The publishing equivalent of Apple would have stifled e.e. cummings for his abuse of punctuation. You wouldn't have Jabberwocky because it contained imaginary words. You wouldn't have Joyce because the App^H^H^HBook Store reviewers decided that it made absolutely no sense.
The examples above are all of writers tinkering with English, tinkering with writing, hacking the language to accomplish things that otherwise would have been impossible before. A closed system takes all these away.
You shouldn't dismiss the effect of walled gardens on hackers just because you can't or won't empathize with our bit-twiddling.
If you want to be experimental, be it online. Nobody can deny access to your HTML5 creations. In fact, Apple's one of the biggest pushers of compliant modern web browsing.
A small problem: run-time environments are not allowed in the app store.
Can you make one that downloads to the iPhone/iPad and run natively? There's nothing in an RTE that needs to access Internet files, right? So theoretically you could program it in its entirety and have people download that.
I'm sorry I didn't know that when I wrote the article, though; certainly it throws a nasty complication into the works.
Not sure what Apple would say if you wrote an interpreter for something else than JavaScript in JavaScript...
The fact that he's pretty clearly trolling in the passage above doesn't make it less worth reading, as it does discuss some interesting points about how people use and learn about computers.
I am not a troll. I am a creative writer. I care much, much more about whether I'm writing in interesting and fun and amusing ways than I do about any pretense of formality, particularly in this piece. (I alternate between phases of more serious writing and more tongue-in-cheek. This is very much the latter.)
I don't like the suggestion that the instant a piece of writing stops being formal or serious, it becomes a troll piece. In this case in particular, I thought that there was a very specific reason to write it in the way that I did: Partly it's to highlight the fact that I think this particular criticism of Apple is a tad silly, for a variety of reasons. But it also deflates me, and indicates that perhaps this argument, while relevant, should not be taken as my attempt to speak the word of God.
As I wrote elsewhere on this thread: I didn't want this posted to Hacker News. I was writing for a different audience of people, one that enjoys a little melodrama and overdescription. I didn't expect anybody in that "programming" umbrella to read this.
I'm sorry that it's wound up here, but it wasn't trolling and I resent the accusation.
Speaking of mail, I would like to be able to host it at home, where it should be. (It's private, after all.) Thanks to the walled garden policy of blocking the outgoing SMTP port (and no one complaining, because web mail is soo convenient), I can't.
If Trusted Computing ever becomes the default, it won't be long before using open systems becomes a major hassle. Because, you know, they are dangerous, infected by viruses, used by cyber-pirates, in a word, suspects. Just like home hosted mail servers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/whereilive/coast/images/southw...
"It is not productive to spend an hour learning how to change the font on your computer’s clock. Even if while you’re doing that you’re learning about how computers work, you’re wasting your time and getting somewhere trivial very slowly."
This reminds me of "computer education" programs that just teach how to use MS Word. Yes, this will get you a job, but you'd be learning at a more fundamental level with Squeak eToys. Or some of this:
He makes these sweeping generalizations about what is or is not productive for other people to do. By his definition all the people "tinkering with" open source Linux, Apache, etc would be "non productive" since perfectly good commercial alternatives existed (and still exist) for them.
Would a half troll be something like a half elf with a troll father and human mother? :-P I believe such a player class exists in the game Arcanum.
More seriously, the author drowns whatever valid points he may have in trollish blather.
As to the "endless tinkering that an "open" system allows is viewed as a useless waste of time by the vast majority of people," the value of tinkering is to the tinkerers.
Non tinkerers making vlaue judgments on its utility is irrelevant to its desirability to tinkerers. I think music is irrelevant so you shouldn't get to play your violin? A more viable argument is that I shouldn't have to subsidize your violin, not that my judgment about your musical tinkering being "a useless waste of time" is "not completely wrong".
That's all possible with a closed system. You can make environments specially designed to encourage tinkering, rather than leaving everything open for intrusion. You can write guides teaching people things that they wouldn't normally see on a closed system. It doesn't exist by default like it does perhaps on a system wherein everything is viewable, but you can still create it. So it won't kill programming.
It's not like Apple's declaring a holocaust on all other computers. If you're so obsessed with tinkering that you think it's worth fucking around instead of learning to tinker in more meaningful ways — though I must admit that from my biased point of view that always seems like the college graduate whose poetry reads like high school — the other systems are all available, and will be for a long, long time; it won't be long before somebody releases an open source equivalent of the iPad for stupid people to go around claiming is objectively better in every way and for ordinary tinkerers to buy and tinker with.
But I'd like to address this troll accusation, because I find it unbecoming. I am not a troll. I have been a productive and contributing member of this community for nearly two years; even though my respect for it has constantly declined, I come in here to debate with people all the time. I don't do it to fuck around with your head or to provoke people. I do it because I enjoy stating my point of view, which is frequently very different from the mass opinions here.
My blog is not written for Hacker News. My blog is written for the potpourri audience of artists and literati and young adults that enjoy long essays written about random subjects. It's not a coding blog, so even when I write about subjects that interest people here I'm not writing it in a way that'll appeal to readers here. This article was submitted three times; the first time I asked that it be killed and the submitter graciously killed it for me. This is not of a tone appropriate for Hacker News.
But that does not make it a troll post. I wrote a post last month describing fictional Listerine commercials. I'm sure if it had been submitted here people would have been boneheaded to announce the commercials were fake and I was trolling. There are smart people here, but there are not very diverse people.
Tinkering is just play. Play has useful evolutionary purposes to the individual and the group. Consumers not finding such stuff useful isn't any indicator of it's actual value to society.
Other machines will exist to tinker on. Moreover, the iPad itself is opening to tinkering. If I'm a young kid who finds out online I can download a jailbreaker and completely hack up my iPad, that's exciting for me! That gives me an opening into the world of tinkering and fiddling that you have with these computers by default. Or, if I have an idea for how to excite people into learning how to fiddle with computers, I make an iPad app or a webapp that teaches them all those things. As I said in the article: If nobody else decides that would be an awesome thing to do, chances are I'll make one myself, for my own sake as much as for others'.
I understand the criticism that the iPad's getting for being closed. I've been a member here for however long. And to some degree, I sympathize with it. But people here are fucking ridiculous. (Not just here; Reddit and MetaFilter are just as bad.) They jump from "I wish it was open" to "The fact that Apple's closed the system is killing computing forever and plunging us into the dark ages."
I wrote this to Alex Payne in a rougher, impromptu format. I just wanted to explain to him why I didn't think it was totally bad that the iPad was closed. When I finished writing it, I liked it, so I rewrote it for my blog readers and added that little smug "Programmers aren't permitted to feel my breath on their skin" character because I thought it was really fun and because I have readers who enjoy irony and tongue-in-cheek. Then it got out to a wider public, including certain venues where people didn't know my name or my writing style, and now we have this discussion going on.
I hope this will stop certain of the people here from jackassing themselves about. (Not you, fnid; your comment was a great response to an attitude I don't hold.)
