Comment by uponcoffee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by uponcoffee | Hacker News Reader

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It's easy to continue the line of thought to absurdity, so I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

There's a few lines here that need to be drawn somewhere. Nintendo sells access to a platform to developers. It's not unreasonable that they aren't allowed free reign to control what's run; at some point one developers free reign would conflict with anothers.

Should the consumer have free control over what's running on their hardware? Perhaps. Let's for the sake of argument assume yes.

Then how should Nintendo and third party developers deal with hackers? Completely cut their access to Nintendo/game services? Now they have a brick.

The lines drawn for developers and consumers with respect to game consoles make sense and generally work for all involved.

I think your point has legs in other contexts (i.e. Apple products, right to repair, etc) just not here. If people feel differently they should vote with their dollars, but managed walled gardens will always be greener in some aspects.

Why is it reasonable to be given free reign to control what is run on their platform? this is why Apple gets away with anti-competitive practices like pulling apps that compete with newly released features, even though the apps weren't a problem before.

These are truly walled gardens. Worse, these walled gardens are monopolies that can and are abused by large companies.

Continuity. Standards and limitations keep the platform usable which makes it valuable to all involved. For walled gardens to be successful, both consumers and developers must both buy into them.

So, either people are painfully stupid or a managed platform has some appeal over free ones.

Continuity, ease of use, various warranties/guarantees make walled gardens attractive. If consumers have free reign and brick their device, it's hard to expect the manufacturer to have/honor any warranty. If developers have free reign there's no guarantee another application won't break theirs or that they won't break someone else's... or that it'll work with whatever the consumer is doing.

Yes, an obvious counter point is *nix systems, but there is some authority in that ecosystem which keeps most things working. It's still not painless to setup/use which prevents it from effectively competing with windows/Mac OS.

Simply put, the price of admission into a walled garden comes with some perks/guarantees/warranties which aren't readily available elsewhere.

Windows and Mac OS are not walled gardens in this way, although both Apple and Microsoft have shown signs of wanting to make them more so. Despite Windows not being a walled garden it has better continuity than any platform Nintendo has ever made, and ironically not only for Windows (and DOS) software but for most Nintendo platforms too via emulators.

Fair point, that was a poor example/counter example on my part.

What I had in mind was more a long the lines that windows/Mac OS isn't transparent and the consumer has limited control over what it's doing and how to implement things. Furthermore their official app stores are a walled garden of sorts.

Consumers/developers have a good deal of freedom on these platforms and with that comes breakage in various forms. Malware, instability, etc. And to deal with that you have repair shops/programs. System resets, fresh installs etc. Maintenance becomes a responsiblity of the consumer.

Like I said, the lines can move based on context. Moving the needle further towards freedom for developers/consumers gets you *nix systems - which is harder for your average consumer to maintain/use. Moving away gets you iphones/consoles, etc which "just work" and flaws in software/hardware handled by the manufacturer.

Very off-topic, but I've seen this twice this week already: it's free rein (as in horses), not free reign [1].

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/15276/is-this-us...

But since "free reign" has been about since 1834, there's about a 40/60 split between "reign" and "rein", and both make the same sense, I don't think anyone except daft old prescriptivists would care now, do you?

https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/03/26/rein-or-reign...

I'm not sure I buy that argument - according to the article it's a 20/80 split between "take the reigns"/"take the reins" with about the same number of samples. In that case, "take the reigns" seems egregiously wrong, and I question either the statistics or the sampled population.

> In that case, "take the reigns" seems egregiously wrong

But still understandable with the kind of context - "take the reins" and "take the reigns" would be imply "take control", no? (Sure, it's clunky, but that's English for you.)

It is understandable and doesn't "effect" my comprehension, but that doesn't mean that the net "affect" is equivalent or desirable. :)

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