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.
Cult #1 (Score:5, Funny)
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
Re:Cult #1 (Score:5, Funny)
Oh I can do this:
Name: Mac OS
Established: 1984
Gathering of the tribe: Apple WWDC
Major Deity: Steve Jobs, Woz
Sacred Relic: A half eaten apple.
Believed Antichrist: IBM
True Antichrist: Bill Gates.
Re:Cult #1 (Score:5, Funny)
why would the cult of apple curse IBM!? did IBM not cometh and deliverith the sacred PC of power?
Name: cult of free software
Established: 1985
Major Deity: RMS
Sacred document: GPL
Antichrist: !GPL'd software
and
Name: cult of debian
Established: 1993
Major Deity(s): Bruce Perens & people called Ian
Sacred relic: Debian 1.0 discs
Antichrist: ubuntu
Re:Cult #1 (Score:5, Funny)
did IBM not cometh and deliverith the sacred PC of power?
You're forgetting the next verse of the Book of Jobs...
Re:Cult #1 (Score:5, Funny)
why would the cult of apple curse IBM!?
If you bled six colors, you wouldn't have to ask.
Re:Cult #1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Name: Commodore Amiga OS
Established: 1985
Gathering of the tribe: various E.U. discoteks
Major Deity: Jay Butterfield
Sacred Relic: a red-and-white "boing" ball.
Believed Antichrist: Commodore management
True Antichrist: Wintel empire
Major religious rituals: Multitasking 100 programs at once, Instant off shutdown (flip the power switch), rapid bootup (10 seconds), balancing Chip RAM versus Fast RAM, and Guru Meditation errors
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).
AmigaOS (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cult #1 (Score:4, Interesting)
Name: cult of debian
Established: 1993
Major Deity(s): Bruce Perens & people called Ian
Sacred relic: Debian 1.0 discs
Antichrist: ubuntu
Bzzzt fail.
I was "around" back then (although I didn't join until a couple years later) and the 1.0 disks were an epic fail. Not a sacred relic at all. If anything, the opposite of a sacred relic...
Check out:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-releases.en.html [debian.org]
Debian 1.0 was never released: Accidently InfoMagic, a CD vendor, shipped the development release of Debian and entitled it 1.0. On December 11th 1995, Debian and InfoMagic jointly announced that this release was screwed. Bruce Perens explains that the data placed on the "InfoMagic Linux Developer's Resource 5-CD Set November 1995" as "Debian 1.0" is not the Debian 1.0 release, but an early development version which is only partially in the ELF format, will probably not boot or run correctly, and does not represent the quality of a released Debian system. To prevent confusion between the premature CD version and the actual Debian release, the Debian Project has renamed its next release to "Debian 1.1". The premature Debian 1.0 on CD is deprecated and should not be used.
Also if anything would be Debian's "antichrist" it would be Debian's own non-free repository of software with licenses too icky to be in the real "main" Debian. The fact that I like the devilish non-free repository probably means I listened to too much heavy metal in the 80s.
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Re:Cult #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows isn't a cult.
It's a religion.
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Yup, the church of Windows. After all they make a lot of money.
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I like my modern computers, and I run Windows on them, so I guess you could say I like Windows. Plenty of people do - just because we don't get fanatically about it doesn't mean we don't like it.
For a while, I viewed Windows as very much a "least worst", but that just means the other offerings are even worse. But since 2000, I have to say it's a decent OS (based on the robust NT line, but capable of running consumer applications). Computing in the late 90s was terrible, as all the choices were dire, but I h
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There's a difference?
Re:Cult #1 (Score:5, Funny)
Windows isn't a cult.
It's a religion.
Exactly, just like scientology
Re:Cult #1 (Score:5, Funny)
Cult: A small unpopular religion
Re:Cult #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Cult #1 (Score:5, Funny)
Best Cult (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Cult #1 (Score:5, Funny)
The oldest appointment I have dates back to Sept 2001.
Bet it wasn't a girl...
Re:Cult #1 (Score:4, Funny)
The oldest appointment I have dates back to Sept 2001.
Homeland security would like to have a word with you Mr.Dave.
Fun Read? (Score:5, Funny)
I belong to the Cult of Single Page Views, not 8-page clickfests.
Not so much fun, actually.
Re:Fun Read? (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.infoworld.com/print/73433 [infoworld.com]
Re:Fun Read? (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, the cult of grammar Nazi's.
Name: Grammar Nazi Cult
Established: 1383
Gathering of the Tribe: Internet Comment Forums
Major Diety: Geoffrey Chaucer
Sacred Relic: Strunk and White
The Antichrist: The Apostrophe Between "t" and "s" in the Word "it's" When "it's" is used as a posessive
Purpose: Annoy Everyone not in the Cult
Re:Fun Read? (Score:5, Funny)
Thats "possessive." :-)
Re:Fun Read? (Score:5, Funny)
Kindly have the decency to identify us correctly by our Sacred Relic - Strunk and White's Elements of Style, First Edition.
I hope you did not mean for us to lump us in the Later Editioners - who eat off of their bellies, when there are perfectly good tables about for use of that function.
In any case, your abbreviation of the Holy Name of our Sacred Relic may well have been alleviated by the acceptable, yet colloquial (although arcane), use of et cetera, hereby illustrated as per Rule 2, as you are but no doubt aware of so to do: Stunk and White, etc.
(And yes, I thank you in advance for the opportunity of scoring points with my peers to compact my typography by ending a sentence with the abbreviated form of et cetera, thereby saving a full period. My deep appreciation is also given for the bonus points scored as well that the word period preceded it's synonymously named punctuation mark in the previous sentence. It is for this alone that I defer to kindness and not rag upon the lack of calendar year reference, similarly missing.
After all, a good Grammar Nazi is never a quibbling Sematics Nazi, nor worse, a Syntax Nazi (this last reference having been given, quite naturally, with highest reverence to the ghosts of alt.syntax).) *
Kindly remember, and please never forget: if something can be said with few words, it's worth saying very well; therefore, it worth saying with a great many words, in order to be at one's best, if for no other reason. (N.B., it is well and good that initiates question the validity of verbosity over being succinct, as an object lesson that the admonishment for clarity overrides.)
In closing, I am further compelled to compliment you upon the quite deft class-naming used for our gathering place, indicating, as it does, this modern forum while simultaneously not excluding Usenet, that is, as goes without saying, our one true Kobol, with the codex modification as it applies, naturally, to the mythology presented only in the contempory BattleStar Gallactica.
* Note the parenthetical salvation of the egregious Usenet syntax error had the sentence been constructed to end thus: alt.syntax.
Re:Fun Read? (Score:5, Funny)
You spelled semantics wrong.
For the sake of newcomers, it's important to note that Guild of Grammar Nazis and the Spelling Nazi Brotherhood have a bilateral-cooperation agreement, thereby ensuring work for both unions' members.
Cults in tech? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Cults in tech? (Score:5, Funny)
I've always considered myself a Quaker.
Re:Cults in tech? (Score:5, Funny)
I've always considered myself a Quaker.
No DOOMsday cult?
Re:Cults in tech? (Score:5, Funny)
No DOOMsday cult?
Of course not. That would just be Unreal.
Re:Cults in tech? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm with the Church of Latter Day Megaman.
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PC games and MMORPGS kick @$$ its not a cult its a way of life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111
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PC games and MMORPGS kick @$$
I agree - Nethack FTW!
Oh, wait - you weren't referring to the player next to two piles of money, after all.
Never mind, then.
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Strange to have 'cults in tech' and no mention of gamers, console vs pc, mmorpgers in WoW etc.
Frankly, I'd like to see a "cults in finance" list.
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I don't think you need a rivalry to constitute a cult.
I'm more talking about the sort of religious, slavish adherence to something (ie most gamers) that for me defines what a cult is.
Lispers AND Apple Users? (Score:5, Funny)
Why did they list the same group twice?
Pretty absurd Apple is absent (Score:5, Insightful)
especially if we're mentioning Ubuntu. Seems like windows is missing too.
A fanboi is a fanboi, even if their product actually is better.
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Apple's a major religion.
Most of these guys are the David Karash's of the tech world. Minus the whole FBI crashing the house party... yet.
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Apple's a major religion.
Scientology is not a major religion.
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Apple's a major religion.
Most of these guys are the David Karash's of the tech world. Minus the whole FBI crashing the house party... yet.
Actually, that was the ATF. [davekopel.com]
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yeah after mentioning ubuntu, not mentioning apple looses major credibility
~A concerned Debian users
Re:Pretty absurd Apple is absent (Score:5, Funny)
As yes, The Cult of Loose.
Their won cult that never should of ben allowed.
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These lists always seem to leave off the major players. Perhaps they wouldn't get as much traffic if they offended the mainstream os/console/editor fanatics.
Why Windows isn't a cult (Score:5, Insightful)
"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).
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.
In my head I transposed the 'n' for a 'l' in cults (Score:5, Funny)
Strangely enough the article read much the same.
TFA In One Page (Score:5, Informative)
slashdotters (Score:5, Insightful)
very big mistake - the author forgot to mention slashdotters
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I'm sorry. This isn't 'arguement'. This is abuse.
Perl? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Perl? (Score:4, Informative)
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Anyway, as language C have an edge... it turned ascii code into Wine.
Re:Perl? (Score:5, Funny)
Established: 1987
Gathering of the tribe: USENET
Major Deity: Larry Wall
Sacred Relic: All those O'rielly books
The Anti-Christ: Ruby
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Amen.
Don't forget to menion http://perlmonks.org/ [perlmonks.org].
The other anti-Christ: Python
Proof is here BTW: http://xkcd.com/224/ [xkcd.com]
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ah yes, perl. one of those 'write-only' languages. much like c++ in that regard.
both perl and C++ are langs I dread to read others' code in.
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Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
Re:Perl? (Score:5, Funny)
Other's code? I have enough trouble reading my own code a couple of months after I wrote it.
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The language with a "bless" command -- definitely one for cults!
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Oh it needs to be installed, cute.
Nah, Apple fans.. (Score:5, Funny)
..are more like Scientologists than an cult....
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Do you mean, they believe they can only reach enlightenment if they plow enough money into it? Or simply that despite being quite their leader has made some dick moves they still worship him?
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Amiga (Score:5, Interesting)
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Eric Schwartz's terrific little animated music video about Amiga accompanied by the "Still Alive" song from Portal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mg6wrYCT9Q [youtube.com]
Forth (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Forth (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Forth (Score:5, Funny)
forth respect gets
(come on, its STACK oriented. sheesh. do the joke correctly)
Oracle DBAs (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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You can always tell because they believe all of the business logic should be migrated from your current app framework to stored procedures, there to bitrot in PL/SQL hell forever.
That's a mighty short list (Score:2)
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...
Clueless (Score:5, Insightful)
I stopped reading after this.
Lisp is missing a minor deity... (Score:2)
Though I suppose mentioning Guy Steele would have confused the Johnny-come-lately Java people.
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Even worse, it's "Paradigms OF Artifical Intelligence Programming", not IN. They got the name of the bible wrong! Er, not that I'm a cult member or anything.
Emacs.... (Score:2)
And 1 kill-ring to rule them all!
C= 8-bitters instead of the Amiga?! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:C= 8-bitters instead of the Amiga?! (Score:5, Funny)
There are still people crowing about how Amiga is poised for a comeback. Everyone's going to realize how wrong they were for abandoning the platform. We'll all repent and be saved by the second coming of Amiga. They still go on and on about REXX and Video Toaster, as if those are relevant technologies.
I for one am actively working to prevent this disaster by promoting... Atari TOS! TOS can save us all! Don't listen to the Amiga infidels! You only need 512 colors! MIDI, MIDI, MIDI! Those Amiga Cultists are all nutters! 16/32-bit Atari is the true path!
Tech Cults? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Cool, I am a member of 4 of the "cults" (Score:3)
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)
Linux (Score:2)
100 comments and no mention of Linux as a cult, the big elephant in the room. Yes, it's a cult.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That's GNU/Linux, you freedom-hating blasphemer!
Gather the HURD!! *draws katana*
signed,
RMS
They missed out C programmers (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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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.
BeOS left off? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Oh, BeOS. Wow. I don't get clingy and fanboy-ish over many tech things, but that's one of them. If it had modern drivers and could run at least most of my software, I'd use BeOS over anything else--Linux, Windows, OSX, *BSD, you name it.
Hell, I've even begun to need some future-proof, extensive, filesystem-level metadata for my ever-growing collections of various things; if only BeOS were still alive & kicking with a bright future, I could just use BFS. Wish the other operating systems would catch u
Missed the biggest of all (Score:5, Insightful)
Object-oriented programming. And yes, I expected to get done for heresy.
Brett
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
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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.
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No, no, no. If you didn't have a beige box, you're a poser.
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Also, like a Volkswagon, I can fix a failing Commodore 64 with my own tools. Unlike modern machines that are replaced when they fail, the Commie, and other 8-bit machines, have a simple architecture, and parts that are easly repaired/replaced.
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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.