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Twitter, Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal

ericsink.com

72 pointsbdfh4254 comments

I read posts like this often, and I think the author makes the common geek mistake of assuming that the way normal people use computers is a subset of how geeks use them. Take out all the programming, modding and even file handling and you get what ordinary users need.

This is not true. Non-geeks use computers in all kinds of ways geeks never think of. They use a very specific genealogy application. They connect an obscure 10 year old water sample analyzer. They connect a keyboard and record music.

This is why all attempts to make a simplified limited computer over the years have failed. Ordinary people need the full flexibility of a computer. Make it simple to use, but not limited.

It's a valid point, but I don't think you can consider an iPad or other similar device to be 'limited' if they contain a modern web browser. They may not have a midi interface or connect to old devices, but I think you over estimate how many people need that.

> all attempts to make a simplified limited computer over the years have failed

Really? Ever heard about iTouch/iPhone? They are the very definition of

> Make it simple to use, but not limited.

Tivo is another simplified, very limited computer. That is the nature of consumer devices. Limited but exceptionally simple and "just works" at the thing they do.

And yet you don't buy an iPhone as a replacement for your computer. People still need a "real" computer, and for that reason we're probably not going to see computers go the way of the dodo in favor of iPads.

Well, uh, isn't this how Apple is marketing the iPad? The thing you use when you're not out and about but don't want to deal with "the computer"?

The computing device that takes care of 80% of your day to day computing needs? (ie: Watching videos of kittens on YouTube)

And heck, even if that's the case and the "real computer" turns into an incredible niche device, do we even need the power of a gigantic desktop machine with 8 gigs of RAM and the super duper video card? I don't know about you guys, but all I need is a terminal and I can do 99.9% of the hacking I want to do (sometimes I use gitk).

The only reason my parents don't use an iPhone as a replacement for their computer is the screen size. The only reason. For a reasonably large subset of "people" a 'real' computer is an unnecessarily complicated device.

As Kejistan said, you don't buy an iPhone instead of a computer. Most people are used to phones that can make calls, send messages and little more, so the iPhone is more capable. Tivo is also not a replacement for a computer, but for less capable movie/tv players.

Most people may just be browsing the web most of the time, but they also use the computer to copy photos from a camera, make party invitations, etc. Netbooks may not be suitable for running Photoshop and Excel, but they can when you need to. This is why they are so popular.

I don't think there is anything wrong with saying, you just have to have the right device for the right task. If what you need is to check email and browse websites, get something that does that. It might do more, but if that's all you need, than it doesn't have to do more. Likewise, if you need a "very specific genealogy application" then you know you have to get something that runs that. Just because some customers need something specific doesn't mean that everyone needs something that can do everything. You just need to find the right thing fo the job.

Case in point, I have a friend who was going on a multi-year trip to Australia. She wanted to get a computer that could travel with her, run skype, let her update her blog and upload pictures. Other than that, she didn't need anything else. She may do heavy picture editting on her Macbook at home, but she realized for a trip like this, all she needed was a netbook with linux on it. She got skype and webbrowsing, and the ability to pull pictures off of her camera. She realized a full Macbook or Windows laptop would've been overkill, so picked the right tool for what she needed.

Close. They won't put up with vendor laziness that geeks will. For example, convoluted/unnecessarily hard configuration or software installation. Or, take the hideous wireless configuration work required on linux for years, versus the simple drop-down menu on the mac.

I don't know if I would go so far as to disagree with TorKlingberg, but I do see the trend you mention. Technically expert users will do whatever it takes to get a product they want to work, even if it really isn't worth the effort.

This is why we can't have nice things. It amazes me the number of projects that require that I build from source, in a specific directory, with these options and these dependencies installed. If I can, I avoid such projects on principle.

What's worse is, I've been accused of being lazy or too dumb to run such projects. It's not that I can't or won't install these products: I don't want to waste my time doing so if it can be helped. I'm just expecting the same thing of other developers as I expect from myself. If my product is versioned 1.0 or higher, I expect that it a) has an installer (Windows-style) b) comes in a package (.deb et al) c) comes via a manager (apt-get), or d) runs in-place (WinSCP/PUTTY/uTorrent).

Woo Hoo,

Parent is the best explanation so far why brain dead machines won't win.

I remember a Bus-to-RV conversions Web BBS ten years where one poster wrote a DOS program to calculate the optimal Bus conversion layout.

This is why all attempts to make a simplified limited computer over the years have failed. Ordinary people need the full flexibility of a computer. Make it simple to use, but not limited.

Yes...

Yes, they failed, from Al Gore's "Information Super Highway" to the original AOL on down. Thank God. Richard Stallman's Right Read based it's description very directly on the publish specs of the Information Super Highway. But Stallman didn't sink it. The demands of ordinary people, which only an open net could satisfy, were what defeated it.

Yeah. I've read a lot of articles lately that try to divide the entire computer-using world in to two groups. The geeks (us) and the rest (mom). That doesn't jive with reality. There are a lot of people with different levels of computer savvy.

I wish the title of this submission had been better. I'd have read it much sooner.

I've taken to calling iPad-esque ideas "Internet Appliance" (I'm sure I got that from somewhere else and I doubt it's original). I think the article misses one important point though - businesses. As far as consumer products I don't see my mom (metaphor) buying a standard desktop PC again assuming similar devices to the iPad come from other makers. Businesses, OTOH, I expect to continue to use traditional PCs for many years to come. People who work in front of PCs need lots of screen real-estate even those doing accounting-and these businesses have tons of legacy SW that it took them years to migrate to new systems (many of them still haven't).

This will be a boon to geeks. As businesses hold onto the traditional computers we will all benefit and continue to get much of our hardware fairly cheaply.

The average business today would fall apart if people suddenly got that time back that they spend dealing with IT. They'd fill the time with political machinations and end up eating each other alive.

More seriously, I predict that we'll see official support products for linking multiple iPads together in a workstation capacity within a year. Well, probably just two iPads at most, but third-party products might go for more.

You just know someone is going to make a display wall out of them.

> More seriously, I predict that we'll see official support products for linking multiple iPads together in a workstation capacity within a year. Well, probably just two iPads at most, but third-party products might go for more.

Are you talking 'iPad-like devices' or actual iPads? If you're talking actual iPads, I see the price as a barrier to these becoming ubiquitous devices. If the 'pad' market follows the PC market, Apple will just be at the luxury end of the spectrum.

Odd, but I see business users as having more in common with Eric's "Mom" than with hackers. There are jillions of custom business apps that don't give people files to manipulate: There's a client app or a web page and a database on a server somewhere stores the data. Salespeople and customer service reps and what-not just use the apps just as an iPad owner might 'just use' a program.

I think that point is that those apps already exist and need to run on PCs. Porting them over the 'simpler' devices takes time and money that most businesses won't be eager to spend.

But they already have existing PCs to run that existing software. We are, I think, talking about new businesses that have a choice—of course those that have locked themselves into a paradigm will still be locked in when a new one is invented.

Larry Ellison was touting the concept of "Internet Appliance" back in 1995. I don't think think his were ever mass manufactured.

For those that don't know the source of the headline:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znxFrgql5dc

(I shall never forgive Fox for canceling that show. Never.)

"The genius of the iPad is that it cannot get things like viruses."

safari can certainly be compromised, but even with the sandboxing that claim seems like a stretch

It will be way less common, specialy considering that you can't execute anything in there...

That's a very, very silly idea. If the device can be jailbroken by browsing a webpage that exploits a vulnerability in the browser, such a page could also infect your device. The idea that the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad are any less vulnerable to viruses than any other networked device out there is just plain wrong. People can and will attack these devices, it's just a matter of how difficult it is; from my experience with auditing Apple's products, the difficulty level is generally somewhere between trivial and damn-near-trivial.

The difference is that fixing an iPad won't require a repair shop; it'll require plugging it into your computer, which will go through its normal syncing cycle of backing it up, then upgrading apps—but it'll notice the invalid app checksums on infected apps and overwrite them with App-Store-canonical versions. If kernel-level viruses become prevalent, it'll simply start checksumming that too, and offering to restore from an IPSW with all your data (but nome of your config) intact (but that won't be a problem, since part of Apple's aesthetic is "low configuration.")

Interestingly, it'll mean that only jailbreakers—and those with no access to a computer to sync with—will ever have viruses for more than one sync cycle.

But given a sufficiently complex code, you can execute from unexpected places. Sometimes even without any bugs involved:

http://blog.didierstevens.com/2010/03/29/escape-from-pdf/

One thing's for sure, if iPhone-like computers get more significant uptake, we will find out exactly how horrible XSS can be.

that almost sounds like a challenge

I am sure there will be security problems, but the basic starting point seems like it should make things easier to deal with. Every app is in a jail with limited access. I am curious how the common file area plays into security.

This challenge sounds like an excellent way to be rapidly educated about a broad array of security holes.

Yeah, that line really stuck out to me. Wasn't there a link floating around in the last week or so where people were able to utilize some kind of bug in the iPhone to extract the entire database of SMS texts, including previously deleted SMS messages?

For me this article boils down to this one bullet point:

"The industry is finally ready to sell things that make geeks feel frustrated instead of things that make normal people feel helpless. What does this mean for geeks and our role in society?"

It'll mean great things for geeks. A userbase who no longer fears computers or hates IT departments will allow for more interesting applications, better collaborations and the end of geeks as second class citizens in many organizations. That is, as long as they play along.

It turns out that interface innovations for Mom also work for hackers - provided that you still have access to a *nix toolkit. Witness the popularity of the Macbook among developers. But then you wouldn't really want bash on an iPad, would you? That is not what the iPad is for. Hackers also passively consume information too, and when they do their needs aren't different than Mom's - an intuitive interface that does not get in their way.

I doubt I'll need bash, but I'm gonna want emacs. Maybe Bespin will be adequate, I don't know.

I'll need multi-tasking before I can consider this anything more than a toy I'm using in the same room as my laptop.

Pretend you could have as many of them as you wanted—10 to run 10 apps at once. Would that make it less of a toy?

I have been banging on for a long time that as soon as someone produces a decent home computer that is actually designed to be a consumer good then the price of computers as we know them will start to rocket upwards.

We probably need to start thinking about just what constitutes a good developers platform so we can all get behind it and achieve some sort of economies of scale.

DIY is gonna have to drill down to the level of motherboards and chip-fab much faster than it has been.

> designed to be a consumer good

That is the iPad, and iPhone/iTouch before it. I don't know what you mean by "decent home computer" but for me "decent computer" is not compatible to "consumer good". Consumer goods are black boxes that just work, computers are DIY tools.

Sure way to make me read a blog post: reference a line of Firefly dialogue in the title!

He presents a false dichotomy. There is nothing stopping an iPad-like UX being configurable in a way which makes geeks happy. It's just a matter of putting the configuration controls out of the way of most users.

I'm not sure how to put this, so bear with me. Once you go down the road of "configurability" you immediately lose the focus that would come with a device like this. IMO the reason that the IPhone/IPod/IPad interface "works" is because they PREVENT things. It isn't for everyone, sure, but it works for most people. Good UX design is as much about removing abilities as it is about gaining them.

Your average "joe on the street" doesn't want a computer, they want a consumer electronic device (a game console, a point-and-shoot camera, a television).

Yes, it's a common nerd delusion that the UI is a presentation layer on top of something else and that you can therefore have an "iPad-like UX" presenting some complicated underlying system.

This thinking leads to a kind of UI cargo cult where the nerds are copying superficial aspects of the iPad without understanding what fundamental properties make it "iPad-like".

Why not go the game console route and just have an 'Other OS' option? Pad-like devices don't preclude geekiness. It's just that Apple is currently the only 'real world' implementation and they are very anal about their devices.

I think that most people are 'up in arms' about things like the inability to install 'unapproved' apps. When Microsoft was trying to push the 'Trusted Computing' platform people were rabidly against it because then it would cause Microsoft to be the sole approver of applications for Windows. Now that Apple has created the same thing within the iPhone/iPad-OS people praise them for it and call it innovative and revolutionary.

> This thinking leads to a kind of UI cargo cult where the nerds are copying superficial aspects of the iPad without understanding what fundamental properties make it "iPad-like".

So people look at a device, and copy the aspects of it that they like. Now they are a 'cargo cult' because these aspects are not the aspects that you like?

Apple makes decisions based on consumer experience. They made Boot Camp because they wanted the user experience of dual-booting Windows on an Apple computer to be something even grandma could learn to work with. Unless there's some specific, other OS users are demanding to run on the iPad (Android?) Apple won't make the investment to create something Boot Camp-like for it—and that means they won't support it, because they're perfectionists.

> because they're perfectionists.

I think that you mean he is a perfectionist (as in Steve Jobs). I doubt that everyone at Apple is a perfectionist, but perfection is expected of them as an edict from 'on high.'

I really don't see the authors point and completely disagree with him. Computers were originally used by people to get work done. It's why they were invented in the first place. And the only way to get work done was to know how to write a program. Now the "normal" people just want to use the web and chat with their friends.

Look to Japan for making technology appliances.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197702

This is a country where high speed Internet connection is common but from my observation, a lot of households to not have a general purpose computer.

This may help explain why so many Japanese websites seem to be utterly atrocious--fewer people looking at them.

What i don't agree with is that he focuses on the older generation, his mom, when the problems he describes won't exist as much for younger generations. His mom started using a computer past the point where it was hard for her to learn things. Of course it will be confusing to her.

Coming generations grow up with easy access to computers, and will know how to use them well. Eventually we will get to a point where very few people are computer illiterate.

Some anecdotal evidence. It took my mom 3 months to figure out how to make an itunes account, another few months before she figured out how to install an app. My 3 year old son had to show her how to play movies, on both the iphone and on boxee.

This really just depends on your definition of computer literate. I don't buy that having a facebook account makes you a computer wiz. Neither does owning a smart phone. There are computers in my car and I have'nt a clue how they work.

What does computer literate even mean? If it means comfortable with the command line / terminal, then I absolutely don't beleive that tomorrows kids will fall within the classification.

I think the middle ground of this possible fututre is very interesting. What happens to all those folks who use specialist software such as CAD, Design, Music and other areas that still need highend systems and that know nothing about computers. I have plenty of musician friends who know nothing about computers but know Cubase or Logic like the back of their hands. The next 5 years will be interesting!

Same thing that happened 15 years ago,perhaps?

I have a gorgeous SGI Indigo in my basement office courtesy of the company I worked for when they were tossing them (lots of them!) in the dumpster. Back in the day, you needed a "Workstation Class" PC to run the big CAD applications and many mechanical engineers had a computer whose only purpose was to run that CAD system.

I don't think we'll go all the way back to "a computer only for CAD" but we will have computers sold that are optimized for CAD, music production, etc.

What should we call the class of devices that help normal people manage their Amazon wish list?

Momputers?

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