What technologies are geeks pioneering today?

     What if most geeks today really are just buying Macs instead of building 
     their own overclocked Windows PCs from Newegg parts?

I can agree with the point of the article, but I wish it weren't so one-sided.

I'm using Ubuntu because it saves me from dealing with that piece of trash that is MacPorts.

I'm also (still) building my own desktops from parts because it's cheaper and I like the control in choosing the capabilities that matter to me.

      But then something strange happened. Lots of people switched 
      to Apple laptops.

Statistics disprove this point. Maybe true in certain niches; also Windows is popular precisely because normal people want to get their job done and just won't give a shit about cool and shiny things or about superiority of architecture.

In companies I am seeing 7-year old Windows XP setups. And in companies with a good IT department, people use backups and image restores in case a computer gets affected with viruses; it worked very well thus far.

I also worked on a MacBook Pro for 2 years, and I did have to reinstall everything at some point because of hard-drive failure ... and because I was in a minority of OS X users, the internal software used for OTA backups wasn't available for me, so I had to install everything from scratch with no support from the IT department.

Using an exotic OS ... yeah, there's a dark side to that.

You're just getting old. I'm pleased to say that geekdom is not aging with you as you posit in this article. I know people who are doing all of the above and more.

But the real pioneers aren't doing any of those things. They're doing things that aren't on our radar yet. That no one else has imagined or even can imagine yet. They'll show up when you least expect them to, with something that has you scratching your head at first.

Then they'll take over the world.

I wouldn't qualify as a geek any longer, but there are a lot of excellent things I've been hacking on in my evenings and weekends, or intending to hack on soon:

1) Wedging stupid languages onto the iPhone and whipping out an app or two a week (ad hoc distribution for itch-scratching for self, family, friends, and neighbors) 2) Arduino hacking (soon, now that the old version is throwaway cheap) 3) MakerBot stinky plastic fabrication 4) CUDA programming

I still screw around with my Mac Pro too much, constantly upgrading the internal drives (SSD) and external DAS.

If I'm doing this, and I'm a middle manager for a retailer, I have to imagine technical people are doing incredibly interesting things. The stuff I'm doing would have blown my mind when I was 7 years old. (That's 31 years ago.)

The rest of my wanking is pseudo-philosophical, thinking about agorism and the profit margin possible while eliminating scarcity, and wondering why I'm up at 1:20am updating my BibTeX database and posting on HN when I have to go be boring at work in eight hours.

I think you're simply showing your lack of exposure to new technologies. As 1053r noted, there are tons and tons of new things coming out all the time. Yes, it seems that with the advent of fast, cheap hardware most platforms perform generally the same, but new software is continuing to amaze.

Your wife may use the same computer, but i guarantee you she does not use it in the same way. Does she use localhost? Has she ever run a ./configure? It's like saying my owning a football puts me in the same league as Brett Favre.

I recently built a desktop from parts, for the first time in years. It's not really a geeky experience anymore. Pretty much everything's onboard, there's no fiddling with IRQ jumpers, you don't have to completely dismantle the case to get to the RAM sockets... you just bolt stuff together, plug stuff in, turn it on and watch it go. There's nothing for geeks there.

Hmmmm... Well, I set off home from work early yesterday as I needed to do a multi-terabyte nessus import from hell, so took the kit home and am working from home today to do it. It's pretty much pushing the boundaries of my workstation, postgreSQL and Django setup.

The only reason I have any confidence it'll work is because a few months before I did some extremely complex stochastic modeling of HTTP traffic from packet captures using PyCUDA to speed things up (which it turned out wasn't speeding things up much due to all the i/o).

So I guess I'm pioneering large scale vulnerability management and network forensics - although maybe pioneering is a strong word as I'm sure there's plenty of better people out there.

Smartphones, syncing your facebook, twitter, foursquare, etc in an automated way. Using the latest iphone / android app. 4g phones / usb modems / portable wifi points. Going without home internet. Setting up permanent "windows" between offices or houses located in different states / countries using always on video calls. Using robots to telecommute. Building self replicating desktop 3d printers. Using their smartphones to control their home automation. Building wearable computers. Buying 3d televisions. Putting solar arrays on their roofs.

I've barely scratched the surface.

I had my own home-built mp3 player in my car as well.

I removed my center console, and rebuilt a new one, that housed a complete computer inside it. Recovered the console with vinyl, ordered an IR receiver, got the Winamp remote control software, that translated remote buttons => keystrokes. I had it where it loaded Winamp on boot, plus my playlist of all my songs.

The only thing I never did was purchase a visual interface for it. I just had a sheet of paper printed out, with all the songs, and a # to the left of them. I would type in that number, and the song would start playing.

I am sure you are still busy hacking things: new businesses, new services on top of existing services, new ideas. Just because you aren't installing shit in your cars dashboard doesn't mean you aren't still hacking. We're hacking at a higher level, structurally and organizationally.

I'm not sure the two things are mutually exclusive. Being a "computing adult" doesn't mean that you don't enjoy tinkering.

The kind of stuff that you mention, like building a carputer, is something that I'd do for fun, not because I really wanted a way to play MP3s.

I think they're hacking on arduinos, MSP430s and pogo plugs.