the hacker ethic found in today's world

hacker ethic, yesterday...today


I see all the free knowledge spreading communities around the web, as part of hacker ethics.
wikipedia, stackowerflow and all the open source tools and drivers that are made everyday. and there are people working on them actively, developing tools and answering questions and solving problems.
in this sense the hacker ethics is alive and moving forward. it may has changed a lot during recent years, but it is still natural as hackers are front line technology users and developers they should adopt to changes in the world. I also feel some new waves of hacker activity coming along with copy right and intellectual property issues. too much restriction on data sharing, monopolies on publishing and data privacy issues seem growing.

Jargon File

my digging in Jargon File


I was mostly fascinated with the different language use rather than a single word. perhaps because I used to work in language processing and had some experience on web data collection.

it was interesting to see how much original hacker language has impacted current web and youth language. actually about youth, I am not sure if youth language entered hacker language or other way around. because it is always youth speciality to play with language and make up new words and expressions. impact of programming logic on the way hackers communicate is a big one too.
this is my(!) impression in Jargon file:
foo bar
or

foobar: n.
[very common] Another widely used metasyntactic variable; see foo for etymology. Probably originally propagated through DECsystem manuals by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1960s and early 1970s; confirmed sightings there go back to 1972. Hackers do not generally use this to mean FUBAR in either the slang or jargon sense. See also Fred Foobar. In RFC1639, “FOOBAR” was made an abbreviation for “FTP Operation Over Big Address Records”, but this was an obvious backronym. It has been plausibly suggested that “foobar” spread among early computer engineers partly because of FUBAR and partly because “foo bar” parses in electronics techspeak as an inverted foo signal; if a digital signal is active low (so a negative or zero-voltage condition represents a "1") then a horizontal bar is commonly placed over the signal label.

when I was younger and I was doing my master in computational linguistics, I used to look for all sorts of regular expressions in web. very often I would find my answer with an example using "foobar"! I always wondered why foobar appears everywhere! and what does it mean. I even imagined that maybe there is a real place called "foo bar" ...