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david -dot- locke -at- amd -dot- com wrote:
>
> Tanja Rosteck said:
>
> > Secondly, I strongly disagree with those folks who think just because
> > you graduated with a certain degree (or none at all), that you can't
> > do well in a seemingly unrelated field.
Me too.
> I'll take a guess and suppose that this is pointed at me.
I doubt that.
> Being a geek has nothing to do with the degree a person has. It has
> everything to do with how the person approaches technology. A person is a
> geek long before they get a degree. Geeks, "Technical Enthusiasts," approach
> towards technology differently. They model the application.
So far, I agree entirely.
> These are the people that don't read the manuals.
| Although high general intelligence is common among hackers, it is not the
| sine qua non one might expect. Another trait is probably even more important:
| the ability to mentally absorb, retain, and reference large amounts of
| `meaningless' detail, trusting to later experience to give it context and
| meaning. A person of merely average analytical intelligence who has this
| trait can become an effective hacker, but a creative genius who lacks it will
| swiftly find himself outdistanced by people who routinely upload the contents
| of thick reference manuals into their brains. [During the production of the
| first book version of this document, for example, I learned most of the
| rather complex typesetting language TeX over about four working days, mainly
| by inhaling Knuth's 477-page manual. My editor's flabbergasted reaction to
| this genuinely surprised me, because years of associating with hackers have
| conditioned me to consider such performances routine and to be expected. --ESR]
> They experiment. They test. They hack.
> They learn. They will pick up a reference manual to find that one thing that
> escapes them.
Or to learn it all, and send the author email if it is incomplete or inaccurate.
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