The Computer Geek Thread

[Prog Snob]

I know there's a PC thread, but fuck PCs. Most, not all, of the geeks I know don't use PCs, so I figured why not create a thread for anyone who loves computers and exploring every aspect of them, whether it is building an insanely powerful machine or using nifty software like Wireshark or Kali Linux.

The first article I wanted to post here I just came across while on the Cisco Learning Network. It goes over the basics of fiber-optic cables and the two modes it uses, single-mode and multimode.

https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/blogs/vip-perspectives/2016/05/05/optical-fiber-explained-and-demystified

Dig in!

[Logain Ablar]

I'm not sure how much mileage you're going to get from a discussion on fibre optics..  I think I have forgotten everything I ever learned in school about them.

Can you remember every computer you owned, from a kid? My list goes something like:

* ZX Spectrum 48k + (A UK 8-bit classic. Tape drive. Games took 10 minutes to load.)
* Atari 512ST (Had a fierce rivalry with the Commodore Amiga. First computer I had with a mouse)
* Apple Mac Classic (All in one, with the small black and white screen. Tiny hard drive, thin)
* Apple Mac Performa 630 (Colour! Prince of Persia!)
* Windows Desktop PC - 120Mhz Pentium I, IIRC (Quake (I and II) was an unhealthy additiction. Multiplayer with a friend's computer by linking together with a serial cable. 28k modem that sent the phone bill through the roof.)
* Windows Desktop PC - Some sort of self-assembly job, where I bought the motherboard, case, graphics card, etc separately and put them all together. (Broadband!)
* Windows Desktop PC - Bought this one from a manufacturer. DVD Writer!!

After that, a couple of Windows Laptops, and we're up to date. The first one is a dinosaur now, but I bumped up the memory and installed Ubuntu to keep it limping on.

[cramx3]

I deal with fiberoptics on a daily basis so that stuff is all known to me... not a whole lot to say there besides it's amazing how it works.  We deal with almost all 10G short range in our DC and long range for our outside network connections.  Internally we are also mostly at 40G between switches and our highest performance servers operate with 100G fiber uplinks. 

[Prog Snob]

People can discuss whatever they want.      I was just posting an interesting article. Hell, we can talk about water cooling systems or anything else.

As far as remembering all the computer I owned, let's see.

*IBM PC-XT (My parents got it for me for Xmas many years ago)
*Gateway (I don't remember much about it)
*The next two were home built, though I don't remember the specifics of them now.
*Acer laptop. It's what I have now, but I removed Windows from it and right now Linux Mint is installed.

I deal with fiberoptics on a daily basis so that stuff is all known to me... not a whole lot to say there besides it's amazing how it works.  We deal with almost all 10G short range in our DC and long range for our outside network connections.  Internally we are also mostly at 40G between switches and our highest performance servers operate with 100G fiber uplinks. 

We also deal with a lot of fiber optic links here in the huge transit network. I'm not sure of the specifics of them, though I could easily find out. I can imagine they're probably the same speeds that you mentioned.

[cramx3]

Maybe, maybe not.  My company needs the highest speeds possible.  All my previous jobs at banks didn't come close to having as quick of a network as we have here.  To compete with other online ad tech like google and facebook, we need to keep up with the times.  100G long range circuits is a thing now, we are actively looking into it as well. 

[Logain Ablar]

People can discuss whatever they want.      I was just posting an interesting article. Hell, we can talk about water cooling systems or anything else.

Of course - sorry if I came across a little snarky. Didn't mean to.

What do you think of Linux Mint? Would it be suitable for older hardware? My ancient laptop dual boots with Ubuntu and Windows 7. I can't fully ditch Windows as I need it to run some of the music software to hook up to my Boss and TC Electronic pedals. It's a pain that Linux isn't more widely supported for that kind of stuff. 

[Prog Snob]

People can discuss whatever they want.      I was just posting an interesting article. Hell, we can talk about water cooling systems or anything else.

Of course - sorry if I came across a little snarky. Didn't mean to.

What do you think of Linux Mint? Would it be suitable for older hardware? My ancient laptop dual boots with Ubuntu and Windows 7. I can't fully ditch Windows as I need it to run some of the music software to hook up to my Boss and TC Electronic pedals. It's a pain that Linux isn't more widely supported for that kind of stuff. 

You didn't come across as snarky. I was just clarifying the purpose of the thread. 

I like Linux Mint, but I wouldn't recommend it for older machines. I would say to go with Ubuntu MATE which is very lightweight.

[Logain Ablar]

Thanks, will check out Ubuntu MATE..

This channel on Youtube is good if you are into retro computer hardware: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8uT9cgJorJPWu7ITLGo9Ww

E.g. this one on oldschool computer music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_3d1x2VPxk

[Tomislav95]

Ubuntu MATE is really cool. Unfortunately, my laptop has switchable graphics so there are problems with drivers. Linux Mint works just fine but I use Windows 8.1 in dual boot with it. Usually, I use Mint for college stuff, bash scripts, programming etc.

[Prog Snob]

Thanks, will check out Ubuntu MATE..

This channel on Youtube is good if you are into retro computer hardware: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8uT9cgJorJPWu7ITLGo9Ww

E.g. this one on oldschool computer music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_3d1x2VPxk

Thanks. I'll check those out when I get home.  I like looking at some of the older equipment.

[faizoff]

It's been ages since I messed with actual unix command line scripts. The next major update to windows 10 will have a native bash command terminal from what I read.

[El Barto]

TRS-80

Apple 2
IBM AT
Compaq portable

The latter three came and went, as my old man would bring different ones home on the weekends. At the time they were all cutting edge, though.

[cramx3]

The latter three came and went, as my old man would bring different ones home on the weekends. At the time they were all cutting edge, though.

Similar to me.  I can't recall any of my old PCs through my childhood, but my father was a data center manager for a bit and would always bring home different computers.  It's actually how I got into technology, having been playing with it since I was a kid (granted, now all kids play with computers but back in the early 90s that was not normal).

[Prog Snob]

When I was in the sixth grade, my school decided to have computer classes. It was the first year our school did it. I loved it and that's how my parents came to the idea of buying a computer for the home. We did those BASIC programs. It was impressive to type lines and lines of code just to see something flash across the screen for a split second.   

[cramx3]

When I was in the sixth grade, my school decided to have computer classes. It was the first year our school did it. I loved it and that's how my parents came to the idea of buying a computer for the home. We did those BASIC programs. It was impressive to type lines and lines of code just to see something flash across the screen for a split second. 

  nice.  My town has ATT in it with their labs and therefore lots of smart asians in technology.  So growing up in school, computers and programming were fairly popular that they offered a programming glass for a one year experiment in 8th grade.  I took it, we learned Pascal and it was awesome.  I remember I programmed a game for betting on (fake) horse races using random number generators for how fast each horse would travel and a banking system for the players.  Programming was always so much fun back then.  I ended up taking AP Computer Programming in high school and taking another one time offered experiment class after school on discrete mathematics.  Definitely helped guide me towards getting my computer engineering degree. 

[Prog Snob]

That's pretty awesome. So how well do you know programming? Which languages did you learn?

[Kotowboy]

I had an Acorn Electron when I was about 7 and I learned BASIC programming

[cramx3]

That's pretty awesome. So how well do you know programming? Which languages did you learn?

High school and college only taught C++, I don't program professionally and stopped enjoying it during college so I haven't learned anything new in this area since college.  I also learned some machine language for the certain motorola chip we used for programming in my robotics class.  I would say I knew programming fairly well having done so much course work, but I'd need one hell of a refresher if I were to try and program now.

Also, I used to use Visual Basic for programming AOL Progz back in the 95-98 years when trolling AOL was fun.

My little brother followed my footsteps and got his degree in computer science.  He is way better/more into programming than I ever was and does web programming for a living.

[Prog Snob]

I started to teach myself C++ since that's a pretty ubiquitous language and most of the hacking programs are designed using that. I just kept pushing it to the side but plan to one day pick it back up, even if it's just for an hour a day.

Machine language is pretty difficult to learn, isn't it?

[cramx3]

I started to teach myself C++ since that's a pretty ubiquitous language and most of the hacking programs are designed using that. I just kept pushing it to the side but plan to one day pick it back up, even if it's just for an hour a day.

Machine language is pretty difficult to learn, isn't it?

Yea, programming in hex is not fun.

[Tomislav95]

Do you mean assembler or? We were programming ARM and some custom RISC processors in one course but it's not really my thing. I like high level programming (object-oriented) much more. Last semester I had object-oriented programming in Java and I loved it, still developing my Java skills. Soon we'll start with some Python but just with basics. I plan to study it further if I like it.
I remember we were studying QBasic in elementary scool but teacher was terrible, I didn't learn anything .
Great topic

[ReaperKK]

I started to teach myself C++ since that's a pretty ubiquitous language and most of the hacking programs are designed using that. I just kept pushing it to the side but plan to one day pick it back up, even if it's just for an hour a day.

Machine language is pretty difficult to learn, isn't it?

Yea, programming in hex is not fun.

You ever see the videos of that guy who has his own os. TempleOS?

Anyway I like this topic, I've built many pc's and I was actually cleaning out my closet when I just found a bunch of old motherboard and hard drives, I'm going to have to slap those in and see what's on there.

I'll never forget my first pc, it was a windows 95 AMD compaq, AMD 266mhz. I had spent a weekend in elementary school learning how to recover windows because I deleted some system files by accident

Since then I've been building my pc's, I have stacks of old video cards, motherboards, and processors.

I've always been a big AMD fan but I'm going to build a new Intel gaming rig when the 1080 comes out later this month.

[Logain Ablar]

I had an Acorn Electron when I was about 7 and I learned BASIC programming

Predecessor to the mighty BBC Micro! Our school had one, which lived on a trolley and was wheeled between classrooms.

I did some BASIC programming on the Spectrum, but was too young to understand much about it, other than following tutorials. I didn't learn to program "properly" until uni, where we used a language called Modula 2, which nobody in the real world has ever heard of.

Then, my first real job doing C programming, and then Java came on to the scene about 1999, and it has been Java ever since, plus some of the other technologies that comes with the web.

Assembly language isn't easy, as you are at the lowest possible level, putting values into the registers of the CPU, but I'm in awe of those guys in the 80's that managed to create seriously playable games with such limited resources. You wouldn't get much into 48 or 64kB these days!

[cramx3]

Do you mean assembler or? We were programming ARM and some custom RISC processors in one course but it's not really my thing. I like high level programming (object-oriented) much more. Last semester I had object-oriented programming in Java and I loved it, still developing my Java skills. Soon we'll start with some Python but just with basics. I plan to study it further if I like it.
I remember we were studying QBasic in elementary scool but teacher was terrible, I didn't learn anything .
Great topic

Yea, thats actually what I meant.  The terms are fuzzy.  I can't recall at all what type of processor it was, but I think it was a RISC as well.

Anyway I like this topic, I've built many pc's and I was actually cleaning out my closet when I just found a bunch of old motherboard and hard drives, I'm going to have to slap those in and see what's on there.

I'll never forget my first pc, it was a windows 95 AMD compaq, AMD 266mhz. I had spent a weekend in elementary school learning how to recover windows because I deleted some system files by accident

Since then I've been building my pc's, I have stacks of old video cards, motherboards, and processors.

I've always been a big AMD fan but I'm going to build a new Intel gaming rig when the 1080 comes out later this month.

Nice.  I've got a large stack of extra parts as well.  Also, from the PC thread, Im going to my friends house on Sunday to build his PC so that should be fun.  In fact, I just took a 400GB SSD off the shelf from work to be his OS and took a 2TB drive from an old server awhile ago that he will use for his data.

For my PC, since I plan on getting the GTX 1080 card soonish, I am going to take apart my whole PC and give it a good clean and fresh build with Windows 10.  My case is disgusting since I have a cat and it gets dust and fur all on the insides and my fan performance is suffering so since I need to get inside to replace the 1080, I might as well go full in and gut it all, clean it, and re-install.

[Logain Ablar]

Nice.  I've got a large stack of extra parts as well.  Also, from the PC thread, Im going to my friends house on Sunday to build his PC so that should be fun.  In fact, I just took a 400GB SSD off the shelf from work to be his OS and took a 2TB drive from an old server awhile ago that he will use for his data.

For my PC, since I plan on getting the GTX 1080 card soonish, I am going to take apart my whole PC and give it a good clean and fresh build with Windows 10.  My case is disgusting since I have a cat and it gets dust and fur all on the insides and my fan performance is suffering so since I need to get inside to replace the 1080, I might as well go full in and gut it all, clean it, and re-install.

Is your work ok with you taking stuff home? I worked for a one place that let you buy some of the older machines at a reduced price, and the money went to charity. They stopped it eventually, because apparently all the data on the hard drives had to be securely destroyed. This had to be done by an external company, so no more cheap PCs.. 

I used to be into PC gaming, but I ended up spending a fortune, as it seemed like you needed update the hardware with the release of the latest game. Sometimes you could get away with updating the graphics card, but other times you needed a brand new motherboard, memory etc. It all got pretty expensive! 

[cramx3]

Yea, we have lots of unused stuff that my boss will look the other way.  We are a small team so not a big corporate environment.  The old 2TB drive from a server is a bit tricky though because we do have a policy for hard drive destruction now... but that hard drive was from an old server from a company we bought so it was kind of off the books so another "look the other way" type of scenario.  We've given away some really nice servers to people in our company in the past but they are getting more strict about it now (not because of giving them away, but because the company is finding ways to reuse old equipment in different ways).  I have a server in my basement that I took from work.

I actually have a degausser in my office for hard drives which is kind of cool, and also our policy is to shred SSDs (via blender).  So for the first one we did, I recorded it and put on youtube, it's pretty cool:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHu_EJVZm58

[Logain Ablar]

Excellent choice of the "smoothie" setting. Nobody's getting data off that bad boy! 

[dparrott]

My dad was a modem engineer, so I grew up with TRS-80 (my dad would call it Trash-80), C64, had Apple IIe in middle school, used to do a ton of programming and play games with that. 

[Prog Snob]

Anyway I like this topic, I've built many pc's and I was actually cleaning out my closet when I just found a bunch of old motherboard and hard drives, I'm going to have to slap those in and see what's on there.

I'll never forget my first pc, it was a windows 95 AMD compaq, AMD 266mhz. I had spent a weekend in elementary school learning how to recover windows because I deleted some system files by accident

Since then I've been building my pc's, I have stacks of old video cards, motherboards, and processors.

I've always been a big AMD fan but I'm going to build a new Intel gaming rig when the 1080 comes out later this month.

Nice.  I've got a large stack of extra parts as well.  Also, from the PC thread, Im going to my friends house on Sunday to build his PC so that should be fun.  In fact, I just took a 400GB SSD off the shelf from work to be his OS and took a 2TB drive from an old server awhile ago that he will use for his data.

For my PC, since I plan on getting the GTX 1080 card soonish, I am going to take apart my whole PC and give it a good clean and fresh build with Windows 10.  My case is disgusting since I have a cat and it gets dust and fur all on the insides and my fan performance is suffering so since I need to get inside to replace the 1080, I might as well go full in and gut it all, clean it, and re-install.

I used to have a bag of parts from my old computers, but those were destroyed by the ex along with my Cisco equipment. I used to buy old parts from people on Craig's List just for shits and giggles.

[cramx3]

I've sold most of my old parts besides my hard drives now.  I will sell my gtx 770 once I upgrade.  Sucks your ex destroyed your stuff 

[Prog Snob]

Tell me about it. Fucker.

Anyways, I downloaded a Wireshark course so I'm going to mess around with that today. I'm also looking for a good C++ course, so I can develop my own hacking apps. Don't worry. I'm only going to test it on the mini network I have setup here. Though, I did hack into my landlords Wifi when mine was incapacitated.  I have my laptop, my old deskop, and the laptop my mother was going to get rid of. Along with learning Wireshark, which is a must for any experienced network engineer due to the understanding one gleans from it in regards how data travels across a network, and C++, I'm studying for the CCIE. Right now, I'm reading a book about TCP/IP which is probably one of the most important things to fully understand in networking.

[ReaperKK]

I had an Acorn Electron when I was about 7 and I learned BASIC programming

Predecessor to the mighty BBC Micro! Our school had one, which lived on a trolley and was wheeled between classrooms.

I did some BASIC programming on the Spectrum, but was too young to understand much about it, other than following tutorials. I didn't learn to program "properly" until uni, where we used a language called Modula 2, which nobody in the real world has ever heard of.

Then, my first real job doing C programming, and then Java came on to the scene about 1999, and it has been Java ever since, plus some of the other technologies that comes with the web.

Assembly language isn't easy, as you are at the lowest possible level, putting values into the registers of the CPU, but I'm in awe of those guys in the 80's that managed to create seriously playable games with such limited resources. You wouldn't get much into 48 or 64kB these days!

From what I remember Chris Sawyer coded almost all of RollerCoaster Tycoon in assembly.

[orcus116]

I'm not sure how much mileage you're going to get from a discussion on fibre optics.

The whole telecommunications infrastructure fascinates me mainly due to my work (wireless telecommunications). I'm on the site planning/engineering side but I've done a lot of work with backhaul for the major cell phone carriers so I've worked with Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Lightower, etc. While not essential to my line of work I love knowing how fiber optics works with connections to switches, individual sites, and the like.

Not that I would get one but are there any feasible fiber connection cards directly to home computers or would that not even matter if the local provider doesn't offer something like that? Like could you ask them to install a fiber to fiber switch in lieu of a fiber to copper switch?

[Prog Snob]

I'm not sure how much mileage you're going to get from a discussion on fibre optics.

The whole telecommunications infrastructure fascinates me mainly due to my work (wireless telecommunications). I'm on the site planning/engineering side but I've done a lot of work with backhaul for the major cell phone carriers so I've worked with Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Lightower, etc. While not essential to my line of work I love knowing how fiber optics works with connections to switches, individual sites, and the like.

Not that I would get one but are there any feasible fiber connection cards directly to home computers or would that not even matter if the local provider doesn't offer something like that? Like could you ask them to install a fiber to fiber switch in lieu of a fiber to copper switch?

I don't know if there are any switches made that have direct fiber connections, though I could be wrong. The ones we use at my job use a transceiver which gets plugged into a special switch port. They look something like this:



I actually have a couple lying around the house that we weren't using at my job. No reason other than I thought they were cool.     I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that eventually fiber will come directly into the home, but again, I think there will be some kind of intermediary connection point, like a patch panel of sorts, before it gets to the routing/switching device.

[orcus116]

I always thought if I ever had a stupid amount of money I'd have some kind of server room in my house with business level switches and maybe even see if I could get a wireless carrier to install a DAS system. I've seen one off donor systems only costing around $12K.