The Biggest Cults In Tech 397
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.
TFA In One Page (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Perl? (Score:4, Informative)
Ye Olde Apple Cult (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Why Windows isn't a cult (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Perl? (Score:3, Informative)
The language with a "bless" command -- definitely one for cults!
Re:Mac users (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Wot, no NetWare? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:They missed out C programmers (Score:2, Informative)
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
author is a rookie - didn't list OS/2 cult (Score:3, Informative)
No OS/2 shows an obvious lack of knowing the history of computer software and operating systems.
LoB
Re:Missed the biggest of all (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Re:They missed out C programmers (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Cult #1 (Score:4, Informative)
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).
Re:Cult #1 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Cult #1 (Score:3, Informative)