Just wondering if you guys knew of any other sources to read up on geeky stuff. any good tech magazines worth subscribing to? and are there any geek/tech related tv shows out there?

Advanced or not id like to see em. and what are some other good tech forums? It seems like the only geeks on cb I could count with one hand.

in fact. I will.

CJ,
Mipadi,
illriginal(that douche),
and thats about it. So there is barely a point making threads it tech, when it would practically be more beneficial to pm one of those people.

Well many imageboards have a tech forum.

Facepunch.com's Hardware And Software forum is where I reside.

I read Anandtech, Distrowatch, and Infoworld online; and I have a subscription to Popular Science.

ya I was checking out facepunch. does stuff actually get done over there? and are there a lot of btards? they have 3500 users online atm.

and I bookmarked the other 3. Ive run across distrowatch a couple times already.

edit: also is there an age limit? last time I put my real age on a site that I was too young for it banned that email and username so I couldnt use it.

Shit gets done quick on FP. Being a /b/tard is frowned upon, and 3500 users is below average.

Age limit is 14 on facepunch, I think. Go ahead and register with a fake age though.

IT stuff, fixing hardware, etc., never really interested me (it's kinda...boring, in my opinion), so I don't really hang out at a lot of forums that talk about hardware, building computers, and that stuff. I'm also not really into gadgets, so I don't care to talk much about cell phones, etc. This is all probably because I'm actually an English major masquerading as a systems programmer.

I do like writing software, so my hangout spot used to be Proggit (the programming subreddit at Reddit.com). Back about 2+ years ago, Proggit was really more about programming language theory, rather than just programming. Proggit exposed me to a number of languages I use today, such as Scala and Erlang, and also introduced me to a lot of theoretical concepts (I happened to be taking my required prog. lang. theory course back then, and a compiler optimization course, so Proggit was way cool). But now it's infested with C++ and .NET programmers, and most of the posts there are about boring day-to-day programming, programmer war stories, and that sort of thing.

The xkcd forums occasionally have some interesting posts about programming and "real" (read: theoretical) comp sci, but, again, most of the posts there are about C++ and PHP, which along with Perl form the trifecta of Worst Languages Ever "Designed" (if you can call PHP "designed").

Lambda the Ultimate is a pretty good place for "real" (read: theoretical) programming talk.

I hang out at GitHub, which isn't really a discussion forum but it's a good way to check out what other people are doing in the world of open-source software development. (Plus, Git rocks.)

I used to really be into OS design, so I read Kernel Trap a lot, which condenses mailing list posts for the major kernels (Linux, BSDs, etc.), but I don't check it out much anymore -- don't really have time. I spend most of my day working with computers & software, so to be honest, I don't really feel like reading about them in my off-time.

I usually use 1990 for my age on almost every site.

And that is interesting too, il check those out.

Honestly, it's the software side I find boring. I love dicking around with hardware. The only programming language I really enjoy writing is Python.

ditto.

I really would like to get more into the software side though cause that is where the real money can be made.

Hardware is much more difficult to see where money can be made. You would be amazed at the amount of money that goes into and comes out of CPU and GPU design.

I'd love to work at AMD, Intel, or Nvidia.



That and I'm a free software advocate.

To each his own. The way I see it, hardware itself doesn't really do anything interesting or useful. It does virtually nothing without software to control it. Plus, I personally find the mathematics and science behind programming languages and their design is more interesting than mucking around with hardware. I could just never get excited about plugging cables together. <shrug>

Not to say there's nothing interesting about putting components together, or setting up networks or whatever.

I'm more into the hardware than just sticking components together. I've actually been trying to build my own working programmable computer from the ground up.

I'm going to see if I can get it to play some classic video game themes through an old speaker I have laying around.

tight.
could you make your own hard drive or something?

I probably could if I really wanted to, but I'm not going to try. I don't really need one for this.

I'll probably use punch cards or something, just because shit's tight.

Yeah, I mean, there are some cool aspects to hardware design. And my research background is in networking and systems, so low-level hardware is interesting to the extent that I can exploit it to make software run faster (that was the crux of my undergraduate research -- exploiting processor caches and virtual memory for fun and profit) but...I still see it as mundane. I dunno. Hardware is simultaneously boringly simple and agonizingly complex. And I still see software as the way to get useful (and fun) stuff done. Plus the whole science and theory behind programming language design is fascinating. Sure, "boring" languages like C++ aren't terribly interesting, but there's much fun to be had when looking at the underlying concepts on which Lisp is founded, or how closures are implemented in various languages, or how Erlang solves a lot of concurrency issues, or how purely functional programming actually lets us use the full power of multiple processor cores, etc.


Sure. If you access to platinum, finely-tuned machinery, and a clean room.

I have access to platinum (probably not even enough for a kilobyte of storage), but I don't know about the finely-tuned machinery or clean room

deeewwww it.
You havent really made a computer till you have made each component.
and then you still havent made a computer from scratch until you mine each element used in the making of the parts.
and ditto for the machinery used in molding the parts.