An artifact of great power and great mystery

At the risk of sounding extremely doltish, I qoute from the movie 'Dude, Where's my Car'

It's a powerful and mysterious device, its power exceeded only by its mystery, and strangely its mystery exceeded only by its.... er.. insipidity??

Path breaking research never ceases at SRM, and espescially the new paths that are broken everyday are more and more alarming. Not only have they great stalwarts from the department of metaphysical cybernetics have conquered the secrets of the pyramid, mastered Vaastu Shastra, ran over all prevailing common sense and made it an unfortunate roadkill. They are now entering the realm of hacker culture to question the most fundamental assumtion and answer them with such candor, boldness, and a straight face (which wouldn't stay that straight, once the answer is out) that might send Eric.S.Raymond back to writing notes on the back of his dairy on how to please women.

Well, take a bow, Mr.Raymond, before our great researcher who ponders upon the timeless new dimension in the nature of hacker culture, which I've never seen in any of your great published works. Well its time we dusted our 'Catb' printouts, take a whitener, and start adding the corrections. Here is my report on yet annother incident..

[Date: Today.. duh!, Time : Was ROTFLMAOPIMP that I couldn't notice]

A gloomy rainy thursday, with a pretty quiet class, and yet another unfortunate soul at the dias.. This time some arcane aspect of computer security was also at the pulpit, more as a symbol of impending molestation and defenestration of common sense, rather than as the topic of discussion. And as this poor soul as any deeply misguided by the media did use the word 'hacker' in the wrong sense.. (A serious post on this topic later). This led to the revelation of the completely new dimension of a hacker that had wizzbanged past Mr.ESR.

Our dilligent glob.. er.. Research Scholar, catches this poor soul in the act, and pops the question.. No, no.. not that question, but a different one, which has lead to a maelstorm in the world of open-source philosophy and psychology.. and the question is

'Is hacker a hardware or a software?'

To which our poor soul, (wishing he had signed the contract to the devil), elaborates on the fact that 'hacker' often refers to a person in the same way that a carpenter doesn't refer to the chisel or wood. To which the relentless scholar goes on and instructs the person to stop digressing by giving examples and answer the question, to which the poor soul promptly packs its bags and leaves on a one-way ticket to alaska.

Well, thats how this new dimension was discovered.. Enlightenment beckons those who brave SRM..

Reporting Almost live ( I almost died laughing my ass off.. ) for TUHANIAT,
Vishnu Vyas.