Tinkerer’s Sunset

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2010/01/29/tinkerers-sunset

by mqt • 16 years ago

196 67 16 years ago

jdminhbg• 16 years ago

This whole tinkering panic is ridiculous. Did tinkering end when Nintendo released the NES? Or more recently with the Wii? His dad could have bought a word processor instead of a ][e, would he have been able to tinker with that?

Some devices are more open than others. This is not a new phenomenon, nor did anything change on Wednesday.

aristoxenus• 16 years ago

Seriously, you guys are making me sad. Use some imagination -- there is a lot more to tinker with for your dollar in 2010 than there was in the good old days. For the price of your dad's ][e you can now buy multiple linux boxes, a bucket of Arduinos or a NerdKit, robotic legos, and -- if you are so inclined -- an iPad with developer account on top of it.

At first I was wondering what the ulterior motive to all this drama was. I'm beginning to think it's just link-baiting.

mos12• 16 years ago

I have a geothermal HVAC system, and it's not very well designed. If the loop temperatures drop below a certain point it becomes ineffective, and I need to manually switch to a secondary heat source.

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.

wglb• 16 years ago

I agree with you about opportunities to tinker/hack. Just check out Maker Faire, or Ramsey Electronics or Ardunio stuff.

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.

wmf• 16 years ago

The point of the argument is that in the old days you didn't have to buy anything extra; you could tinker with your main computer. This drew in some opportunistic hackers.

mgunes2• 16 years ago

The concern is not with whether there are enough machines to tinker with today or whether there will be that many five years down the line. The concern is with what kind of computing culture is being instilled by the largest mobile computing device manufacturer of the world, which also happens to be one of the most inspiring connoisseurs of interaction design of the last two decades. And where this will lead what we know as "computing" to on the 20-year scale.

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.

waterlesscloud• 16 years ago

Because people are extrapolating into the future where these sorts of devices dominate the computing landscape.

Which isn't at all unreasonable, since that's what Apple is also doing.

blhack3• 16 years ago

I think the difference is that while there have been some smaller, less obvious things that you have been locked out of (gaming consoles, for instance) Apple has come out with what will be the future of computing, and they have blatantly said "This is ours, don't touch it. If you do, we will sue."

flogic• 16 years ago

Correct to a point, but only a point. There is a fundamental difference between an iPhone/iPod and an iPad. The iPad has enough interface bandwidth to be a family's only computing device. Which means it's significantly harder to get started tinkering. From that point you have to shell out close to $1k to get Johnny started iPad hacking with few benefits if he turns out to not like it.

byrneseyeview• 16 years ago

One company that sold lots of easily-modified computers is now selling a harder-to-modify computer.

Could you get an Apple ][e Emulator through the App Store? And throw in all the tips, manuals, and cheat sheets Mark referenced?

Zak• 16 years ago

That would be a virtual machine or interpreter, and that's against the TOS.

oconnor0• 16 years ago

Virtual machines are against Apple's App Store's TOS?

blasdel2• 16 years ago

If the iPad has a way to enable the Webkit Inspector, you’ve got your tinkerer’s playground right there! The equivalent of Ctrl-Reset is about:blank.

  Unix OS : iPad : Browser :: MOS CPU : Apple II : BASIC

I’m sure that in your day there were curmudgeons who grew up with Altairs railing against the kids these days that bought computers that not only had one-chip CPUs (make your own damn ALU from TTL), they even came fully assembled! Just like you didn’t want to have to deal with wire-wrapping and debouncing yourself, kids these days don’t want to have to deal with stupid implementation details like booting an operating system. Just as you wanted a standardized BASIC prompt that let you punch in code listings you got from friends and magazines, kids these days want a standards-based browser that they can use to tinker with the whole world’s creations.

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.

joe_bleau• 16 years ago

Picky, but the Altair did have a single chip CPU (the 8080).

DougBTX2• 16 years ago

Open up your iPhone, fire up safari, and type this into the address bar:

    javascript:alert('hello_world!');

With a bit more glorification, that could turn into a dev environment.

kqr2• 16 years ago

I think the web itself gives the individual a lot more to tinker with and explore than in the old days.

For example, you can still play around with applesoft basic.

Applesoft basic interpreter in javascript:

http://www.calormen.com/applesoft/

DannoHung2• 16 years ago

Answer this: You have somehow given a completely unlocked iPad to a child that will run any unsigned executable.

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?

blhack3• 16 years ago

>|Answer this: You have somehow given a completely unlocked iPad to a child that will run any unsigned executable.

>|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://openbsd.org/ftp.html

http://gcc.gnu.org/

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.

raganwald2• 16 years ago

t'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

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.

DannoHung2• 16 years ago

I didn't ask you to solve the question of, "Where they can figure out HOW to hack its guts", that would be a pointless question to ask, here of all places. I asked you how are they going to figure out that they CAN hack its guts? Mark said that he had to press a two key combination to get dropped into an evaluation prompt and that he could start hacking right then and there.

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.

pasbesoin• 16 years ago

My concern is if/when they come to dominate content distribution and become the only channel (or a member of an oligopoly of channels, all using "fair use" adverse licenses and DRM). At which point I'm effectively forced to lease rather than own my content, under whatever terms they dictate.

rimantas2• 16 years ago

Apple still makes most of the money on hardware. They could not care less how do you get your content if you consume that content on the device they sold to you.

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.

yan2• 16 years ago

I really don't understand the wave of alarmist posts on the 'end of a tinkering era'. Today, we have more communities and devices for tinkering than we've ever had. Magazines like Make, sites like Hack-a-day, platforms like Arduino, and countless open source projects that are simply there to be messed with, and one device that comes out with a (probably) justified need to be locked down, and everyone raises panic? If I ever have the desire to mess with anything technological today, I can literally get my hands on anything, from affordable FPGA boards with great I/O, to open mobile devices, to even RF hacking! (GNU Radio's great.)

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.

rosser2• 16 years ago

"Tinkerable" and "steep learning curve" are orthogonal.

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.

yan2• 16 years ago

> 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.

Periodic• 16 years ago

And I'm pretty sure that plenty of those youngsters who would have loved to tinker got nothing more powerful than a pocket calculator in the 80's because computers were very expensive and hard to come by. I would argue that these calculators were not very tinker-friendly.

I think you underestimate the curiosity of kids and their ability to find things to tinker with if they have that inclination.

Volscio3• 16 years ago

You have to weigh in the fact that the growth of the internet has allowed hobbyists to find each other. But then governments and international organizations will be pressured to prosecute against hackers and tinkerers. The post addresses the possibility that in the future, we won't be able to modify our own hardware. It's not elitist to worry about who will have ownership over our future products if it's not going to be ourselves.

Create• 16 years ago

will never harm anyone's ability to tinker with technology that want to. There will always be platforms that are open by design

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).

WinterAyars• 16 years ago

There's another issue too. It's not just "the iPad is closed, therefore openness is doomed". That would be obviously silly. The problem is that all the powerful forces in our society (barring technology itself) are pushing towards these closed, integrated, proprietary systems. Go look at what ISPs want to do to our internet access! Rather than, as we would expect, having cell phone contracts become more internet-like they want it to be the other way around!

gfodor2• 16 years ago

The iPad has really brought out a lot of old, crochety "well in my day" engineers that are now to the point where its embarassing.

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.

pyre3• 16 years ago

> They can, of course, jailbreak.

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?)

smokey_the_bear• 16 years ago

Jailbreaking is particularly annoying to me as an app developer. My phone was jailbroken before I started writing apps, but I've had to keep it clean in order to get the necessary OS updates, and to have the same environment as most of users. But we have a fair number of users with jailbroken phones who like to use our app with external GPS devices on iPod touches, and it's really hard to support them.

Volscio3• 16 years ago

Paging Lessig...we're encouraging our children to either be less curious or to willingly break copyright laws.

gfodor2• 16 years ago

My point was Jailbreaking is a final, last ditch step that young aspiring software nerds will probably have if they want to spend their time dicking around with the low level guts of the pad. My bigger point was, they won't bother. Because the capabilities of the device make it so there's not really that much joy to be had in rooting the thing or tinkering with it the way we were "brought up" in the computing world.

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.

whyenot• 16 years ago

My first programming experience was using a televideo terminal and an acoustic modem to connect to my school system's mainframe. We played around in basic and did tons of tinkering, and the devices we used were closed, dumb terminals.

I just don't see the problem.

Super_Jambo• 16 years ago

Economic rules only exist to serve society.

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.

noonespecial• 16 years ago

The funny part is that they (Apple) are waging war against those grown tinkers that they created. The sweet irony doesn't stop there. Today's little hackers are just as motivated to seize control of their technological world as those in past years. I have learned from watching my own children that just about nothing can stop a motivated child.

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.

rimantas2• 16 years ago

endless keys and locks and walled gardens

By that you mean freely available SDK?

ghshephard• 16 years ago

Tinkering now moves to "Meta Tinkering" - as it always has, to some degree There was a time when Tinkering involved modifying the OpCodes/Circuitry of your Computer - 1950 - 1970s. Then Tinkering involved programming the computer, with little ability to touch the hardware or modify the CPU, using assembler, compilers, interpreters.

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.

bemmu• 16 years ago

I grew up with an 8bit basic too, but to me it seems Garry's Mod would inspire a lot more tinkering than Apple II basic: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=7D7FFF74CFCF1CC5

You can start without any programming at all, then extend with Lua scripting. Available on Steam.

tocomment• 16 years ago

By the way after finishing vernor vinges the peace war I'm thinking tinkerers really need to get to work. They did some amazing things in that book.

Tinkerer’s Sunset

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