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Muscle Cars And Smokin' Chips
YetAnotherGeekGuy writes "IEEE Computer has an article this month, "The Zen of Overclocking" by Bob Colwell. In it the author compares overclockers to hot rodders (which, in my personal experience, are two sets with a significant intersection). More importantly he talks about the phenomenon, the culture, the attitude, and the natural tension between them and the industry in the quest for the right balance between performance and reliability. Thought-provoking, and some good one-liners. Enjoy!"
I think there really is a parallel between car-modifiers and pc-modifiers. There's really four classes:
a) The "don't know, don't care" crowd. They let a salesman or a "friend who knows about [computers|cars]" tell them what to buy, and they take it to the shop for every bit of maintanence.
b) The DIYers (like myself) who will change their own oil, brakes, and motherboards.
c) The real overclokers, and the hot-rodders, who push the boundaries of their chosen field, and are really into getting the most performance from their machines.
d) Ricers. People with "Type R" stickers, big wings, windows in their cases, clear fans, and who think neon has any place apart from outside a strip-joint.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
I know completely what you mean.
I have a auto tech class, and much of the talk seemed similar to computer moding/repair, like how most people do not anything about the car or pc, only pay attention to the idiot lights (a big window that pops up and says "dude, you got a fuxored pc") and never open up the inside.
But modding a car is much more difficult than a PC, as due to the fact it has much more parts that can be removed, as opposed to a pc where there are many parts, but are grouped in larger chunks (video card, motherboard, cpu) and once you figure out what is wrong, you either do a software fix, or replace it as fixing the hardware is probably extremely expensive for what you would need to do (fixing a single cell of bad ram), so it would just be cheaper to go buy a new stick of RAM.
Cars on the other hand have several systems, that keep subdividing, and have many removeable parts, as if a piston ring is faulty (think of it as a little bit of the cpu) you car will either not funtcion, or not work good, if it was a cpu, you would toss it, but in a car, you would take the time to trace it to a componet and replace it.
thus, I think overclocking is wanting to be like car modding, but just cannot get the outside respect of car modding. In the long run I think cpu modding is easier (a quick trip into BIOS and maybe 10 minutes of time), but in the long run could be much more difficult (getting tech to let you modify the chips themselfs to work better and other detail modding, even replacing circuits and building faster software). So, we are kind of the next hotrodders, thats why people have lan parties you know.
I'm an ex-street racer/hot rodder (my two favorite cars were a '70 Challenger whose 383 I replaced with a 440, and my factory 340 '69 Dart Swinger).
:-)
I can tell you that very few of the guys in the street racing and cruising scene came out there with girls, or even had girlfriends. A few of them were married, but they typically only came out for the cruise portions. The racing, which happened later in the evening on dark roads around the city, was attended by young, unattached males.
Think about it: if you have a girlfriend, how content is she going to be that you spend most of your time and money on your street machine, and your idea of a good time on Saturday night is going to the parking lot cruise at Mervyn's, then heading out to Kearny VIlla for racing? Most of the very few girls I met back then who thought that was fun actually had their own cars, and the cars were better than most of the guys' rides. Their owners could drive, too. The proof of this was that if a guy did get a girlfriend, he would usually become pretty scarce in the street scene after that.
Even in the seventies at Ruffin Road, where people sometimes even trailered in cars, and ones brought on a tow bar were not at all unusual, those hot summer nights were still almost exclusively male summer nights. I'd guesstimate that no more - and probably less - then ten percent of those guys had girlfriends. That's probably even worse than the Slashdot percentage
I don't know how things are now, because I'm married and have kids and that just takes precedence over fast cars and makes racing absolutely out of the question, but back in the late eighties/early nineties when I was last involved in the scene, it had mostly been taken over by riced-up Japanese cars and (far worse) lifted mini-trucks whose height above the ground was far higher than the IQs of their drivers. I bet most of those guys didn't have girlfriends either.
The fact is, most of the hot rodders and street racers have a great deal in common with overclockers (which is probably why I occassionally dabble in overclocking myself): they're technology nerds. Most of them were far more interested in cams, pistons, and going on junkyard crawls looking for cool rare parts than they were in cruising for girls. It was pretty common to turn out early Saturday morning at the Ecology yard in Otay Mesa, toolbox in hand and cash in pocket, and run into people you knew from Saturday night.
Overclockers are the new hotrodders.