The Jargon File

Hah. I was just reading The Jargon File and I came across the general description of a hacker (The Jargon File, if you don’t know, is basically a large hacker slang dictionary with information on hacker folklore, pranks, and descriptions). Funny; I match almost every category except the education and food categories.

If you read further into The Jargon File, you discover several common traits and misconceptions of hackers. Here are a few goodies:

• Leet-speak (saying “u r 4n 31337 hax0r,” or the like) is a distinct trait of a wannabee (that is, not a hacker) or, in my personal opinion, just a plain lazy person (an exception can be made sometimes for shortening words in text messages, but with the advent of T9, this too is becoming inexcusable).
• A hacker is not someone who breaks into security systems (like breaking into NASA or the pentagon). That would be a cracker. Hackers are much different, and generally are not doing anything illegal.
• Hackers have a really strange sense of humor by the measure of most normal people. For example, see RFC 1149; this demonstrates a standard upon which computer-to-computer communication (basically a network or the Internet) could be created by using carrier pigeons to fly messages back and forth between computers and scan them in. The RFC documents, by the way, are documents that standardize quite a bit of the Internet and other technology.
• Not mentioned explicitly in The Jargon File, hackers do not use pretty interfaces with lots of slick looking graphics and a mouse (see the movie “Live Free, Die Hard” if you want a prime example). Most tend to generally use a “command line” or shell, which is purely text with no graphics. Nowadays, however, many hackers do use a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for their work simply because it can speed things up.
• Hackers have a serious aversion to anything made by Microsoft. They tend to use Unix-based systems (like Linux or BSD), which have been around since the 1970’s and are generally faster and more stable than “Windoze” (a common nickname for Windows, also “Winslow”). The only reason that I personally use Windows is that there are no good multimedia programs for Linux that have the features that I use often. Otherwise I would’ve switched over to Linux years ago.

I’m pretty sure I just alienated over three quarters of my regular audience, but hey, it’s my blog anyway, right? This is the stuff I care about quite a bit, and I’m planning on making a career out of it eventually.