The Adventures Of Hax0r Man Chapter 12 Hax0r Man talks to a fellow technology enthusiast by LateBlt It wouldn't be correct to say that Hax0r Man doesn't talk to a lot of people. He just doesn't know most of the people he does talk to. Hax0r Man is actually a very public person in a very public position, as he lives in what is technically the public commons: The street. So he talks to several people throughout the day. Many of these people will sometimes say "Hi" or "Sup", while others will sometimes engage in a full-on conversation, such as "How ya doing?" Somewhat less common, but not altogether uncommon, is the type of person who is bored or waiting for a bus or in some other position that does not require them to actively do anything other than stand around for a while. These people will often engage Hax0r Man in what non-hax0rs appear to call "small talk", the practice of speaking without saying anything. Hax0r Man is not very good at small talk, but he will sometimes try to accomodate these people by mimicing their own path of conversation. Since small talk tends to focus on a convenient conversation device that comes readily to the speaker's mind, many people will attempt to speak to Hax0r Man about technology, correctly guessing that he is a computer person based on the fact that he is using a laptop. Sometimes these people are not particularly interested in computers, but folks who fancy themselves to be computer wizards are scattered all over Silicon Valley, and often Hax0r Man's casual conversants think they know a thing or two about computers. Such appears to be the case with one young gentleman who passes by Hax0r Man one day while walking down the street in no particular hurry. Spying Hax0r Man's ubiquitous laptop, the young man nods in acknowledgement and says "Hey man, nice lappy." Hax0r Man accepts the compliment gracefully and nods back. "Thanks. Lappy likes you too." "Hah. Yeah, I'm a techno freak myself. Isn't it a bit heavy to have on the road, though? You can get everything you could need in a cell phone now. Laptops are sort of going by the wayside." Hax0r Man has heard this sort of sentiment before, but never understood it. Perhaps his new conversation partner can finally clear the fog and bestow some understanding upon Hax0r Man regarding why everyone has abandoned laptops for cell phones. "I've heard that," Hax0r Man confirms. "But it just doesn't seem to me like you can do everything a real computer can do on a cell phone." "Oh, totally. My cell phone plays movies and has a web browser built in." The young man fairly beams with pride. "Uh... Okay, that's great. But how is it for computing?" Hax0r Man wonders. "Computing? How do you mean?" "Well, does it do what a computer actually does?" "Yeah, of course. It plays MP3s, videos, everything. *And* I can use it as a phone too, so it actually has way more functionality than a plain computer." "That's only a very limited subset of a computer's functionality, though," Hax0r Man says. "Realistically, who are you going to call, anyway?" "What?" "What's the purpose of having a phone you can use to call people? Who are you going to call?" "Anybody. My friends, my family." "About what? What are you going to tell them?" "Anything I want. Anything I have to say to them." "Like what?" "Anything! Don't you understand? You can use a phone to talk about anything you want to!" The young man is now becoming somewhat agitated by the current course of conversation. "But I have nothing I need to talk about to my friends or family. And it sounds like you don't, either." "What if you need to get a hold of someone quickly?" "I won't." "You're telling me there's no point or purpose in calling people on the phone?" "Exactly," Hax0r Man agrees. "Then what's the point of having a phone?" "My question exactly. That's sort of what I was asking you in the first place." "Are you seriously saying that there's no reason why you would have a cell phone?" Hax0r Man slowly nods, finding that this assertation seems to match up fairly accurately with his own. "I guess you could say that." "Then why do you have a cell phone?" A long time ago, Hax0r Man would provide the correct answer to questions like this by saying "Mu". However, he quickly discovered that most people do not understand what this word means, so Hax0r Man, now as several times before, gives this same answer in its expanded form. "Your question cannot be answered, because it makes assumptions which are not accurate." "You're telling me you don't have a cell phone?" The young man looks as though Hax0r Man has just confessed he has at least a dozen different types of STD. "You are correct, sir." "You're sitting here with your laptop and you don't even have a celly? Man, almost a third of the world's population has a cell phone." "That's true. This leads me to the logical conclusion that I am not a third of the world's population." "Yeah, okay. Well, even if you don't call people, the phone is still way more compact and easy to carry around. And you can do all your computer stuff with it." The young man turns his attention to his cell phone's screen, and begins listing all of its functions. "You can do e-mail, surf the web, play music, watch videos, and take photos because it has a built-in camera. All you need." "That's still a very specific and small subset of what you can do with a computer," Hax0r Man says thoughtfully. "I mean, you haven't even mentioned the monitoring interface." "You mean the monitor? Well yeah, the screen is a little small, but..." "No, the monitoring interface. The readout that shows you what's going on with the CPU. How can you tell when an interrupt line triggers, for example?" "What?" "How do you know when something has activated one of the interrupt pins on the CPU?" "Uh, you don't. Why would you care?" To Hax0r Man, this is sort of like a truck driver asking "Why would you care if the truck's brakes work?", or a lawyer asking "Why would you care if you go to jail for a few years?" However, Hax0r Man is used to people asking him questions with seemingly-obvious answers, so he patiently answers the question. "Because you might have re-written that interrupt to do something else, like poll an input port, and you might want to keep an eye on it and see if anything is calling it." "I have no idea what you're talking about, sorry." "The interrupts. You know, the signals to the CPU that call it to a different instruction routine." "Nope, sorry. Not familiar." Hax0r Man pauses, shocked. "You don't know what an interrupt is?" "I've heard of them, but never used them. What would you do with them?" "You get the attention of the CPU, of course. How does your CPU work if it doesn't have interrupts?" "It probably has them, I just never bothered to look into them." "So you don't understand how your own CPU works?" "Why should I care?" "Well, how are you going to make one if you don't understand how one works?" The young man laughs suddenly. "Come on, dude. You think I'm just going to start making my own chips?" Hax0r Man, who has designed several chips and had limited runs of them done at local ASIC shops, feels a sudden pang of sadness. "I'm sorry... I didn't realize you were computer illiterate." "Whatever, man. Why would you want to fool around with all this stuff anyway? Nobody does that anymore." "Because you need to understand these concepts in order to use a computer. A computer isn't for watching videos, playing music, or taking photos. You can do all those things with a television, a stereo system, and a camera; people have been doing them since long before computers. Does your cell phone allow you to manually read or change the contents of random memory addresses?" "No, I don't think so." "Then your cell phone doesn't even approach the functionality of my Commodore 64, because that's what a computer is for. By being able to access any memory location at any time, a computer can do anything your cell phone can do, and much more. I can set up virtual environments or databases using any form of data structures I want." "Yeah, sure. Why would you want to do stuff like that anyway?" "Because I want to understand how the computer works," Hax0r Man says simply. "What I want is *understanding*. Is that so unusual?" "I think it is," the young man replies. "Not too many people want to know how a computer works. At least not at the level that you're talking about." "That's true. Maybe you can call somebody who does on your cell phone for me," Hax0r Man speculates with a hint of irony. "I don't think I know anyone like that." "I didn't think so either. Oh well, thanks anyway." Hax0r Man and the young self-described techno freak part ways, and the latter goes walking down the sidewalk, doing incredibly techno-savvy things like listening to music and calling a friend to arrange for a rendezvous later. Meanwhile, Hax0r Man goes back to designing a signal-processing circuit on his laptop, suitably impressed by how little he apparently knows about "technology".