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Don’t misunderstand: I don’t think it’s a real problem that I can’t change the capacitors in my television today — I think that the most interesting surfaces fo

Don’t misunderstand: I don’t think it’s a real problem that I can’t change the capacitors in my television today — I think that the most interesting surfaces for tinkering tend to evolve over time — and today the primary tinkering substrate appears to me to be the open web. This is so true. Growing up, what I remember most was playing with web tech - buying my own server space, hosting my own sites, installing random stuff like Wordpress and Drupal and messing with the code running these sites; learning CSS, HTML and doing random stuff in PHP ... So what if we've lost the ability to mess with TVs, and computers, and iPads? It may very well be that the TV/computer/Heathkit equivalents today are Wordpress/Rails/Opentape installations, that kids run on their servers and play around with. We may not have another Apple on our hands (which resulted from arguably the king of tinkerers himself, Wozniak) but we might have the next Larry Page/Sergey Brin/Mark Zuckerberg. And that's not entirely a bad thing.

orangecat 17y ago
So what if we've lost the ability to mess with TVs, and computers, and iPads? You can mess with TVs, but not many people do because there isn't much point due to the natural evolution of the technology. That's very different from the iPad, where there are lots of interesting things we could do, except that Apple has arbitrarily declared them to be illegal.
Groxx 17y ago
Especially as the TV / Computer / whatever electronic hacking crowd still exists, and creating things from scratch has become insanely easier thanks to things like the Arduino. Though the average consumer product is definitely less hackable now than it used to be, mostly due to significantly increased complexity, the intentionally-hackable world has if anything improved, and lowered the barrier of entry to the level where almost anyone can jump on within a day or so.
davidw 17y ago
There's tons of undiscovered territory on computers though. No way am I giving up my hackable Linux.

orangecat 17y ago

So what if we've lost the ability to mess with TVs, and computers, and iPads? You can mess with TVs, but not many people do because there isn't much point due to the natural evolution of the technology. That's very different from the iPad, where there are lots of interesting things we could do, except that Apple has arbitrarily declared them to be illegal.

Groxx 17y ago

Especially as the TV / Computer / whatever electronic hacking crowd still exists, and creating things from scratch has become insanely easier thanks to things like the Arduino. Though the average consumer product is definitely less hackable now than it used to be, mostly due to significantly increased complexity, the intentionally-hackable world has if anything improved, and lowered the barrier of entry to the level where almost anyone can jump on within a day or so.

davidw 17y ago

There's tons of undiscovered territory on computers though. No way am I giving up my hackable Linux.