I´m addicted to being a guru.

Discussion in 'The Guru's Pub' started by StewieTech, Apr 14, 2015.

  1. grunger

    grunger Ancient Guru

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    I'm going to echo what seems to be a growing sentiment....

    I work in IT full time as a senior infrastructure engineer and sysadmin so its not like I really have the inclination to 'play' with them at home any longer.
    Managing network and infrastructure leads you to think of desktop pcs simply as 'tools'
    Build image, WDS deploy image, all settings are then done via GP
    If the machine has a fault software wise re-image it, if it has a h/w fault under warranty HP or Dell come, if not replace it.

    Also the revolution of the gaming rigs has somewhat passed it seems - everything now is more evolutionary.
    I would have one point have had a new rig every ~2 years or so, my current board is probably getting on for 5.

    The massive jumps in performance just aren't there any more, who is really excited that the new i7 is a 18% faster than the old one in real world performance?

    SSDs getting faster sure, but they've now passed the speed that anyone will notice in the real world (unless talking SANs but that's not really what this forum is about)

    Video cards are still getting quicker, but (much as I hate to say this) like it or not the gaming world IS console orientated nowadays (I know they don't have the resolution or some of the detailing you can get with a PC) as they are what the public buy, they require no hard end user setup and they are a nice closed architecture system - easy to develop for.

    I do still have a fairly powerful machine, it will play pretty much anything @ 1440p but I'm not sure what I'll do next.

    I might do an X99 build, but I'm struggling to see the point of investing that kind of money.

    I do encode things still, and that does require power, but as soon as plex on the Xbox on can do MKVs without transcoding then that might not even be required

    I may just get a docking station for my Lenovo X250.

    There are lots of interesting things happening in IT, but most are more Cloud or distributed computing based
     
  2. XP-200

    XP-200 Ancient Guru

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    I bought my first PC back in 1993 to play Star Trek the 25th Anniversary, Dos, adlib cards, floppy disk drive, the monitor sat on top of the PC case and was powered by the PC, overheating was something YOU did while trying to scrounge enough mem to get the game that required the full 640k to run.

    Great days, and even after all this time i am still addicted to the PC.
     
  3. Black_ice_Spain

    Black_ice_Spain Guest

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    I still play a lot, but i've lost interest in building now too. I still have a very powerful PC (for regular standards) but just bcs I need performance, not bcs I like to tweak it.

    Not that building PCs has been very expensive here, always went for the best bang-for-buck and not many high-end gpus or cpus, but now I just get a new part, install it and go to play, **** overclock and such (I do it, but just to get performance, not like checking its max OC or similar)

    I think its bcs I got nearer (work) to hardware and software architecture, I've lost interest on the commercial side.
     
  4. Chillin

    Chillin Ancient Guru

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    Set my mother up with a Macbook Air; all I can say is pure bliss. No more million phone calls because somehow she changed a setting or right clicked and deleted the whole system, etc. Everything just works and it's idiot proof.

    Once my current Acer laptop goes, I'll probably pick up a Macbook as well. All I do these days is watch/stream the random movie and song, abuse Word and surf the internet. Sure Windows is flexible, but when is the last time I even touched really on that flexibility; instead I have a bunch of hardware that works OK with each other but nowhere as well as a tightly controlled ecosystem would.

    The final clinch is that I can also install Windows on the Macbook as a separate OS should I ever need it.

    The only thing I plan on keeping outside the Apple ecosystem for the moment is the phone, I just can't bring myself to pay iPhone prices for the latest flagships.
     

  5. BLEH!

    BLEH! Ancient Guru

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    Sadly, work gets in the way too much nowadays.
     
  6. sykozis

    sykozis Ancient Guru

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    I've got my work laptop. It's a cheap Asus that I got because it was actually cheaper than Chromebooks at the time. I can run OpenSuSE on it with no issues but I need IE for work so I would have to dual boot. Easier to leave it with Windows until FMC catches up with the times.

    My wife has an aging (it's almost 4.5yrs old) Acer laptop with a Pentium P6200 in it that's become very flaky. It needs to be replaced soon but funds are limited right now. I want to get her a MacBook because I want something that will last a few years. All she does is Facebook and Instagram these days so I may just say "eff it" and get her a $200 Chromebook if her Acer can't hold out until December. I just hate the idea of having Google even more involved in our lives.

    I've got 2 desktops. The system in my specs and my Athlon5350 that runs OpenSuSE nearly flawlessly. I want to load Edubuntu on the Athlon5350 and give it to my 7yo son but NVidia's support of Linux is horrid outside of Android. I can't fathom why NVidia hates their users so much. It took me 2hours to install OpenSuSE on the Athlon5350....that included all the drivers and additional software I had to manually search for. I spent DAYS trying to get the NVidia driver to install with no success at all. NVidia fanboys brag about how great NVidia's support of Open Source is and how poor AMD's is....but from where I'm sitting, it's the other way around. So, I figure my 3 options at this point are to either stick with AMD/Intel for the foreseeable future, buy an Intel Compute stick with Ubuntu or buy a Mac Mini and learn to use MacOSX.....and I love the look and size of the Mac Mini.

    For cellphones, I'm sticking with Windows Phones until Ubuntu Touch gets a foot hold (and US availability). Google is too intrusive and Android is lacking too many features that I require. I refuse to own an iPhone and Blackberry rubbed me the wrong way for the second time. I was waiting for the Blackberry Leap to launch....but it's using outdated hardware. They're using Snapdragon S4 with an integrated battery......2 "no-goes" for me. A new phone should never be a downgrade from my current phone.

    The tech industry, as a whole, is moving in a direction I'm not particularly happy with. The "cloud movement" as I tend to call it, is pretty well the end of user privacy. I expect that eventually we'll see consumer hardware fade away and we'll all be stuck with a "PC" that has it's OS pre-loaded onto a NAND chip that's just large enough to store the OS and it's expected updates. All of our personal files will be stored "in the cloud" where "Big Brother" has access to them 24/7. It's my theory that this is the reason we're not seeing SSD's with larger capacities.
     
  7. Calmmo

    Calmmo Guest

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    Get a job building/fixing computers and you'll partially get over it. Happened to me little over a decade ago when I worked as a PC technician.
    Just need to partially fix my need for gaming now.
     
  8. Atlas

    Atlas Maha Guru

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    The update virus is a creepy thing that pops up every once in a while. When my old system get's outdated the whole cycle repeats itself;

    - Check every review on the MB I have my sights on
    - Same with cpu
    - Same with videocard
    - Get a really oversized power supply
    - Get a nice case (well, in my opinion off course)

    And then the overclocking and 3dmark and cpu benchmarks begin lol.

    I do work in IT for about 20 years now, but building your hobby rig is different from doing things in a professional matter.
     
  9. vbetts

    vbetts Don Vincenzo Staff Member

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    Hey I'm a Google Admin! :D

    But I love computers, I love doing what I do. I miss actually fixing computers, but now I manage google services and chrome devices that I love working with everyday.

    Being in this community helped a lot as well, I have learned a great deal here and inspired myself thanks to this community.
     
  10. sykozis

    sykozis Ancient Guru

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    Only until Google decides to take what little control they give away from you.
     

  11. vbetts

    vbetts Don Vincenzo Staff Member

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    We pay for their services, therefore nothing can be taken away or any work we do using their services can be shared or sold.
     
  12. sykozis

    sykozis Ancient Guru

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    Google owns the services you're paying for. They can change what they permit any customer to do.
     
  13. vbetts

    vbetts Don Vincenzo Staff Member

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    That they do, but due to contracts and service agreements they just cannot up and disable on of our services we pay for such as Google Docs. No different than if we utilized hotmail from Microsoft.
     
    Last edited: Apr 16, 2015
  14. Twiddles

    Twiddles Maha Guru

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    You're not the only one ;) Getting low end hardware to "make it function properly" and then watching and enjoying the end result is so much more satisfying :D Got an old AMD Geode lying around that now runs my DNS service etc, it's an old thin client :D

    I'm addicted too, I regularly take old 775 boards etc home from the shop just to create small usable Linux machines for people who are on a tight budget. Besides that it's server/network/PC maintenance/building/software deployement/software testing/sales/stock acquisition etc etc. It does grow on me sometimes and for that I've got a Mac ;)
     
  15. sykozis

    sykozis Ancient Guru

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    Contracts eventually end and new terms are negotiated.
     

  16. vbetts

    vbetts Don Vincenzo Staff Member

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    True, but Google is such a big corporation that we would never lose any services we use from them. Even if it were to happen, there are other companies with services comparable to Google. Again, this is something that can happen to any company.
     
  17. viren

    viren Ancient Guru

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    I always find time to dig up info on new hardware and find ways to update my rig no matter how busy I am.
     

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