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iOS is anti-Unix and anti-programmer

blog.dbpatterson.com

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Re: iOS is anti-Unix and anti-programmer

#21

Post by onosendai »

martinpannier wrote: post #10
mas644 wrote: post #8

It's not anti-Unix or anti-programmer...it's all about being anti-freedom. All these companies want to do is turn your computing experience into a locked down, controlled, monitored experience. They want to turn your limitless and powerful computer into a home appliance...like a blender or electric razer. No way to customize, no way to modify, no way to organize thoughts your way. No hacking or "jailbreaking" into yo…

Most comments in this thread strike me as being anti-"normal users". This is the elite, talking about how they can maintain their elite position.

That's not what the parent, or the article is saying. Don't turn this into some sort of class warfare for the sake of trolling.

The ability of an OS or application to expose data in order to allow you to manipulate it as you see fit, does not preclude it being user-friendly and straighforward to use. That funcionality might very well be hidden away, but available if you're inclined to use it.

The point that is being made is that this level of openess and flexibiliy is directly at odds with the need for control of some companies over their OS/applications and the content whithin, usually for the sake of profits.

Re: iOS is anti-Unix and anti-programmer

#23

Post by martinpannier »

mas644 wrote: post #8

It's not anti-Unix or anti-programmer...it's all about being anti-freedom. All these companies want to do is turn your computing experience into a locked down, controlled, monitored experience. They want to turn your limitless and powerful computer into a home appliance...like a blender or electric razer. No way to customize, no way to modify, no way to organize thoughts your way. No hacking or "jailbreaking" into yo…

Additional thought, because your post is just so wrong.

> limitless and powerful computer

More like confusing and impairing computer

> no way to organize thoughts your way

More ways to do so with my iDevice than with any other computer I ever owned!

> no need to understand how the technology works

Yay! Finally!

(Not to bring up the car analogy again, but do I really need to know how my motor works to drive to work?)

> technology is now magic

True, it's now accessible to (almost) all!

Etc. ad nauseam

Re: iOS is anti-Unix and anti-programmer

#24

Post by quandrum »

After reading this, it struck me as this is how intents could (and sometimes) work on android.

It's not perfect. You can't string together a bunch of apps. But it's nice when I click on a youtube video, the youtube app seamlessly takes over. Same for email, or reddit links.

Re: iOS is anti-Unix and anti-programmer

#25

Post by briandear »

mas644 wrote: post #8

It's not anti-Unix or anti-programmer...it's all about being anti-freedom. All these companies want to do is turn your computing experience into a locked down, controlled, monitored experience. They want to turn your limitless and powerful computer into a home appliance...like a blender or electric razer. No way to customize, no way to modify, no way to organize thoughts your way. No hacking or "jailbreaking" into yo…

So build something better and let the market decide. I can teach my mother in law to use an iPhone in five minutes. Giving her all of this "freedom" would make the devices much harder to use and maintain, not to mention far more insecure. Not much of a malware danger on ios either. There are very few apps that need a jail broken device; the few that are unique are generally dealing with features the average user wouldn't want or need. For those Ivory Tower types, there's no law against jailbreaking..

Re: iOS is anti-Unix and anti-programmer

#26

Post by Newky »

As someone who spends almost all day either in vim/commandline mode or web browsing, I want to make the point about the unix pipe point, and that with gui's this is impossible.

Its not even the fact that it would require a lot more effort to sort and format a list of 100,000 names into our predefined pattern, but more the fact that the power of the command line is lost.

I find as I'm programming, I gravitate towards languages which can give me good access to this piping system, and give me access to stdin as a stream. Often in languages such as Java, pushing it information into a file and reading from the file is the easier solution and although this may be the more long term solution, for shell scripts etc its hard to beat the likes of perl's "while()", not to mention the fact that awk works like this by default.

Also in terms of bringing this piping paradigm to the GUI world, I think the closest thing I've seen is Intents, both on the android side and the new Web Intents that both Google and Mozilla are working together on. Technically this seems like a more hefty version of pipes to me.

Re: iOS is anti-Unix and anti-programmer

#28

Post by acabal »

mas644 wrote: post #8

It's not anti-Unix or anti-programmer...it's all about being anti-freedom. All these companies want to do is turn your computing experience into a locked down, controlled, monitored experience. They want to turn your limitless and powerful computer into a home appliance...like a blender or electric razer. No way to customize, no way to modify, no way to organize thoughts your way. No hacking or "jailbreaking" into yo…

Maybe true, but the fact that iOS devices are selling so well shows that people actually want their computers to be as simple as appliances. I think that to many "regular" people (i.e. non-HN-reading types of people), the power in computers is when they provide a simple and idiot-proof way to automate many common day-to-day tasks. If given the choice, many people would rather go out for a picnic than sit down at a shell to figure out the difference between | and > so that maybe, one day, they could become command-line gurus and appreciate the power like we do.

The market for complex and powerful computer interfaces will always exist--it's people like you and me. But the market for simple, easy, and foolproof computing will always be much bigger. Apple is owning that market, and if it's worse for the consumer, well, they seem to be pretty happy about the situation so far.

Re: iOS is anti-Unix and anti-programmer

#30

Post by thomasgerbe »

pointyhat wrote: post #11
tomjen3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of those people you know with iPads are what we would call normal people? I only ask because it seems to me that most of them wouldn't mind at all that one couldn't be productive on the iPad since surfing and a few games are mostly what they use it for.

80% I'd say. It seems to go like this: 1) They bought it with a purpose in mind but it didn't work quite as well as they were hoping (khan academy, mapping, general use, recipes in kitchen, streaming video). 2) The games last a while but they are mainly novelty rather than immersive or lasting so it's back to the XBox. 3) then the web browsing gets frustrating as streaming video is choppy over WiFi and impossible ove…

My friends have had a very different experience.

It's much more comfortable to hold on the couch, at the cafe, in bed, or on the plane/car than being on a laptop.

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