This is the first piece I have read by Pico and it reminded me of a quote by Gandhi I had noticed on the London Underground "There is more to life than increasing its speed".
What of those is useful? I don't have a Windows machine, so a huge number of those don't make sense or are worthless. I don't care one whit about hardware, which eliminates another large swatch.
1. memory connectors, 2. keep your apps on a memory stick, 3. straighten old CPU pins, 4. know some basic HTML <br />, btw, is to be compatible with XHTML and is not pre HTML-5.0. 5. is "executive customer service", 6. play Quake in <1 hr, 7. "build a Hackintosh", 8. watch movies online (which even my non-geek Mom does), 9. get around content filters (doesn't a real geek have 3G or such connection?), 10. π to 23 decimal cases (blah), 11. replace a controller board, 12. benchmark a computer, 13. use printer paper to decorate your room, 14. "Securely Erase Your Data", 16. hide your porn ... X. 'shop a photo, Y. something about modding a Valve game, Z. rocket jumping, ... and more.
I'm a real geek, and I say that most of these are relevant to only a small subsection of people who self-identify as a real geek, much less of those considered real geeks by others.
That site promotes geeks as users of information. Playing games, using programs, ripping CD, etc. There are a few things about building hardware based on components, but little in the way of creating or doing research.
I didn't finish it as it was full of dreck, but I saw nothing about programming, soldering or wireboarding, working with sensors. The only think I saw about art or design was 'shooping or putting an image into a game. Why learn 20 some odd digits of pi when you could toss in some CPU to Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search or other distributed computing projects? Or spend time with the Wikipedia MySQL dump, load it into your own SQL instance, and geek out learning databases?
Trying to understand the most effective ways in which users online engage with each other, especially with people we don’t know. They could be games, groups /forums or comment threads. Conscious that this is context dependent. Commenters on Scobleizer/Kawasaki Google+ posts are engaging in an online experience which is very different those playing WOW.
You are right, partly. Am more of a DB person with a minimal understanding of scripting languages. Hence the reach-out. About building the next facebook, I would love to.
Am considering Ruby at the moment. But reminded of Twitter dropping Ruby due to certain reliability issues. Hence having second thoughts. Or am I a little ahead of myself here worrying about something that may never affect me?
Hmm... Do you have plans of building something at Twitter scale? If you can foresee that, then I guess you are right when you are considering Twitter's case of dropping Ruby.
I am no Ruby-ist but I am sure Ruby is not that bad that you will have troubles scaling. You just have to understand how to scale and you can use either PHP or Ruby to apply the general concepts of scalability.
Twitter didn't "drop Ruby". They just replaces (huge) parts of their stack by other things that might or might not written in their old default language. As will anyone that has to work at their scale. Their frontend was still Rails for a long time (or still is, in parts?).
Example: see what they have to offer as open source. Still quite a bit of Ruby:
http://twitter.github.com
For what it's worth, Facebook "dropped PHP" in the same way that Twitter "dropped Ruby" in that both dramatically exceeded the scale that these languages and frameworks support out of the box and had to custom develop certain components to keep costs down.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari...