Don't Be Ashamed. Let Your Geek Flag Fly! ('Puter Content)

[highlandsflyer]

You probably do though, in almost every way imaginable except your own pc. Most of the machines you network with globally are IBM compatibles.

Semantics aside.

 

[sylus]

But I'm not Jewish ?

 

[highlandsflyer]

I still have a couple of i7-920s on 1366 but I am planning on moving onto 1155 with whatever is the best bang for buck. Don't necessarily need the HT so may consider the i5s. Strictly keeping quad core though.

 

[petitpal]

I'm a software engineer by trade so geek is what I do and what I am. What interests me though is how big the industry has got over the past couple of decades, by which I mean: when I was doing A-level computer science way back when it was perfectly possible to have a really good grasp of most thing computer related - understand networking protocols, hardware, etc. These days you find people who's entire career is, for example, handling Dretek routers. The whole thing has got so big and so complex that everything has got hugely specialised; I'm not saying that's a bad thing - just interesting.

PCs for example: I replace my home PC when it breaks, generally, and my works computer, that I use for my nine hours or so of software development a day, gets replaced on a similar time frame. I pretty much completely lose track of hardware (processors and the like) until the point where I need something new - then I read up, buy something, and forget about it all again.

Thing I find difficult about my job being based in a very virtual world is actually explaining what I do day to day; difficult enough, sometimes, explaining to your boss what you've been writing for the past month when there is absolutely no user interface to show for it, "well, there's this thing that does this stuff and then there's some other stuff - look, here's the code. Don't run away - come back!", etc. I'm sure most of the people I know (certainly my family) are convinced that software grows on trees or something - which makes me slightly redundant... hmmm....

Other thing that people outside the industry sometimes fail to realise is how tricky it is to keep up (as a profesional person). Moment you think you're just about where you need to be, the whole industry moves and you have to go with it or end up in a back water with no career prospects. Take your iPhones for example. Really only been the last what, five / six years?, they've been around. That's not much time to completely re-skill - if you're talking in terms of being able to earn an equaivalent amount to whatever software you're alredy skilled in.

It's all good fun though, wouldn't want to do anything else.

Anyway - that's my geeky creds for you.

p.s. Started on a Dragon 32K in Dragon Basic (but dad used to code in assembler and machine code or punched cards, mag tape, etc ).

 

[highlandsflyer]

But I'm not Jewish ?

Is that claim kosher?

 

[cyfa2809]

I dont know what you just said. HT?

Looks like the i7's dont have fsb but have QPI? Not sure how that equates. Looks like im way out of the 'game'. Not that i was ever in it deeply or anything.

 

[highlandsflyer]

Petipal,

Interesting post, and I have to agree with you. I am not involved in IT at all these days, but I can see how diverse everything is.

Whereas back in the day we used to upgrade all the time as the technology moved so fast, things are such that most of us now can delay that without really noticing a huge deficit, unless we are power users.

My impetus to upgrade the half dozen pcs here has been the desire to have them all using cheaper DDR3 so they can all have at least 8 gigs and to ensure they all run 7 seamlessly and can stream and scream without fail when needed.

I am planning to reduce it all to a couple of servers and a bunch of tablets soon.

 

[sylus]

But I'm not Jewish ?

Is that claim kosher?

Only on Saturdays

 

[highlandsflyer]

Hyper Threading.

They really messed up their designations as some i5s are dual core, some quad.

With these chips the mem controller is processor located, no longer rated according to the northbridge chipset based memory controller bus
speed.

 

[petitpal]

Most stuff, although by no means all, in the industry (serious servers) are doing the virtual thing these days; so one huge server running lots of smaller ones... so that can help with the need to keep the constant upgrade going (can simply allocate more memory / processor as required). I find this a particularly cool way of running alternative development enviornments that I need to code against; think I have about four or five Windows 2003 / 2008 servers, a couple of XP boxes, Windows 2000, Windows ME and a DOS 6.22 / Windows 3.11 machine that I run up now and then on my work's PC (not hugely powerful by modern standards - Quad core / 4Gb mem / Vista).

Sure you've probably hit it but if not have a look at VM Ware's 'player' software (free for personal use). Lots of fun and also means that, assuming you keep a backup (or even a snapshot) of your virtual server you can kill it dead, copy the files back (or revert to a previous point in the snapshot) and it's alive again. Good stuff. Love it. Only downside is that system admins seem to want to call all of their machines silly names now like RB001WVFG1 and so on.

I'm going to shut up now... think I'm taking the geekiness away from the OPs original intention.