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Tinkerer’s Sunset

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Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#31

Post by blhack »

DannoHung wrote: post #14

Answer this: You have somehow given a completely unlocked iPad to a child that will run any unsigned executable. How are they going to figure out that they can hack its guts? Now answer this: You have given a child a personal computer running Windows 7 or OS X 10.6. How are they going to figure out that they can hack its guts?

>|Answer this: You have somehow given a completely unlocked iPad to a child that will run any unsigned executable.

>|How are they going to figure out that they can hack its guts?

I have no idae, I think the point is that they can't.

>|Now answer this: You have given a child a personal computer running Windows 7 or OS X 10.6.

>|How are they going to figure out that they can hack its guts?

http://www.python.org/download/

http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml

http://openbsd.org/ftp.html

http://gcc.gnu.org/

http://docs.python.org/tutorial/

http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/

The list goes on and on and on and on and on and on of things that I can do on my PC that I will not be able to do on an iPad. If the iPad philosophy becomes the norm (which it probably will) we're boned.

Apple has set a precedent here. They have said "It's okay to release a PC, then totally limit what software can even be installed on it. It's ours, you're just licensing it and that is fine.". Other manufacturers are going to take note.

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#32

Post by gfodor »

The iPad has really brought out a lot of old, crochety "well in my day" engineers that are now to the point where its embarassing.

The iPad will draw more people towards software engineering, because for the first time we will have a general purpose computer that doesn't suck horribly for normal people. It will be cool. It will be fun.

Passion for software has little to do with how much you can "hack" down to the hardware. It has to do with curiousity, drive, and interest. The iPad is going to increase these. Any lack of hackability out of the box that is really interesting will be overcome by these kids, I think people posting about this are thinking these darn youngins will never figure out how to jailbreak their iPads. Odds are though, they just won't care, because being able to root the filesystem is pretty boring compared to what you can do for a $99 dev kit.

The development environment for the iPhone is perfect for learning. None of the bullshit, all of the good stuff so you can get results quickly. Apple should simply make it so you can get a dev license as a student for free, or really cheap ($99 is arguably already pretty cheap considering it includes the App Store services.)

Kids will be able to write apps for the iPad and get them into the App Store. Now their non-tech savvy friends, and everyone in the world, will be able to get them in one tap. This will be absolutely phenomenal for re-kindling the fire of curiosity and passion for building more stuff. When I was learning, I was lucky if a few dozen local nerds on BBSes tried out my programs. Now a clever teenager could conceivably become a millionaire.

Now, what if they want to go deeper? What if they want to use "undocumented APIs"? They can, of course, but can't share their work through the App Store. (They can share it with friends via Ad Hoc) What if they want to really hack the thing beyond what they can do in an app's sandbox? They can, of course, jailbreak.

This is a much better world for getting young kids excited about engineering. I personally think Apple could not pull off the computer revolution they are poised to do with an open system. Just look at the Jailbroken iPhone ecosystem for an idea of what that would look like. It's great if you're a hacker, but it would have destroyed the platform.

Instead of complaining about not being able to root your iPad, complain about the fact Apple is not talking about how they're going to use the iPad to get kids excited about programming.

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#33

Post by joshu »

DaniFong wrote: post #9
mos1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a geothermal HVAC system, and it's not very well designed. If the loop temperatures drop below a certain point it becomes ineffective, and I need to manually switch to a secondary heat source. In a single afternoon, I was able to hook some one-wire sensors into the loops, attach them to a widget that made the sensor data available via IP, write a daemon that monitors the temperature, and then automatically not…

Impressive. It might be very interesting to chat. I'd appreciate if you dropped me an email to dfong lightsailenergy.com :-)

Same. What was the widget? Been thinking of hiring someone to do some board layout work to build these.

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#34

Post by DomesticMouse »

orangecat wrote: post #16
wglb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you about opportunities to tinker/hack. Just check out Maker Faire, or Ramsey Electronics or Ardunio stuff. But I think there is a valid concern about the trend to legislate against tinkering--restricting sales of radios that can hear on cell phone frequencies, DVDCSS, DRM, suppression of chemistry sets, evacuating a school due to misunderstanding of an electronics experiment.

But I think there is a valid concern about the trend to legislate against tinkering--restricting sales of radios that can hear on cell phone frequencies, DVDCSS, DRM, suppression of chemistry sets, evacuating a school due to misunderstanding of an electronics experiment. Exactly. In Apple's vision of the future, using your own computer in ways they don't approve of is illegal: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/app…

This is a question of perception. Faced with something that doesn't make sense, a geek will see it as a challenge, a puzzle, a worthy adversary. Geeks love challenges.

A lot of people don't. I have many people who have me on speed dial for when they feel like tossing their laptops out the window. It's for these people that the iPad is designed.

All of this "death of tinkering" shows me that none of you guys actually take the time to understand people other than yourselves, and this whole movement speaks to just how self centered the whole geek tribe is.

It disturbs me.

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#35

Post by pyre »

mbrubeck wrote: post #11
wmf wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the argument is that in the old days you didn't have to buy anything extra; you could tinker with your main computer. This drew in some opportunistic hackers.

But the Apple IIe cost $1400 in 1983 (over $3000 in today's dollars), so most people never had a "main computer" to begin with. Now vastly more people can own a computer at all. And the type of person who spent a month's wages to tinker with a computer in the 1980s is not going to buy an iPad as their only computer today.

> And the type of person who spent a month's wages to tinker with a computer in the 1980s is not going to buy an iPad as their only computer today.

So, the only people that bought an Apple IIe were tinkerers already? What about the example of the father that bought it for the word processor? Is that example entirely unreasonable or blatantly false?

What about the Commodore 64?

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#36

Post by Blasa »

mbrubeck wrote: post #11
wmf wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the argument is that in the old days you didn't have to buy anything extra; you could tinker with your main computer. This drew in some opportunistic hackers.

But the Apple IIe cost $1400 in 1983 (over $3000 in today's dollars), so most people never had a "main computer" to begin with. Now vastly more people can own a computer at all. And the type of person who spent a month's wages to tinker with a computer in the 1980s is not going to buy an iPad as their only computer today.

Why are we talking about the Apple IIe? I'm sure a lot more people that learned to code and about the guts of the machine in the 80's did so on Speccies (£180 in 1984), C64s ($595 in 82) or Amigas ($699 in 1987) than on Apples/IBMs.

I was bought a Spectrum as a child (and saved up christmas money for an Amiga). My parents weren't at all technical. I learnt a bit of BASIC but not much (I didn't have the patience to program much), but I did get a decent understanding of what went on inside. So I was happy to build my own computers.

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#37

Post by joe_bleau »

blasdel wrote: post #10

If the iPad has a way to enable the Webkit Inspector, you’ve got your tinkerer’s playground right there! The equivalent of Ctrl-Reset is about:blank. Unix OS : iPad : Browser :: MOS CPU : Apple II : BASIC I’m sure that in your day there were curmudgeons who grew up with Altairs railing against the kids these days that bought computers that not only had one-chip CPUs (make your own damn ALU from TTL), they even came f…

Picky, but the Altair did have a single chip CPU (the 8080).

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#38

Post by orangecat »

DomesticMouse wrote: post #34
orangecat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I think there is a valid concern about the trend to legislate against tinkering--restricting sales of radios that can hear on cell phone frequencies, DVDCSS, DRM, suppression of chemistry sets, evacuating a school due to misunderstanding of an electronics experiment. Exactly. In Apple's vision of the future, using your own computer in ways they don't approve of is illegal: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/app…

This is a question of perception. Faced with something that doesn't make sense, a geek will see it as a challenge, a puzzle, a worthy adversary. Geeks love challenges. A lot of people don't. I have many people who have me on speed dial for when they feel like tossing their laptops out the window. It's for these people that the iPad is designed. All of this "death of tinkering" shows me that none of you guys actually…

I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with. To the extent that the iPad makes computing more accessible to more people, that's a good thing. The problem is with the entirely separate issue of Apple actively putting roadblocks in the way of those of us who would like to customize it.

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#39

Post by pyre »

yan wrote: post #26
rosser wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Tinkerable" and "steep learning curve" are orthogonal. In fact, what the article's author is decrying is that this thing without a steep learning curve is completely un-tinkerable. That, per his argument, is what will cost us some chunk of the next generation of programmers -- that, in pursuit of ease of adoption (and/or control), Apple has lopped off tinkerability. You're absolutely right: if I want to tinker, I ha…

> All she knows is, "Wouldn't it be cool if my iPad had ... ?" or "Wow, I wish I could ... " And the tool she has not only gives her no ability to explore those possibilities, it looks like it's designed to actively impede her from exploring them. While I understand this argument has no right or wrong answers, I can't say I agree to the above statement. Just by the virtue of having a well-designed piece of hardware i…

> If it was an open platform, it would most likely have been of lower quality, not as ground-breaking

The issue isn't that the platform is open/closed. Open or closed is a binary decision that Apple made that was entirely separate from their user interface decisions.

It just happens that most of the development money is behind closed products.

NOTE Before anyone on here says anything more about how much better/worse open systems are vs closed systems when it comes to user interface and integration, think about these points:

* Do you feel that at any point during the development of the iPhone or iPad, Apple's designers would have been restricted had the platform been open? (By designers I mean user interface designers; please don't give me some smug, "they couldn't have incorporated a close-source library," answer)

* Do you feel that if Apple were to release the source code to the iPhoneOS tomorrow that the usability of all iPhones would immediately suffer and there would be mass panic as people were not able to continue using their iPhones?

* Is there any real reason that Apple couldn't have a 'devmode' switch that voids your warranty, but allows you to run whatever you want on it? Note: I'm not talking about jailbreaking. I'm talking about an official switch that flips the only-run-signed-binaries bit off, but at the sacrifice of Apple supporting your further actions.

Apple is all about control. One example, is when they removed the built-in ability to theme the operating system (in OS9) when building OSX. I remember that the justification back then was the Steve Jobs wanted every Mac that was running OSX to have the same interface so that: (1) it would be highly recognizable and (2) people wouldn't have to worry about differences between different setups.

What gets my goat about this is that they were selling computers to the masses. They weren't setting up some sort of corporate infrastructure or university computer lab where all the computers must be the same. What if I want my computer to be different than someone else's? What if I don't care about whether or not someone else can sit down and use my computer? What if X modification makes me more productive? I feel like if I were an Apple employee and voiced such concerns at a planning meeting I would be looking at a pink slip, the way that Steve Jobs runs his boat.

I guess the point of all this is that I see a lot of the electronics industry going the way of 'dumbing down for the masses,' but not just specific products... EVERYTHING. Just look at what happened with TechTV/G4TV, now it's no longer about tech, or even gaming. It's just a SpikeTV, "Let's watch some wrestling" network. The same with SyFy. I feel like this is the start of a 'race to the bottom' in the industry.

Re: Tinkerer’s Sunset

#40

Post by whyenot »

My first programming experience was using a televideo terminal and an acoustic modem to connect to my school system's mainframe. We played around in basic and did tons of tinkering, and the devices we used were closed, dumb terminals.

I just don't see the problem.

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