Tinkerer’s Sunset
diveintomark.org
diveintomark.org
Some devices are more open than others. This is not a new phenomenon, nor did anything change on Wednesday.
At first I was wondering what the ulterior motive to all this drama was. I'm beginning to think it's just link-baiting.
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.
It might be very interesting to chat.
I'd appreciate if you dropped me an email to dfong <a.t> lightsailenergy.com :-)
Not terribly impressive, but $150 worth of my own work wouldn't have been able to drop the power usage to those levels.
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... . That's right out of Stallman's "Right to Read" (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.
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.
Do you really believe Steve Jobs is sitting in a dark room somewhere, cackling over how his plan to destroy freedom will soon be complete?
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?
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.
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.
So yes, many precocious youngsters of my generation learned to hack just because they happened to have computer (bought for non-hacking purpose) and it was tempting and possible to tinker.
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.
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.)
I'm wondering how likely it is for a child to get curious about what this "computing" thing is, discover the basic distinction between hardware and software, wonder how one goes beyond the software that ships as default with the device, how one makes a computer do something vaguely defined, random, outside the intended use scenarios, fun, or extremely specific, with an iPad, Chrome OS device, or similar future sandboxed information appliance. How much more or less likely it is compared to a 386DX with a bulky CRT, that runs DOS and expects the user to type a word by default, or an Amiga 500 that expects the user to insert a floppy by default. Getting curious in the first place is a prerequisite; it comes before one can consider paying Apple $99 a year to get the tools with which to satisfy that curiosity.
My line of thinking is that we're witnessing not a huge shift in what personal computing is defined as, but the gradual total disappearance of what we've come to know as computing from the retail market in favour of narrowly targeted information appliances with intentional limitations that aim to make "computing" invisible in the whole experience. It's true that these devices will not saturate or dominate the market any time soon. But the number of pockets that vote for them will definitely bias the industry towards a specific direction, and the culture they create in this decade will set the tone for the culture of the next era, just like how our past experiences with Pascal, Windows 3.1, DOS, what have you, influence the way we evaluate today's technology.
Which isn't at all unreasonable, since that's what Apple is also doing.
Unix OS : iPad : Browser :: MOS CPU : Apple II : BASIC
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.
javascript:alert('hello_world!');
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.
By that you mean freely available SDK?
For example, you can still play around with applesoft basic.
Applesoft basic interpreter in javascript:
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.
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?)
If I am an aspiring young hacker I would probably spend more of my time writing apps for the app store or building apps on the web for my friends' iPhones. If I really want to learn about the guts of the thing, I can jailbreak or simply learn about the guts of non-iPad computers.
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&... 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.
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?
>|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://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.
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.
Your argument makes sense if we were talking about the iPhone. What role is the iPad meant to play, if not a simplified PC replacement ?
I won't program on an iPad. I like the look of iWork, but I can't see myself composing my next presentation on it. I won't be (legally in Canada) ripping my DVD collection on it. I might write comments like this on it, but without a stylus I can't see myself writing a blog post on it.
An iPad may replace my mother's Macbook. And it ought to. She surfs the net, writes email, does her banking, and skypes. She has no need of a device that she can tinker with.
I see iPads as a threat to books and also as a threat to secondary televisions. The big screen isn't going away, but a lot of people like a smaller TV in their bedroom or kitchen. Being able to watch movies and favourite shows on a small device may displace these extra televisions.
A kid with a new computer today has gotta figure out first that it CAN be programmed and then what a good way to program it is. If he's got no guidance and no foreknowledge, he'll be floating in a vast, featureless ocean of jargon, languages, libraries, and frameworks.
We've drowned the burgeoning tinkerer before he even had a chance to start. Apple's just held the funeral at sea.
Could you get an Apple ][e Emulator through the App Store? And throw in all the tips, manuals, and cheat sheets Mark referenced?
-- Apple iPhone SDK agreement
You can start without any programming at all, then extend with Lua scripting. Available on Steam.
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.
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 have more options available to me today than anyone ever has before. But it's not me that's being cut off from tinkering. It's the novice computer user, who's only beginning her journey of discovery into the possibilities these incredible tools can offer -- because the tool she has in front of her, as it's been given to her, explicitly excludes those possibilities. She doesn't know what Arduino is; she doesn't even have a concept for it. As far as she's concerned, FPGA is something a golfer might join. Those are things for people already at least knee-deep in tinkering.
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 in her hand, she can start asking these questions. If it was an open platform, it would most likely have been of lower quality, not as ground-breaking, and she wouldn't have had it in her hands in the first place (I'd love to be wrong here, but I'm afraid I can't find the evidence to prove myself wrong). The fact that it has "apps", written by real people can actually guide her to search online what it takes to create these apps, from which she can then find out about open platforms, programming languages, (even FPGAs!) and development in general.
I understand that talking about our curious, hypothetical protagonist we can prove anything we agree with, but without an extremely approachable, polished device it would simply not appeal to as many people. Most of these people will just be users, but some will be curious, and those are the ones we're talking about. Since hobbyist platforms are ubiquitous, you don't need to create yet another hackable platform, you need to get them interested.
I'm purposefully holding back anything specific to the iPad. Nor I, nor the majority of HN readers have even held the device, but knowing Apple, I think it can vastly increase the ubiquity of general purpose computing even more, and make good UI and design be expected. And that's a win for everyone.
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.
That doesn't follow at all. Is Mac OS X of "lower quality" because anybody can write and distribute apps for it? Does the existence of the "allow non-market apps" checkbox in Android make it worse?
I think you underestimate the curiosity of kids and their ability to find things to tinker with if they have that inclination.
How many people does that wall turn away, who might otherwise have discovered a new passion or talent? How much does it take from the rest of us, having all those potential hackers and tinkerers turned away before they could even discover they wanted to tinker and hack? What incredible ways might they have changed the world, if only they'd had the opportunity to discover that they could?
None, is my guess. Anyone who wants to tinker now has internet access, that changes everything.
No. Freedom is never granted: it is use or loose it.
Most posters miss the cultural aspect, which is more fragile than you might think. E.g. those, who have no longer seen quality colour TV do no longer have a demand for it. When was The Ascent of Man, or The Day the Universe Changed last updated? When you could learn about the world around you? Perhaps a decade ago? TV hardware is more advanced as ever (large, crisp home theaters) and locked-down as ever (DRM, HDMI, CryptoCard etc.) Would you think you have a case, that there is a demand for quality TV content?
completely open device like OpenMoko
A very good example: it is a practically completely discontinued open communications device. Last time communication devices were open was HAM, which was quickly taken away (read example on freeculture.org).
I just don't see the problem.
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.
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.