I'm a photo geek and absolutely can't live without my Canon 350D (and whatever I replace it with next year). But how do you know *you* have it in you to be a photo geek ? Easy. Just take the following questionaire
You see this picture and notice:
The wonderful tonal range and interesting composition
Whoa... look at them tits.
That's it. If you answered (1), go buy a Canon DSLR (Canon is the overall the best system for someone starting out with DSLR's today. Really) or if you're really moved by the play of light and shade in that picture, you probably want to buy a film camera and shoot ilford black and white film.
And btw,if you answered 2, (and assuming you're a typical slashdotter ) you'll probably never see tits like that in real life.
"IMHO, Vahalia's "Unix Internals" is not worth 61$. It's dated in the sense that it doesn't really talk about the "modern" PC Unixes (e.g. FreeBSD and Linux) at all."
That's funny. If you read the Vahalia book and the Linux internals book reviewed here, you would notice that a lot of the stuff that Vahalia talks about (e.g slab allocator, SysV memory management integrating buffer cache and page cache etc), is just now being integrated into the Linux kernel. In fact I even remember seeing some parts of the kernel referring to the Vahalia book as the primary source of information... (just grep through the source for vahalia). In fact I would go so far as to say that for a lot of Linux kernel subsytems, as they exist in version 2.4, Vahalia book is an excellent reference. The two books I mentioned above nicely complement each other.
Ciao
In a Unix world, its likely that if you dont learn the basics you cant get it to work at all. Unfortunately, with NT, you can still manage to get it work 25% of the way. This leads to all the common misconfigurations of NT, and all the sterotypes of NT users and administrators.
The above comment is mostly true but you have to remember that the situation with NT a (that any moron can call himself a "programmer" by dopping a few controls on a form) is by design. It comes from the long cherished beliefs of the windows world about pictures being superior to words for all possible tasks. That may be true in many cases from a usability standpoint and that too for people afraid of computers (probably a large majority of all users out there). But as soon as you want the computer to do anything more than those pretty pictorial programs provide for, you need to learn to use words (command line, shell scripting, programming languages etc.) And when it comes to using words, the traditional unix users are way ahead of the game. That's the reason why a grounding in Unix for aspiring computer professionals is inherently better than that in picture based environments like windows and macs. And that is the reason that microsoft making inroads into the educational market can be construed as a "Bad Thing(tm)" for the state of computer education.
Q: Your software breaks when I do X. A: We never do X. You are weird. Don't do X. Now go away.
.. Or, just apply the patch that is available on the IBM developerworks site and recompile the kernel now optimized for your "weird" case. See... this is the beauty of Open source. You want to run 10000 threads... you want to run real-time tasks... you want your computer to make you coffee.... fine, we don't want to do any of these things in the standard release kernel, but you are welcome to hack it to your needs ( most likely just apply patches somebody has already prepared for this particular case). Welcome my dear friend to the wonderous world of Open Source.
it won't be noticed if there are other, more obvious factors in play.Like special abilities (athletic prowess, artistic talent, social skills), or even physical attributes (gender, race, etc).
Hmmm there's something to that. Since I do not fit that ill-dressed/fat/non-social etc. etc stereotype, I sometimes feel almost like a closet geek. I almost always wince when a "civilians" calls another person a geek in front of me taking me to be a regular ( ie non-geek) guy. I guess I'll have to do some sort of "coming out" soon....:-) grepya ( really really grepya )
My definition of "geek" is somebody who questions all things and tries to find answers for himself. ( I know, I know... but there are amazingly few women I know of who fit this description honestly). Also, geeks are willing to take apart anything to see how it works. ( This could mean physically taking apart machanical things like radios or computers OR it could mean minutely examining workings of big systems like gevernments and corporations to understand how and why they work the way they do..) They become very annoyed if they are not allowed to ask questions or take apart things to see for themselves how they work. Real geeks don't like taking things on faith. Hence the rebellion against Microsoft and God. And in IMHO, if you really question today's status quo in the world carefully, you can't help but being with the liberals on most of the issues. Especially if you are not an American ( and hence pay less attention to the mind-numbinlgy idiotic and partial American media)
Please note carefully that computer programmer/hacker!=real geek. There may be a large overlap in the two sets but geekness is an attitude... not a profession. I have a couple of higher degrees in science and getting one in engineering right now. I know PhD Scientists who believe that there's not enough evidence for Global Warming but Jesus's resurrection has been scientifically proven.
So geekness has nothing to do with Degrees either... I was a proud geek at 15 ( though I didn't know the word then, not being a native English speaker) And I am a proud geek now at 27. And yes... flame me all you want to but I do look down upon stupid people ( and you know who you are)
Slashdot Mirror
You see this picture and notice:
- The wonderful tonal range and interesting composition
- Whoa... look at them tits.
That's it. If you answered (1), go buy a Canon DSLR (Canon is the overall the best system for someone starting out with DSLR's today. Really) or if you're really moved by the play of light and shade in that picture, you probably want to buy a film camera and shoot ilford black and white film.And btw,if you answered 2, (and assuming you're a typical slashdotter ) you'll probably never see tits like that in real life.
"IMHO, Vahalia's "Unix Internals" is not worth 61$. It's dated in the sense that it doesn't really talk about the "modern" PC Unixes (e.g. FreeBSD and Linux) at all."
That's funny. If you read the Vahalia book and the Linux internals book reviewed here, you would notice that a lot of the stuff that Vahalia talks about (e.g slab allocator, SysV memory management integrating buffer cache and page cache etc), is just now being integrated into the Linux kernel. In fact I even remember seeing some parts of the kernel referring to the Vahalia book as the primary source of information... (just grep through the source for vahalia). In fact I would go so far as to say that for a lot of Linux kernel subsytems, as they exist in version 2.4, Vahalia book is an excellent reference. The two books I mentioned above nicely complement each other.
Ciao
The above comment is mostly true but you have to remember that the situation with NT a (that any moron can call himself a "programmer" by dopping a few controls on a form) is by design. It comes from the long cherished beliefs of the windows world about pictures being superior to words for all possible tasks. That may be true in many cases from a usability standpoint and that too for people afraid of computers (probably a large majority of all users out there). But as soon as you want the computer to do anything more than those pretty pictorial programs provide for, you need to learn to use words (command line, shell scripting, programming languages etc.) And when it comes to using words, the traditional unix users are way ahead of the game. That's the reason why a grounding in Unix for aspiring computer professionals is inherently better than that in picture based environments like windows and macs. And that is the reason that microsoft making inroads into the educational market can be construed as a "Bad Thing(tm)" for the state of computer education.
A: We never do X. You are weird. Don't do X. Now go away.
My definition of "geek" is somebody who questions all things and tries to find answers for himself. ( I know, I know... but there are amazingly few women I know of who fit this description honestly). Also, geeks are willing to take apart anything to see how it works. ( This could mean physically taking apart machanical things like radios or computers OR it could mean minutely examining workings of big systems like gevernments and corporations to understand how and why they work the way they do..) They become very annoyed if they are not allowed to ask questions or take apart things to see for themselves how they work. Real geeks don't like taking things on faith. Hence the rebellion against Microsoft and God. And in IMHO, if you really question today's status quo in the world carefully, you can't help but being with the liberals on most of the issues. Especially if you are not an American ( and hence pay less attention to the mind-numbinlgy idiotic and partial American media)
Please note carefully that computer programmer/hacker!=real geek. There may be a large overlap in the two sets but geekness is an attitude... not a profession. I have a couple of higher degrees in science and getting one in engineering right now. I know PhD Scientists who believe that there's not enough evidence for Global Warming but Jesus's resurrection has been scientifically proven.
So geekness has nothing to do with Degrees either... I was a proud geek at 15 ( though I didn't know the word then, not being a native English speaker) And I am a proud geek now at 27.
And yes... flame me all you want to but I do look down upon stupid people ( and you know who you are)
grepya