The Rise and Fall of the Geek

chilled writes "Tom Steinberg has posted this guest editorial on The Register bemoaning the decline of the Geek. He suggests that geeks in their alignment against for example RIP and Microsoft are losing their voice. I think he's right but the emergence of a common set of goals should be recognised as a very good thing. The geeks amongst us should use this commonality to rise up and use our voice for progress and not petty squabbling."

This is just not true.

[Kenja]

Geeks have a long and rich heritage they should be proud of. The Geek is and always will be an important part of the circus sideshow. Without them biting the heads off live chickens, the red neck circus patron will have no one to compare themselves favorably to before the beer kicks in.

As a big-name physicist

[PhysicsGenius]

and part-time mathematician, I have to agree with this: The geeks amongst us should use this commonality to rise up and use our voice for progress and not petty squabbling.

Ever since the days of the caveman and the invention of the fire and wheel by the First Geek, Man has been arguing and warring. All arguments are based on misunderstandings, which indicates that two suitably intelligent people would always get along. For too long we have been trying to educate the stupider among us to reach this ideal state and I say that now is the time to give up.

Geeks! Abandon your non-geek wives/husbands and friends! Come with me into the wilderness where we will forge a new society based on intelligence and anime! We will eat naught but pizza and drink naught but Mountain Dew! We may be smelly, but dammit, we won't need tech support numbers either! You have nothing to lose but your dignity!

Re:Uhhh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Romero! How are you?

Any killer new games in the pipeline?

Of course geeks will decline

[Anonymous Coward]

No date => no girlfriend => no wife => no geek kids.

Get on with the real issues

[Target Drone]

use our voice for progress and not petty squabbling

The sooner we can put our petty squabbling aside the sooner we can get move on to the real issue.

Which is better Star Trek or Star Wars?

Re:Uhhh...

[unicron]

First of all, it's a Miata, and it's in your dad's name, so get it right. Second, she can be anyone's girlfriend provided they've managed to save up the 50 bucks. And third, she told me you don't do much "rising" of any type, which I think is pretty disrespectful of her considering how much your're paying.

And no, the itching wasn't there before, no matter how much you wanna believe it was.

Re:As a big-name physicist

[cscx]

You've never spoken to a woman without giving her your credit-card number, have you?

RIP

[Ctrl-Z]

Just what exactly do geeks have against the Routing Information Protocol [faqs.org]?

I'll be damned...

[Usquebaugh]

...if I'll conform to some media stereo type. I speak for myself and don't need no stinking clique focus group telling me what to be.

Jesus next we'll have a tech website that champions free speech but fails to run stories about itself.

*sniff* whatever happened to Jon Katz?

Re:RIP

[Plutor]

Just what exactly do geeks have against the Routing Information Protocol?

Let's start with the usual.

1) True distance routing protocols, like RIP, are inherently flawed. It requires a table of the entire network to be stored on each router, requiring precious hard drive or flash memory space.

2) RIP broadcasts its entire table every thirty seconds.

3) The maximum size of a RIP packet is 512 bytes, so any reasonably sized network will have RIP updates sent as multiple packets. This, combined with 2, can add up to a lot of data transfer FAST.

4) Extremely slow convergence

5) Lack of VLSM support in RIP1 (which too many campuses are still using).

6) Lack of configurability where route summarization is concerned.

Oh wait.. were you joking?

Re:BUSH = RECESSION

[Anonymous Coward]

2. What is the President doing about it?

He's starting a war.

Well, it worked pretty damn well for FDR...

Re:BUSH = RECESSION

[WillyElectrix]

I think it's more like a case of Bush implementing the Recession and SaberRattler interfaces while extending BigOil and SuckyTexasRangers. He's been throwing a lot of exceptions lately which Congress isn't handling very well.

Re:A Counter Opinion

[JWW]

Katzian ..... great term, I like it.

Re:Of course geeks will decline

[Mtgman]

This is why it's important to donate to sperm banks. A geek can't get any in person, but they have hope that if they donate to sperm banks, with a full description of the donor's brilliance and intellectual prowess, that someone will choose his sperm. It's easy, painless and free! Don't deny the next generation the geek genes. Go masturbate into a cup today!

Steven

Re:As a big-name physicist

[unicron]

Which one of these buttons calls your mom to come pick you up?

Re:A Counter Opinion

[glh]

I would even go so far as to say that the majority of geeks that I have known are aware of open source & Linux, and use both at least some of the time (particularilly some of the better GNU tools), but are not married to the Stalmanist ideology that all software should be free, and spend most of their time working with various closed applications. There are those who fit the description of these articles, but I don't believe they don't even represent the majority of geekdom, let alone a consensus.

I think the register is so closely tied to slashdot (at least in some way, probably not officially) that it assumes that the slashdot collective = how to define the way a geek should be. In fact, a lot of sites are looking at slashdot as the source of what geeks/nerds think is important (look at google news!)

Sadly, the term geek is becoming a pop-culture phenomenon. Dare I say it, but slashdot itself IS becoming pop culture (if it's not already).

That's the media for you. What really gets me is, once they get something they run with it. So what about all us poor geeks who don't fit the slashdot collective? A year from now if I go around calling myself a geek, people will automatically think they know what I stand for. Stereotypes, blech.

So I propose a new term to avoid this confusion. I henceforth will no longer call myself a "geek". Those of you who feel the same way can join with me and start using the term "gump". Similar to geek, it once had a negative connotation to it. However, it's time to break away from the soon-to-be-stereotypical geek term and embrace this new one.

Then, when "gump" gets to be a stereotype in a few years, we can change it again to something like "gork" or "gonk" which is a made up word that sounds very silly. :)

Let's get "gumpy". Kind of has a nice ring to it, huh?

Re:A Counter Opinion

[MrSnivvel]

Those of you who feel the same way can join with me and start using the term "gump"

RUN FORREST RUN!

Does not sound to appealling. Back to the drawing board would be my suggestion.

MrSnivvel

Re:"geeks" are being defined.

[PunchMonkey]

I don't know about you, but I AM NOT A GEEK.

I don't know about you,

But if it looks like a duck:
" can program in dozens of languages, configure routers, wire hubs, build servers, manage workstations, hand-edit the Windows Registry, and still remember the PET."

Sounds like a duck:
"I am against the DMCA, against harsh limits on fair use (while being for reasonable limits), and against an Orwellian future."

And walks like a duck:
"I have miserable social skills".

Odds are....

you're a duck.

Re:Trolls and positive karma don't mix.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the total displacement of that spork you've got shoved up your ass?

If you want to learn anything, you need to start doing these experiments yourself. It's easy: get measured graduated cylinder that is large enough to contain the spork. Fill it with enough water that the spork could be immerse completely. Pull the spork out of where it is now, and lick off any contaminants that are of significant volume.

Now measure the water level. Immerse the spork into the water and measure it again. Subtract the measurements. This is the volume of the spork (note that you didn't have to do any fancy math or compute the volume). Multiply this volume by the density of water, and you have the water displacement mass of the spork.

With enough practice, someday you too can be a physics genious.

Re:Pet Peeve

[micromoog]

Outside of the Slashdot / Register / Ars Technica crowd, most geeks still see the computer as merely a tool.

And outside of the Slashdot / Register / Ars Technica crowd, most people still see the geek as merely a tool. ZING!

loose geek, adapt otaku

[circletimessquare]

in '80s it was anthony michael hall in sixteen candles. social outcast. young. obsessive behavior. not getting anything in the bedroom.

in the '90s geek became bill gates (yeah, i know it's ironic anthony michael hall played bill gates in that tv docupic opposite noah wiley's steve jobs). rich. older. strictly technology-associated and more specifically computer-associated. probably getting something in the bedroom now. ;-P

i wonder what the meaning of geek will be in the '00s? either way, it drifts further away from what i think it should be.

i like the japanese word "otaku".

otaku carries all the obsessive weight of the american geek, but overemphasizes the social outcast part, and certainly none of the technophillic rich part. maybe we should disregard the waterdowned term geek in a world where business school dot com scammers could don the adjective in the late '90s to give them some sort of retrohip social cachet.

face it folks. the word "geek" is dead. real geeks should abandon the term.

from now on, refer to me as otaku.

please note, the word otaku must loose an association with a scary underside [geocities.com] first though.

here are some sites which i guess could define obessive "otaku" best ;-P

car otaku [metropolis.co.jp]

anime otaku [umbc.edu]

fish otaku!? [dti.ne.jp]

etc...

The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not.

-William Gibson