3 ms·

This is a prevalent meme on Hacker News but it's nothing more than the tech version of Old Man Yells At Cloud.

venomsnake 12y ago
This old man seems to be unable to find the built in file explorer in iDevices with which to be able to find the savegame location and edit the number of coins he has. Enlighten me, youngster how is that accomplished without breaking the warranty of the device?
- comex 12y ago
  Here you go: http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/ http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/ You need a PC for that, though. If you want to stay on the phone, or accomplish more powerful things, you need to jailbreak. This theoretically voids the warranty, but kids don't usually care about that; on the other hand, consider that many of them would be using dedicated game consoles (home or portable) for equivalent purposes back then, and those typically required buying (i.e. for a child, convincing one's parent to buy) a physical cheating device, whereas jailbreaks are free downloads.
- lips 12y ago
  I think the prominent divide between console and casual gaming hides the fact that iDevices behave much more like the consoles of yore (Cart and early CD based systems), which were, to the vast majority of kids playing them, pure black boxes of tech. My tinkering began with Apple II/Mac/PC games.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- mercer 12y ago
  Perhaps the 'hacking' occurring nowadays is just different. A lot of young people I know play Minecraft, for example, and a large subset of them even get into complicated redstone logic circuits and whatnot, or modding. When I look at my childhood, the vast majority of my peers had consoles and didn't 'hack' them at all. It was mostly the few 'pc gamers' that got into this. I don't think it's so different nowadays.
clay_to_n 12y ago
I totally agree. People are arguing that video games going mainstream is making LESS people interested in tech? Bizarroland. Kids today are going to be more likely to get into tech, and it's going to be far far easier for them to do it. We don't need to get nostalgic for how much more "authentic" it was back in the day when the tools sucked a lot more. (the GameShark comparison may be valid - but in my experience, a GameShark was just a thing you bought to cheat in a game. None of my friends who got them got into learning about programming because of it)

This old man seems to be unable to find the built in file explorer in iDevices with which to be able to find the savegame location and edit the number of coins he has. Enlighten me, youngster how is that accomplished without breaking the warranty of the device?

comex 12y ago
Here you go: http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/ http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/ You need a PC for that, though. If you want to stay on the phone, or accomplish more powerful things, you need to jailbreak. This theoretically voids the warranty, but kids don't usually care about that; on the other hand, consider that many of them would be using dedicated game consoles (home or portable) for equivalent purposes back then, and those typically required buying (i.e. for a child, convincing one's parent to buy) a physical cheating device, whereas jailbreaks are free downloads.
lips 12y ago
I think the prominent divide between console and casual gaming hides the fact that iDevices behave much more like the consoles of yore (Cart and early CD based systems), which were, to the vast majority of kids playing them, pure black boxes of tech. My tinkering began with Apple II/Mac/PC games.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mercer 12y ago
Perhaps the 'hacking' occurring nowadays is just different. A lot of young people I know play Minecraft, for example, and a large subset of them even get into complicated redstone logic circuits and whatnot, or modding. When I look at my childhood, the vast majority of my peers had consoles and didn't 'hack' them at all. It was mostly the few 'pc gamers' that got into this. I don't think it's so different nowadays.

clay_to_n 12y ago

I totally agree. People are arguing that video games going mainstream is making LESS people interested in tech? Bizarroland. Kids today are going to be more likely to get into tech, and it's going to be far far easier for them to do it. We don't need to get nostalgic for how much more "authentic" it was back in the day when the tools sucked a lot more. (the GameShark comparison may be valid - but in my experience, a GameShark was just a thing you bought to cheat in a game. None of my friends who got them got into learning about programming because of it)