6 ms·

Tinkerer’s Sunset

196 points by mqt 17y ago

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
jdminhbg 17y ago
This whole tinkering panic is ridiculous. Did tinkering end when Nintendo released the NES? Or more recently with the Wii? His dad could have bought a word processor instead of a ][e, would he have been able to tinker with that? Some devices are more open than others. This is not a new phenomenon, nor did anything change on Wednesday.
- aristoxenus 17y ago
  Seriously, you guys are making me sad. Use some imagination -- there is a lot more to tinker with for your dollar in 2010 than there was in the good old days. For the price of your dad's ][e you can now buy multiple linux boxes, a bucket of Arduinos or a NerdKit, robotic legos, and -- if you are so inclined -- an iPad with developer account on top of it. At first I was wondering what the ulterior motive to all this drama was. I'm beginning to think it's just link-baiting.
  - mos1 17y ago
    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 notifies the IP-enabled thermostat to flip over to secondary heat if the loops go below effective temperatures, and to flip back when they recover. The next day, I made it so the loop temperatures were recorded and graphed, and that I receive an SMS alert if there's a complete HVAC failure (loops too cold + secondary heat failure). That was some awesome tinkering.
    - DaniFong 17y ago
      Impressive. It might be very interesting to chat. I'd appreciate if you dropped me an email to dfong <a.t> lightsailenergy.com :-)
      - joshu 17y ago
        Same. What was the widget? Been thinking of hiring someone to do some board layout work to build these.
        mos1 17y ago
        It's just an off-the-shelf Barix Barionet 50. It does the job well, and only draws a watt or two (literally). Not terribly impressive, but $150 worth of my own work wouldn't have been able to drop the power usage to those levels.
  - wglb 17y ago
    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.
    - orangecat 17y ago
      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/apple-says-jailbreaking-illegal http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreaking... . That's right out of Stallman's "Right to Read" (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html), which 10 years ago I thought was ridiculously paranoid but now seems to be the environment many companies are striving to create.
      - DomesticMouse 17y ago
        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.
        orangecat 17y ago
        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.
  - wmf 17y ago
    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.
    - mbrubeck 17y ago
      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.
      - pyre 17y ago
        > 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?
      - Blasa 17y ago
        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.
    - potatolicious 17y ago
      > "didn't have to buy anything extra; you could tinker with your main computer" You realize that mass adoption of the "home computer" is a very, very recent phenomenon, right? I grew up with a computer in the late 80s/early 90s because my father was in the field, but most of my neighbours did not start getting computers until the mid 90s. IMHO the image of the precocious youngster learning to hack on the machine his family just happened to have is a bit of selection bias. People look back at the wonderful days of the 70s and 80s with rose tinted glasses - the truth of the matter is back then computers were exclusively hacking machines (i.e., you couldn't work them at all without some fairly in-depth knowledge), you did buy them just to hack on it.
  - mgunes 17y ago
    The concern is not with whether there are enough machines to tinker with today or whether there will be that many five years down the line. The concern is with what kind of computing culture is being instilled by the largest mobile computing device manufacturer of the world, which also happens to be one of the most inspiring connoisseurs of interaction design of the last two decades. And where this will lead what we know as "computing" to on the 20-year scale. It's certain that people who already know that hacking and tinkering is what they want to do with computers will find enough suitably priced computers to tinker with in the next 20 years. Nobody is debating that. The concern is over whether the potential-tinkerers of the years beyond will be able to discover hacking through the immanent curiosity of young age when they run into walls of the kind that Apple is surrounding their products with today.
    - mechanical_fish 17y ago
      walls of the kind that Apple is surrounding their products with today When I learned to program in the 1980s, I taught myself Pascal from a book. Three years later I encountered my first Pascal compiler, through a summer program at a local university, because the sticker price for Apple Pascal was $495 when it came out in 1979 (in 2009 dollars, that would be over $1000) and I was a kid. (The PC folks were luckier by the time I was coding... Turbo Pascal came out for $50 in 1984. That's only $100 in 2009 dollars. Too bad I couldn't afford to change hardware...) Now I can pay Apple $99 per year (in 2009 dollars) and get the ability to write iPhone programs, using pro-level tools, and install any iPhone program I want on my personal phone and those of my friends. Or I can build a web app in Javascript or Ruby or whatever and share it with all my friends, without asking anyone's permission, for $9 a month in hosting. (Or pay-as-you-go hosting on the cloud, if uptime is no concern.) Or, if I really want a machine that is completely open and ready to run Linux on, I can buy one for pocket change. I've literally given away the equivalent of three Linux PCs in the last few months because I don't have enough space in the back of my closet. (The latter is a particularly important point. One reason closed hardware is growing in popularity is that there is so much other cheap hardware out there. Back when a computer cost $2500 it was relatively important to make sure that you could run whatever software you needed on that one computer. Now, if someone offers you a machine that's sealed against malware -- with the caveat that it's also sealed against anyone who won't pay an extra $99, including you -- it's a lot more tempting, because, hey, if Computer A won't run your software we can just buy Computer B, C, or D, new, for a few hundred bucks. Or one can just walk down the street on trash day and pick up potential Linux PCs. I'm just not seeing these signs of Nerd Apocalypse.)
- waterlesscloud 17y ago
  Because people are extrapolating into the future where these sorts of devices dominate the computing landscape. Which isn't at all unreasonable, since that's what Apple is also doing.
- blhack 17y ago
  I think the difference is that while there have been some smaller, less obvious things that you have been locked out of (gaming consoles, for instance) Apple has come out with what will be the future of computing, and they have blatantly said "This is ours, don't touch it. If you do, we will sue."
- flogic 17y ago
  Correct to a point, but only a point. There is a fundamental difference between an iPhone/iPod and an iPad. The iPad has enough interface bandwidth to be a family's only computing device. Which means it's significantly harder to get started tinkering. From that point you have to shell out close to $1k to get Johnny started iPad hacking with few benefits if he turns out to not like it.
byrneseyeview 17y ago
One company that sold lots of easily-modified computers is now selling a harder-to-modify computer. Could you get an Apple ][e Emulator through the App Store? And throw in all the tips, manuals, and cheat sheets Mark referenced?
- Zak 17y ago
  That would be a virtual machine or interpreter, and that's against the TOS.
  - oconnor0 17y ago
    Virtual machines are against Apple's App Store's TOS?
    - mbrubeck 17y ago
      "No interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)." -- Apple iPhone SDK agreement
      - tfinniga 17y ago
        The only hope is a javascript-based interpreter, which bypasses the SDK. We'll see how fast the A4 is, I guess.
      - deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
blasdel 17y ago
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 fully assembled! Just like you didn’t want to have to deal with wire-wrapping and debouncing yourself, kids these days don’t want to have to deal with stupid implementation details like booting an operating system. Just as you wanted a standardized BASIC prompt that let you punch in code listings you got from friends and magazines, kids these days want a standards-based browser that they can use to tinker with the whole world’s creations. Having your code running persistently on a server (whether abstracted like App Engine and Heroku, or old-school like a VPS) where other people can interface with it is far more important to the youth of today than something that dies along with your battery and wireless connection.
- joe_bleau 17y ago
  Picky, but the Altair did have a single chip CPU (the 8080).
- DougBTX 17y ago
  Open up your iPhone, fire up safari, and type this into the address bar: javascript:alert('hello_world!'); With a bit more glorification, that could turn into a dev environment.
kqr2 17y ago
I think the web itself gives the individual a lot more to tinker with and explore than in the old days. For example, you can still play around with applesoft basic. Applesoft basic interpreter in javascript: http://www.calormen.com/applesoft/ http://www.calormen.com/applesoft/
DannoHung 17y ago
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?
- blhack 17y ago
  >|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.python.org/download/ http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml http://openbsd.org/ftp.html http://openbsd.org/ftp.html http://gcc.gnu.org/ http://gcc.gnu.org/ http://docs.python.org/tutorial/ http://docs.python.org/tutorial/ http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/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.
  - raganwald 17y ago
    t'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 No, an iPad is NOT a PC, it's an iPad. Apple sells another product, a Mac pro, that's a PC. I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro, that's also a PC. And there's the Macbook Air, that's a PC as well. But the iPad is not a PC just as my car is not a PC, even though I'm sure it has RAM and ROm and various CPUs in it. I hear you can buy a fridge with a web browser. That isn't a PC with freon-cooled CPUs, it's a fridge.
    - 17y ago
joeycfan 17y ago
Not to worry. The iPad will be used by the mundains and the remnant - who make all the progress - will use the Chinese clone with the USB and camera and open source everything.
pasbesoin 17y ago
My concern is if/when they come to dominate content distribution and become the only channel (or a member of an oligopoly of channels, all using "fair use" adverse licenses and DRM). At which point I'm effectively forced to lease rather than own my content, under whatever terms they dictate.
- rimantas 17y ago
  Apple still makes most of the money on hardware. They could not care less how do you get your content if you consume that content on the device they sold to you. Frankly, I cannot imagine they going back to DRM for music on iTunes, and I hope it is only the question of time when DRM will be dropped for video and other media. If ITMS (where M will stand for "Media" instead of "Music") is the most convenient way to get your media and the price is right they will do well without DRM.
yan 17y ago
I really don't understand the wave of alarmist posts on the 'end of a tinkering era'. Today, we have more communities and devices for tinkering than we've ever had. Magazines like Make, sites like Hack-a-day, platforms like Arduino, and countless open source projects that are simply there to be messed with, and one device that comes out with a (probably) justified need to be locked down, and everyone raises panic? If I ever have the desire to mess with anything technological today, I can literally get my hands on anything, from affordable FPGA boards with great I/O, to open mobile devices, to even RF hacking! (GNU Radio's great.) The iPad will never harm anyone's ability to tinker with technology that want to. There will always be platforms that are open by design and always be platforms that have been rooted/hacked/jailbroken/etc. Being a geek/hacker today is far more socially acceptable and wide-spread than it was in the 80s. I'd even argue that it is doing much more to advance the technology than a completely open device like OpenMoko. Completely open devices are rarely better designed than their commercial counterparts. They don't inspire complete neophytes ("I have to do what just to get a decent resolution?"), they don't push boundaries -- they only appeal to people who are already waist-deep in tinkering. Frankly, if anything, all of this comes off as elitist. God forbid people get their hands on technology that doesn't have a steep learning curve or require you to write BASIC to be useful. Well-designed products that have a lot of concentrated money (and more importantly, talent) inspire people much more so than completely open systems. I think of them as (and please pardon the extremely hyperbolic analogy) well-polished, completed works of art. They won't teach you how to paint or let you alter them, but they'll show you what's possible with the canvas and advance the art. I'm actually now thinking back to a discussion with a friend of mine, who's a collector of 60's-era oscilloscopes. He was raving about them as being the pinnacle of electronics engineering. Not only were these scopes beautifully designed, but their manuals detailed everything about them, how they worked, what tricks they used to function, what micro-components they used. Their documentation authors really wanted you to understand exactly what made it function. Maybe that's the ideal, but I still believe that beautifully-designed products, even closed, further the state of hacking far far more than completely open platforms. If you don't believe in it, don't buy it. If you believe they're a step in the wrong direction for open platforms, make another blog post tomorrow when you have less open platforms, less hobbyist projects, less educational materials, and less hobbyist communities than yesterday.
gfodor 17y ago
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.
- pyre 17y ago
  > They can, of course, jailbreak. Why do people insist that 'jail-breaking' is some sort of valid option? * If Apple had their way even jail-breaking would be illegal. * Jail-breaking is dependent on security holes in the operating system (i.e. the same way that you are jail-breaking your iPhone is the same way that blackhats could take it over) * Jail-breaking breaks on most updates. Why do people think that it is impossible for Apple to make some sort of button that says, "Yes. I want to enter 'tinker mode' my iPhone/iPad. I realize that this will void my software (maybe hardware?) support from Apple." [EDIT] > 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. That's a strawman. If the system was open, would all of those Apps on the AppStore right not just vanish? People wouldn't have bothered to develop for the iPhone at all? What about the people that didn't develop neat apps for the iPhone (that are impossible under the SDK) because the 'jail-broken' community is so small and not officially sanctioned? (Or just because of all of the issues with jail-breaking I mentioned above?)
whyenot 17y ago
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.
Super_Jambo 17y ago
Economic rules only exist to serve society. The iPad & iPhone lockdown are simply a way for apple to give themselves a monopoly on software and content sales. It's leveraging success in one market (shiny looking hardware) into dominance in another (content provision, software sales) If they keep it up and are successful you can bet your ass the regulators will fine them for it, it's far more destructive than MS bundling media player. Of course the end service may be better, but thats neither here nor there, it's hugely anti-competitive. Does rather depend how in-thrall to no-regulation academics & business leaders our politicians get though.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
noonespecial 17y ago
The funny part is that they (Apple) are waging war against those grown tinkers that they created. The sweet irony doesn't stop there. Today's little hackers are just as motivated to seize control of their technological world as those in past years. I have learned from watching my own children that just about nothing can stop a motivated child. All they are doing with their endless keys and locks and walled gardens is creating an unstoppable army of new hackers for whom the latest and greatest "content protection system" won't even be worth a raised eyebrow and for whom the legal harassment has become nothing more than background noise.
- rimantas 17y ago
  endless keys and locks and walled gardens By that you mean freely available SDK?
ghshephard 17y ago
Tinkering now moves to "Meta Tinkering" - as it always has, to some degree There was a time when Tinkering involved modifying the OpCodes/Circuitry of your Computer - 1950 - 1970s. Then Tinkering involved programming the computer, with little ability to touch the hardware or modify the CPU, using assembler, compilers, interpreters. The next generation is the creation of Meta-Environments, in which tinkering allows us to go back to first principles, _create_ circuits, OpCodes, and generally understand the Computing Universe from it's bare components - http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10218 http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&#38... Has been the most fun I've had in a Decade, and I'm pretty sure any smart kid, around the 8-10+ age, can start to mull through most of it's components.
bemmu 17y ago
I grew up with an 8bit basic too, but to me it seems Garry's Mod would inspire a lot more tinkering than Apple II basic: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=7D7FFF74CFCF1CC5 http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=7D7FFF74CFCF1CC5 You can start without any programming at all, then extend with Lua scripting. Available on Steam.
tocomment 17y ago
By the way after finishing vernor vinges the peace war I'm thinking tinkerers really need to get to work. They did some amazing things in that book.

196 points by mqt 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

This whole tinkering panic is ridiculous. Did tinkering end when Nintendo released the NES? Or more recently with the Wii? His dad could have bought a word processor instead of a ][e, would he have been able to tinker with that? Some devices are more open than others. This is not a new phenomenon, nor did anything change on Wednesday.

aristoxenus 17y ago
Seriously, you guys are making me sad. Use some imagination -- there is a lot more to tinker with for your dollar in 2010 than there was in the good old days. For the price of your dad's ][e you can now buy multiple linux boxes, a bucket of Arduinos or a NerdKit, robotic legos, and -- if you are so inclined -- an iPad with developer account on top of it. At first I was wondering what the ulterior motive to all this drama was. I'm beginning to think it's just link-baiting.
- mos1 17y ago
  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 notifies the IP-enabled thermostat to flip over to secondary heat if the loops go below effective temperatures, and to flip back when they recover. The next day, I made it so the loop temperatures were recorded and graphed, and that I receive an SMS alert if there's a complete HVAC failure (loops too cold + secondary heat failure). That was some awesome tinkering.
  - DaniFong 17y ago
    Impressive. It might be very interesting to chat. I'd appreciate if you dropped me an email to dfong <a.t> lightsailenergy.com :-)
    - joshu 17y ago
      Same. What was the widget? Been thinking of hiring someone to do some board layout work to build these.
      - mos1 17y ago
        It's just an off-the-shelf Barix Barionet 50. It does the job well, and only draws a watt or two (literally). Not terribly impressive, but $150 worth of my own work wouldn't have been able to drop the power usage to those levels.
- wglb 17y ago
  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.
  - orangecat 17y ago
    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/apple-says-jailbreaking-illegal http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreaking... . That's right out of Stallman's "Right to Read" (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html), which 10 years ago I thought was ridiculously paranoid but now seems to be the environment many companies are striving to create.
    - DomesticMouse 17y ago
      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.
      - orangecat 17y ago
        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.
- wmf 17y ago
  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.
  - mbrubeck 17y ago
    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.
    - pyre 17y ago
      > 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?
    - Blasa 17y ago
      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.
  - potatolicious 17y ago
    > "didn't have to buy anything extra; you could tinker with your main computer" You realize that mass adoption of the "home computer" is a very, very recent phenomenon, right? I grew up with a computer in the late 80s/early 90s because my father was in the field, but most of my neighbours did not start getting computers until the mid 90s. IMHO the image of the precocious youngster learning to hack on the machine his family just happened to have is a bit of selection bias. People look back at the wonderful days of the 70s and 80s with rose tinted glasses - the truth of the matter is back then computers were exclusively hacking machines (i.e., you couldn't work them at all without some fairly in-depth knowledge), you did buy them just to hack on it.
- mgunes 17y ago
  The concern is not with whether there are enough machines to tinker with today or whether there will be that many five years down the line. The concern is with what kind of computing culture is being instilled by the largest mobile computing device manufacturer of the world, which also happens to be one of the most inspiring connoisseurs of interaction design of the last two decades. And where this will lead what we know as "computing" to on the 20-year scale. It's certain that people who already know that hacking and tinkering is what they want to do with computers will find enough suitably priced computers to tinker with in the next 20 years. Nobody is debating that. The concern is over whether the potential-tinkerers of the years beyond will be able to discover hacking through the immanent curiosity of young age when they run into walls of the kind that Apple is surrounding their products with today.
  - mechanical_fish 17y ago
    walls of the kind that Apple is surrounding their products with today When I learned to program in the 1980s, I taught myself Pascal from a book. Three years later I encountered my first Pascal compiler, through a summer program at a local university, because the sticker price for Apple Pascal was $495 when it came out in 1979 (in 2009 dollars, that would be over $1000) and I was a kid. (The PC folks were luckier by the time I was coding... Turbo Pascal came out for $50 in 1984. That's only $100 in 2009 dollars. Too bad I couldn't afford to change hardware...) Now I can pay Apple $99 per year (in 2009 dollars) and get the ability to write iPhone programs, using pro-level tools, and install any iPhone program I want on my personal phone and those of my friends. Or I can build a web app in Javascript or Ruby or whatever and share it with all my friends, without asking anyone's permission, for $9 a month in hosting. (Or pay-as-you-go hosting on the cloud, if uptime is no concern.) Or, if I really want a machine that is completely open and ready to run Linux on, I can buy one for pocket change. I've literally given away the equivalent of three Linux PCs in the last few months because I don't have enough space in the back of my closet. (The latter is a particularly important point. One reason closed hardware is growing in popularity is that there is so much other cheap hardware out there. Back when a computer cost $2500 it was relatively important to make sure that you could run whatever software you needed on that one computer. Now, if someone offers you a machine that's sealed against malware -- with the caveat that it's also sealed against anyone who won't pay an extra $99, including you -- it's a lot more tempting, because, hey, if Computer A won't run your software we can just buy Computer B, C, or D, new, for a few hundred bucks. Or one can just walk down the street on trash day and pick up potential Linux PCs. I'm just not seeing these signs of Nerd Apocalypse.)
waterlesscloud 17y ago
Because people are extrapolating into the future where these sorts of devices dominate the computing landscape. Which isn't at all unreasonable, since that's what Apple is also doing.
blhack 17y ago
I think the difference is that while there have been some smaller, less obvious things that you have been locked out of (gaming consoles, for instance) Apple has come out with what will be the future of computing, and they have blatantly said "This is ours, don't touch it. If you do, we will sue."
flogic 17y ago
Correct to a point, but only a point. There is a fundamental difference between an iPhone/iPod and an iPad. The iPad has enough interface bandwidth to be a family's only computing device. Which means it's significantly harder to get started tinkering. From that point you have to shell out close to $1k to get Johnny started iPad hacking with few benefits if he turns out to not like it.

byrneseyeview 17y ago

One company that sold lots of easily-modified computers is now selling a harder-to-modify computer. Could you get an Apple ][e Emulator through the App Store? And throw in all the tips, manuals, and cheat sheets Mark referenced?

Zak 17y ago
That would be a virtual machine or interpreter, and that's against the TOS.
- oconnor0 17y ago
  Virtual machines are against Apple's App Store's TOS?
  - mbrubeck 17y ago
    "No interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)." -- Apple iPhone SDK agreement
    - tfinniga 17y ago
      The only hope is a javascript-based interpreter, which bypasses the SDK. We'll see how fast the A4 is, I guess.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]

blasdel 17y ago

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 fully assembled! Just like you didn’t want to have to deal with wire-wrapping and debouncing yourself, kids these days don’t want to have to deal with stupid implementation details like booting an operating system. Just as you wanted a standardized BASIC prompt that let you punch in code listings you got from friends and magazines, kids these days want a standards-based browser that they can use to tinker with the whole world’s creations. Having your code running persistently on a server (whether abstracted like App Engine and Heroku, or old-school like a VPS) where other people can interface with it is far more important to the youth of today than something that dies along with your battery and wireless connection.

joe_bleau 17y ago
Picky, but the Altair did have a single chip CPU (the 8080).
DougBTX 17y ago
Open up your iPhone, fire up safari, and type this into the address bar: javascript:alert('hello_world!'); With a bit more glorification, that could turn into a dev environment.

kqr2 17y ago

I think the web itself gives the individual a lot more to tinker with and explore than in the old days. For example, you can still play around with applesoft basic. Applesoft basic interpreter in javascript: http://www.calormen.com/applesoft/ http://www.calormen.com/applesoft/

DannoHung 17y ago

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?

blhack 17y ago
>|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.python.org/download/ http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml http://openbsd.org/ftp.html http://openbsd.org/ftp.html http://gcc.gnu.org/ http://gcc.gnu.org/ http://docs.python.org/tutorial/ http://docs.python.org/tutorial/ http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/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.
- raganwald 17y ago
  t'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 No, an iPad is NOT a PC, it's an iPad. Apple sells another product, a Mac pro, that's a PC. I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro, that's also a PC. And there's the Macbook Air, that's a PC as well. But the iPad is not a PC just as my car is not a PC, even though I'm sure it has RAM and ROm and various CPUs in it. I hear you can buy a fridge with a web browser. That isn't a PC with freon-cooled CPUs, it's a fridge.
  - 17y ago

joeycfan 17y ago

Not to worry. The iPad will be used by the mundains and the remnant - who make all the progress - will use the Chinese clone with the USB and camera and open source everything.

pasbesoin 17y ago

My concern is if/when they come to dominate content distribution and become the only channel (or a member of an oligopoly of channels, all using "fair use" adverse licenses and DRM). At which point I'm effectively forced to lease rather than own my content, under whatever terms they dictate.

rimantas 17y ago
Apple still makes most of the money on hardware. They could not care less how do you get your content if you consume that content on the device they sold to you. Frankly, I cannot imagine they going back to DRM for music on iTunes, and I hope it is only the question of time when DRM will be dropped for video and other media. If ITMS (where M will stand for "Media" instead of "Music") is the most convenient way to get your media and the price is right they will do well without DRM.

yan 17y ago

I really don't understand the wave of alarmist posts on the 'end of a tinkering era'. Today, we have more communities and devices for tinkering than we've ever had. Magazines like Make, sites like Hack-a-day, platforms like Arduino, and countless open source projects that are simply there to be messed with, and one device that comes out with a (probably) justified need to be locked down, and everyone raises panic? If I ever have the desire to mess with anything technological today, I can literally get my hands on anything, from affordable FPGA boards with great I/O, to open mobile devices, to even RF hacking! (GNU Radio's great.) The iPad will never harm anyone's ability to tinker with technology that want to. There will always be platforms that are open by design and always be platforms that have been rooted/hacked/jailbroken/etc. Being a geek/hacker today is far more socially acceptable and wide-spread than it was in the 80s. I'd even argue that it is doing much more to advance the technology than a completely open device like OpenMoko. Completely open devices are rarely better designed than their commercial counterparts. They don't inspire complete neophytes ("I have to do what just to get a decent resolution?"), they don't push boundaries -- they only appeal to people who are already waist-deep in tinkering. Frankly, if anything, all of this comes off as elitist. God forbid people get their hands on technology that doesn't have a steep learning curve or require you to write BASIC to be useful. Well-designed products that have a lot of concentrated money (and more importantly, talent) inspire people much more so than completely open systems. I think of them as (and please pardon the extremely hyperbolic analogy) well-polished, completed works of art. They won't teach you how to paint or let you alter them, but they'll show you what's possible with the canvas and advance the art. I'm actually now thinking back to a discussion with a friend of mine, who's a collector of 60's-era oscilloscopes. He was raving about them as being the pinnacle of electronics engineering. Not only were these scopes beautifully designed, but their manuals detailed everything about them, how they worked, what tricks they used to function, what micro-components they used. Their documentation authors really wanted you to understand exactly what made it function. Maybe that's the ideal, but I still believe that beautifully-designed products, even closed, further the state of hacking far far more than completely open platforms. If you don't believe in it, don't buy it. If you believe they're a step in the wrong direction for open platforms, make another blog post tomorrow when you have less open platforms, less hobbyist projects, less educational materials, and less hobbyist communities than yesterday.

gfodor 17y ago

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.

pyre 17y ago
> They can, of course, jailbreak. Why do people insist that 'jail-breaking' is some sort of valid option? * If Apple had their way even jail-breaking would be illegal. * Jail-breaking is dependent on security holes in the operating system (i.e. the same way that you are jail-breaking your iPhone is the same way that blackhats could take it over) * Jail-breaking breaks on most updates. Why do people think that it is impossible for Apple to make some sort of button that says, "Yes. I want to enter 'tinker mode' my iPhone/iPad. I realize that this will void my software (maybe hardware?) support from Apple." [EDIT] > 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. That's a strawman. If the system was open, would all of those Apps on the AppStore right not just vanish? People wouldn't have bothered to develop for the iPhone at all? What about the people that didn't develop neat apps for the iPhone (that are impossible under the SDK) because the 'jail-broken' community is so small and not officially sanctioned? (Or just because of all of the issues with jail-breaking I mentioned above?)

whyenot 17y ago

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.

Super_Jambo 17y ago

Economic rules only exist to serve society. The iPad & iPhone lockdown are simply a way for apple to give themselves a monopoly on software and content sales. It's leveraging success in one market (shiny looking hardware) into dominance in another (content provision, software sales) If they keep it up and are successful you can bet your ass the regulators will fine them for it, it's far more destructive than MS bundling media player. Of course the end service may be better, but thats neither here nor there, it's hugely anti-competitive. Does rather depend how in-thrall to no-regulation academics & business leaders our politicians get though.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

noonespecial 17y ago

The funny part is that they (Apple) are waging war against those grown tinkers that they created. The sweet irony doesn't stop there. Today's little hackers are just as motivated to seize control of their technological world as those in past years. I have learned from watching my own children that just about nothing can stop a motivated child. All they are doing with their endless keys and locks and walled gardens is creating an unstoppable army of new hackers for whom the latest and greatest "content protection system" won't even be worth a raised eyebrow and for whom the legal harassment has become nothing more than background noise.

rimantas 17y ago
endless keys and locks and walled gardens By that you mean freely available SDK?

ghshephard 17y ago

Tinkering now moves to "Meta Tinkering" - as it always has, to some degree There was a time when Tinkering involved modifying the OpCodes/Circuitry of your Computer - 1950 - 1970s. Then Tinkering involved programming the computer, with little ability to touch the hardware or modify the CPU, using assembler, compilers, interpreters. The next generation is the creation of Meta-Environments, in which tinkering allows us to go back to first principles, _create_ circuits, OpCodes, and generally understand the Computing Universe from it's bare components - http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10218 http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&#38... Has been the most fun I've had in a Decade, and I'm pretty sure any smart kid, around the 8-10+ age, can start to mull through most of it's components.

bemmu 17y ago

I grew up with an 8bit basic too, but to me it seems Garry's Mod would inspire a lot more tinkering than Apple II basic: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=7D7FFF74CFCF1CC5 http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=7D7FFF74CFCF1CC5 You can start without any programming at all, then extend with Lua scripting. Available on Steam.

tocomment 17y ago

By the way after finishing vernor vinges the peace war I'm thinking tinkerers really need to get to work. They did some amazing things in that book.