Monday, August 9. 2010Can Apple users be True Geeks?Trackbacks
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"So where to draw the line? I guess to me its comes down to "are you a creator or a consumer""
Ooh, no, really, don't go there. At least not without reading the post I wrote last month: http://www.technovia.co.uk/2010/07/the-myth-of-programming-is-creativity.html
Back in the day, I used to call Mac users "font-spotters", because they were like trainspotters who could tell you the name of all the fonts used in a document.
Shakespeare talked about geeks / gecks: this is Malvolio in Twelfth Night. "Why have you suffer'd me to be imprison'd, Kept in a dark house, visited by the priest, And made the most notorious geck and gull That e'er invention play'd on? tell me why." And it seems that sometime between 1970 and 1980, a geek stopped being a circus performer who bit the heads of animals. That's a pretty extreme change of meaning, I think! See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=geek
I love Benjamin's definition, sounds right for a lot of people. I know many people who build in code, fewer who build in hardware. In my case, I have built/adapted my own PC, but now, it's just easier to buy the thing that just works!
I have one of those giant 8-core macs. I haven't switched it on in a good while. Can't see myself buying another high-spec machine.
The last time I had a big processing task to do, I started a cluster of 20 cloud-based machines, ran my stuff for a few hours, and then got back to surfing the web. Just like I used to with time-sharing mainframes, but without the beardy gatekeepers' oversight. I'm surprised how little I care about the performance of my personal machine now. The last time I did some video editing - not being a PC gamer, that's as intensive as I get - my laptop kept up with me fine. Is building a PC from scratch really so geeky? I haven't done that since ten years ago, but even then it was mostly just slotting the cables into the right holes and wrestling with a few metal tabs. We used to have races to build them in the office - around 7 minutes was the record. I don't think it was particularly geeky work. |
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