Campus Party: Did it start Silicon Britain or let 5,000 geeks sleep together? This year's Campus Party didn't hit the target of 10,000 geeks in a giant tent - but it did manage half that and showed them how to program a Raspberry Pi and overclock a PC, the nerd equivalent of ballroom dancing while on a cruise ship. The Pi programming session was overcrowded, with peeps lining up to learn how the …
Why does a nerd need to be shown how to do this now-a-days when it has been made so easy for them.
They don't have to cross jumpers or in fact even touch the hardware any more. It is all BIOS / EFI controlled. Jeeze there are even some that can be done from the OS. And this was a nerd camp? Stopped reading there.
"Why does a nerd need to be shown how to do this now-a-days when it has been made so easy for them."
Well, quite.
It was bit more fun and a challenge back in the days of Z80 and 8086/80x86 days when overclocking was soldering different crystals and keeping fingers crossed if any peripherals worked with the increased bus timings.
To be fair though, we're not all self proclaimed techno gods like yourself. And even though I know most of the hardware component makers now build in some functionality/ability to overclock hardware, and none the less being fairly techy myself - I still kind of get lost in all of the jargon of memory timings, multipliers and such like, and what needs to be done where; so if I was inclined to want to learn more about it, and was getting tired of gnawing my own legs off in boredom - then something like this might be of interest.
Techno god? Basic overclocking isn't much beyond pigmy level. If you want to move to exotic levels like liquid cooling then maybe a little higher, but well within the range of anyone who can use Google.
There is however much less demand for it now that processor manufacturers are making CPUs that overclocking themselves automatically based on load and thermals.
What? You don't have to be a techno god, but thanks for thinking I am, even if it is not true.
Now-a-days you do not have to know about ram timings, multipliers and such other concerns of overclocking. It is all automatically picked up. You choose the speed you want and bobs your uncle.
I have not overclocked for many a year because it really is not necessary now.
I am now a confirmed athiest anti-theist, and wasn't really a christian when a kid either, but 2 of the best holidays I had were with a friend at organised 'christian week' camp things in england.
We had a full week of electronics (building a whole host of different things that we wanted to), and software coding,
This was back in 1984/85 so it was coding my spectrum and amstrad, and the electronics was things like building infrared sensors, and fm transmitters and working them out in vero-board, etc.
It was great fun. And to be fair to he happy clappers, all the singing and christian stuff was confined to the evenings and optional.
I don't know who arranged them at the time but it was some national organisation - they were excellently organised with great accomodation (in a private girls boarding school in the SE) and if still going I'd recommend it to any 12-16yo techie.
stu
Stu: gotta agree with you. The happy clappy squad turned up at my uni. The atmosphere was amazing - just wish there wasn't the constant undertone of 'convert the unbelievers'. Kind of interesting your comment re the electronics and the like - I guess the fact that alot of the Christians still aren't keen on science doesn't matter when its kiddie mind warping time..
Personally I wish they'd ban the whole lot, every single one, the time & energy we'd save not fighting wars, angsting ourselves into an early grave, not to mention the saving on producing songs of praise - we'd solve fusion and warp drive by the end of next year & bankers would be extinct..
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Aren't most wars fought for acquiring and protecting resources for the greedy, the ideology thing is a marketing smoke screen to make the non-greedy support the greedy cause?
Some belief systems are for people who find science too hard, but mostly it allows oversized groups/packs of humans to live together efficiently (in towns and cities). These are the social protocols which allow trust and trade between people - think about the amount of work getting a bank account, if you did not trust them to look after your money.
Obviously this is an oversimplification.
When I read the original article I thought this was going to be a case of a load of hobbyist programmers getting together to make some useful, original apps.
Instead they seem to have shown some people 'Hello World' in Python on as RasPi (probably) - but wasn't this event intended for developers? And how to overclock a computer. Why overclocking? It seems so pointless. For people playing games, fine, but for developing apps?
The whole event was talked-up in the original article as being for developers, the post-event write-up sounds nothing like it. What a waste of a potentially great event.
If they can't even do basic over-clocking or basic coding for a PI, then they're not geeks (hell even leaving out the PI, even newbie geeks can over-clock a machine - machines of the last few years or several, have removed the need to do it the "old fashioned way" ffs!).
As for social skills - they're over-rated.
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