[geeks] "Enterprise"

[Peter L. Wargo]

On Tue, 2 Oct 2001, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

> > Wrong, dude.  REAL geeks use their skills to land a killr job, then they
> > can *afford* to buy goodies that work out of the box, leaving them more
> > time to download porn on their DSL connection.  Proving, once again, that
> > it's the goal, not the means. :-)
> 
> And how does a real geek get those mad skills, but by hacking together
> their own TiVo (or insert other silly project that could be avoided by
> subsituting $15k)?

See below... :-)

> Back to figuring out why my symbolic derivitive code isn't working
> correctly.  This bloody palm is spoiling me when it comes to math classes
> because it is more interesting to write scheme programs to do the math on
> it than doing the homework is.  If only I were allowed to use the palm on
> exams...

Actually, skills were acquired by growing up when personal computers were
really not all that affordable, there was only ARPANET (and BITNET!
Remember BITNET?), damn near nothing had a GUI, and in order to finish
your FORTRAN 2 final project, you had to camp out in the computing center
to get your hands on one of the only 7 working terminals for 900 students
and wait 9 FUCKING HOURS for your program to (hopefully) compile and then
run on a Prime running PRIMOS that was slower than a Sinclair ZX-80 with a
cassette tape.

Ah, those were the days.  I feel so lucky now that I can sit down every
day and troubleshoot multi-million $$ supercomputers and watch my stuff
fail in .0009 seconds instead of 9 hours... :-)

-Pete