the Commodore 8-bit line at best. I even suspect that had the Amiga not fallen into Commodore’s lap, they might have gone bankrupt because of it.
The main problem with all three systems was their CPU. The MOS 8502 found in the C128 and CBM-II as well as the CSG 4510 in the C65 could only access 64KB of memory directly, so they all relied on bank switching to get around the limitation. Bank switching SUCKS. It is even worse than the 20-bit segmentation model found in the i8086/8088.
Apple ended up using the WDC 65816, which included a limited set of op-codes that could handle 24-bit “long mode” addresses. But it was a bolt on feature at best, and was severely limited. A better option would have been if the MOS 8502 came with a new memory mode where all existing 16-bit ($xxxx) ops could have been extended to 24-bit ($xxxxxx) instead. A processor with a flat 24-bit memory mode would have been very easy to work with.
All of the C128’s other major faults (graphics and audio) are all secondary. Sure, had they either adopted the MOS 7360’s 121-color Y/C palette or a 64-color RGB6 palette, it would have been great. Had they adopted stereo SID and/or added frequency modulation, it would have been great. But in the end, the processor would have crippled it. Just try programming for the C65 emulator under M.E.S.S. and see for yourself.
I like Windows 7 on my desktop and have an HTC Incredible running my favorite mobile OS, Android.
People raised on bad sci-fi, artist's impressions and throwaway comments in space engineering textbooks. They believe we'll colonize the Moon and have orbiting solar-power arrays and space stations. Even though 5 decades have passed, none of these things are remotely feasible, they cling desperately to false history like "computers wouldn't exist if it wasn't for NASA".
Total loons with no grasp of reality, history, engineering or biology.
But Space Nuttery shouldn't be on this list, Space Nuttery hasn't accomplished a single thing, a Commodore 64 is still useful today.
"Tech consultant Jamie Wells says a client he works for still uses OS/2 to run its homegrown ERP and CRM systems, only instead of PCs they run it virtualized on Mac Minis."
Please tell me you're joking. If I were brought in to work on a system like this, I'd run away screaming.
Most hypervisors have pretty shoddy OS/2 support. The latest versions of VMWare dropped it, I don't know if it works on Parallels. It does work on VirtualPC, but that's Windows only now, so no luck on the Mac-Mini....unless you're doing the whole BootCamp shindig, which defeats the point of the Macs anyway. ESX/i doesn't support OS/2 either, and I'm pretty sure ESX isn't supported on Macs. Haven't looked into OS/2 on XenServer.
And ERP, really? You'd really trust an enterprise-level application with a setup like this? I'd really like to hear from the guys who have to support this. It may be working fine for them, but I have serious, serious doubts that this is the case.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
So what's this article doing under "hardware"? All of the so-called "cults" in both articles are centered around specific software. And scanning the discussion supports this, since "hardware" is a relatively rare string in the rapidly growing page.
Is there a clean way with the /. software to unobtrusively reclassify an article and its discussion? Though I suppose we don't have a "cult" classification. Maybe we should.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The Postgres fanboys bitch slap any other DB that gets a mention, try and refute an argument and you'll be cyber-wasted true Die-Hard 4.0 style!
Must post anonymously as my life would be in danger.
rather off-topic, but anyway....
regarding the moon head towards earth, not sure i understand what you mean. the moon is currently moving away because of the tides: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon#Tidal_evolution
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
But I do keep running into situations where I find myself muttering "This would be so much easier if I could just resolve a prolog expression
Perhaps AI::Prolog or Language::Prolog would be helpful. Or you could take advantage of some of Perl's dustier corners and write Prolog-like Perl.
Tweet, tweet.
The C128 was the successor to the C64. The CBM-II series had nothing to do with the C64, they were just updated CBM systems. The C65 was primarily done just to keep Bill Gardei from bothering any of the people working on Amiga systems. The C128 made some sense in 1985 -- we sold somewhere around 5 million C128s. The C65 made absolutely no sense in 1993. But sure, it's an interesting collector's item.
The WDC 65816 was technically an 8/16-bit version of the 6502, but it was a pretty ugly hack. This wasn't a 6502 with 16-bit instructions and register modes added, as you might expect. No, this ran 6502 instructions in either 8-bit or 16-bit mode, depending on a bit in the status register. Evil. And the IIGS shipped over a year after the C128, after the Amiga shipped. It was a poor attempt to take on the Amiga, though you can given the designers some credit for building a multimedia computer from the old 8-bit stuff faster than the Mac people did.
The C128's MMU actually made things much easier to deal with, in the specific case of 128KB of memory, than either 65816 or 8088s and their segmentation registers (the 65816 had a similar mechanism, though yeah, it did have a very few "long" instructions). This wasn't something that would have been as useful going beyond 256K, but it was very easy to deal with memory management on the C128. It was nothing like the crazy stuff they did in the CBM line.
It was pretty obvious the C128 was the end of the line for 8-bit at Commodore, so there wasn't a great deal of looking forward in the C128... also not the budget we really wanted for it. But it was a very successful product.
As for the Amiga, yeah, the Amiga was clearly the way to go. Without the Amiga, Commodore would have gone forward with the Commodore 900, which was based on the Z8000 processor family. We had a megapixel monochrome display for it, a novel stacking expansion bus (similar in concept to PC/104), and it ran Coherent, a UNIX clone. This was cancelled after Commodore bought Amiga. Some of the ideas were used, er, stolen for the Atari ST.. Jack brought some of the early C900 people with him. They never got it working... that was George Robbins and Bob Welland, the third engineering team to work on the C900. They also went on to develop the Amiga 500. I was working on the C128 at the time, and went on to develop the Amiga 2000 and other Amiga systems.
-Dave Haynie
The WDC 65816 was technically an 8/16-bit version of the 6502, but it was a pretty ugly hack.
Agreed. The 65816 could be an ugly processor to deal with. And you’re right, only a handful of instructions could use long memory addresses, and only three addressing modes were available for long addresses. For everything else, you had to work within your 64KB bank unless you wanted to start messing with the data or program bank offset registers.
However, if the bulk of your program’s code and data could fit inside one bank, then it worked like an enhanced 65C02. In which case the 65816 was somewhat nice to deal with. Makes me wish that the 8502 had used a 65C02 derived core...
The C128's MMU actually made things much easier to deal with, in the specific case of 128KB of memory
But it was still bank switching, and bank switching is evil. If I could have a nickle for every time I fought with an expanded memory manager on a PC...
But yeah, while the MMU in the C128 was tolerable, it would have seriously kicked ass if I could have just flipped a bit and turned the processor into an enhanced mode that upgraded all of the 16-bit memory modes to 24-bit, upgraded the index registers to 16-bit, and would have added 16-bit counterparts to the 8-bit relative displacement Bcc branches.
It was pretty obvious the C128 was the end of the line for 8-bit at Commodore, so there wasn't a great deal of looking forward in the C128... ... also not the budget we really wanted for it.
I never understood that. I always thought that the jump from the C64 to the Amiga was a fairly huge one, both in feature set and in price. The C128 would have made a nice filler machine for that market. Instead, it just seemed like an expensive C64 with a few bolt on features. Other than some BBS admins, I don’t remember anyone being excited over the C128.
And I never considered the 8-bit data bus or the 16-bit ALU of the 65xx series as a terminally limiting factor to the platform. I knew a few folks with IBM XT systems who had upgraded to VGA and Soundblaster cards. 256 colors and 8-bit digital audio all being processed with that crusty 8088, all under DOS.
If your budget was tight, then it seems like a lot of resources were wasted on adding the Z80/CPM support. And it must have killed your manufacturing cost per unit. It just seem as if better graphics, better audio and/or a better CPU would have made more sense. I mean, come on, even the C16 had a better color palette than the C128.