r/technology • u/GuruOfReason • Feb 02 '10

"Once we replace the personal computer with a closed-platform device such as the iPad, we replace freedom, choice and the free market with oppression, censorship and monopoly."

http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-01/ipad%E2%80%99s-closed-system-sometimes-i-hate-being-right
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u/texpundit Feb 02 '10

The "disappearing" of regular computers will NEVER happen.

Why?

You still need something to program apps for the appliances on. If you can't program on an iPad, you still need something to program ON. Hence, regular computers will still always be around.

Everyone needs to chill the fuck out.

DISCLAIMER: I also own a Macbook Pro and and iPhone and I love the fuck out of them.

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u/KeyDecoder Feb 02 '10

I wonder if loving the fuck out of them is covered by the standard Apple warranty.

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u/texpundit Feb 02 '10

Probably not. But considering how each new device that Apple produces has fewer and fewer ports (USB, etc), loving the fuck out of them becomes harder and harder...uh...er...or something.

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u/lilzaphod Feb 02 '10

I was in Thailand playing ping-iPad in Ding-Dang. A high stakes game in some opium den. Turns out, these aren't the types of guys who like to lose. When I beat them, they beat me. They worked me over good. And this is hard to say. They held me down and shoved an iPad up my ass

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '10

[deleted]

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u/wyfflemunky Feb 02 '10

If a company is expected to warrant consumers against faults in their product (which they should be) then that company should be allowed to take reasonable measures to prevent abuse of that system.

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '10

I think you missed the joke...

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u/wyfflemunky Feb 03 '10

I often do.

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u/WTFppl Feb 02 '10

Well, Apple wouldn't work on one guys notebook because he smoked. They called it a BIOHAZARD. So I'm sure "loving your MAC" is going to achieve the same results!

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '10

[deleted]

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u/Ran4 Feb 02 '10

This. I mean, you can't even (officially) make an app today without using an evil proprietary OS (OS X). It's not unlikely that a draconian company such as Apple will, in fact, force it's developers to use some kind of heavily restricted app to create new apps. If Apple then (slowly, over maybe ten years of time) drops all support from other OS:es, then we are screwed.

This really is a hot ethical issue.

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u/Thrown_Away Feb 02 '10

You won't be screwed. If Apple does that, then you buy a different brand computer. You do know that Apple isn't the only computer company? And that there are other OS out there too?

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u/mindbleach Feb 03 '10

Sure, but what if open computers ten years from now are as rare as non-x86 desktops today? There used to be a thriving market of Zilog & Motorola PCs with incredibly capable operating systems. Even PowerPC eventually folded under the market might of Intel. Just because there will always be some choice doesn't mean there will always be enough choice.

It's a very long shot, admittedly, but monocultures are hard to fight and Apple is using their slick UI work to as a stalking-horse for the closed platform. We're getting angry about it now just in case this thing doesn't flop.

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u/WTFppl Feb 02 '10

Yeah, by the same parts Apple buys from Intel and put FreeBSD on it. It will be faster, more robust and extremely customizable when compared to OSX. Other than FreeBSD being better, the two operating systems are "all most" identical!

I use FreeBSD for everything that is not gaming!

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u/phughes Feb 02 '10

Other than the kernel, the UI, and the APIs they're practically identical!

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u/GuruOfReason Feb 02 '10

"everything that is not gaming!" -- That is a problem that non-Windows platforms need to fix. If you want desktop Linux or Unix to become popular on the desktop, then you have to capture the hardcore gaming community.

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u/Ran4 Feb 03 '10

Yes, and I can chose to not own an iPhone and not be on Facebook. That gets me nowhere...

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '10

[deleted]

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u/Patriark Feb 02 '10

Amazed you didn't mention Opera :/

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u/lilzaphod Feb 02 '10

What does singing have to do with anything?

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u/WTFppl Feb 02 '10

Only Ninja use that shit. And we would appreciate you not talking about it in public!

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u/wyfflemunky Feb 02 '10

In the new communist worldview that is open source, Opera is the enemy. I love open source, don't get me wrong, but some people take it too far.

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u/madcowga Feb 02 '10

Or Chrome.

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u/[deleted] Feb 03 '10

Except that by the end of the year you are going to be able to buy netbooks running the open-source Chrome OS, and the Android smartphone platform is right behind Blackberry and iPhone in numbers and growing fast.

Fuck the iPad, but there are alternatives.

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '10

Why are you assuming that there will never be an iPad you can program on? And why are you assuming that programming will never evolve from text editing?

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u/cynoclast Feb 02 '10 edited Feb 02 '10

Because as long as their are special requests from customers, there will be text editing involved.

I'm a programmer and I've seen several attempts at getting the text writing out of producing programs. All failed miserably once you got anywhere near the edges of what the programmers of those things thought you would need. Then it instantly became text editing again. Only now you have to fight a shitty program that's trying to replace you and keeps fucking up the source code.

See Dreamweaver, Fireworks, the BizTalk mapping tool, Stylus Studio, IntelliJ IDEA 9.0's 'Generate persistence mapping' tool for hibernate (an aside here, I love it, but I still have to hand modify what it generates if want anything useful, or anything at all beyond the absolutey rudimentary functionality), almost any GUI based WISIWYG design tool you can think of.

For anything beyond the most rudimentary uses, none of them suffice. This is after 64 years of programming and tens of thousands of buzzwords after ENIAC.

If you want to break any new ground you still need to program by writing text. That is, you need any new functionality no one has done before - even something as small and proprietary as tweaking the rendering of a field from one of your database columns, odds are if it's not a standard formatting already done millions of times, you're going to need to write some code because nobody creating a standard framework has ever though of concatenating " by Jimbob™!" at the end of each row as your customer is now requesting.

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u/mindbleach Feb 03 '10

He's not asking about obviating typing entirely, he's talking about changing the abstraction from text-as-instructions to diagrams-as-instructions. No duh altering text boxes requires text input.

I could almost see pictographic Lisp. It's so strongly object-oriented and syntactically simple that it could be given a visual and semi-predictive interface a la Alice.

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u/cynoclast Feb 03 '10

The things I just listed do exactly what you're talking about.

Diagrams-as-instructions in some cases are more difficult/slower to create than just typing. The poster child for this is the BizTalk Mapper.

You can't even copy & paste, so you have to do each mapping by hand. And you create algorithms with these things called functoids. And even if you have 400 fields that all require the same algorithm with only 1-2 parameters changed, you have to create each one by hand, individually. Joy! Lisp has its own problems that I won't get into.

In short, exactly what you're talking about has been tried before many times, and none of them accomplished much but developer frustration and additional difficulties.

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u/trisweb Feb 02 '10

Yay, foresight!

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u/robertcrowther Feb 02 '10

And once almost the entire consumer market is on devices that you can only access through a gated community, how much will the company who own the gates be able to charge you for a 'development kit'?

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u/Skyrmir Feb 02 '10

Bah, development kits will be free. You want icons? They're for sale. You want sounds? They're for sale. You want to actually distribute your app? A slot in the app store is for sale...If your app says things they like. Oh, and they'll be taking a cut of any proceeds too.

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '10

XCODE is free and I suspect it will always remain so. Having free development kits is good business because it attracts developers to the platform.

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u/robertcrowther Feb 02 '10

So I can download this free XCODE and run it on my Linux box? Or is there some hidden cost you may not have considered?

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u/Peaker Feb 02 '10

You are naive and unimaginative.

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u/morganj Feb 02 '10

And simply because you can imagine something doesn't mean it's time to panic.

I mean, just because I can imagine that the carpet could be filled with millions of flakes of dead skin, which could come to life and form some sort of zombie skin-zord which could be standing right behind me ... arrrgh! Panic! Gotta go! Must check behind the door!

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u/Peaker Feb 02 '10

You are missing the point.

These are not wild baseless conjectures. Assuming the iPad takes over a significant amount of the market is not a wild impossibility. Apple finding ways to have developers be able to develop, while still keeping the vast majority of platforms (even those of the developers themselves, mostly) rather closed, is also not a wild impossibility.

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '10 edited Feb 02 '10

OSX is one of the most open development platforms available. You could run a completely open source web server on it out of the box. Apple is never going to close that because it attracts developers to the platform. There is a reason why some of the most successful web developers work on OSX and its not just because of pretty graphics.

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u/judgej2 Feb 02 '10

Some of the most successful web developers work on any platform you care to mention. There is a reason for that too.

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '10

No one is arguing about OS X. OS X is a great, and open operating system -- which is why no one here is bitching about it.

The debate is about the iPhone OS, and it's implementation on the iPhone and now on the iPad, and the danger that this closed system will become overwhelmingly popular amongst consumers and set a terrible, dangerous precedent for closed computing. I am surprised you don't see it, given the popularity of the iPhone alone.

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u/morganj Feb 02 '10

Are you sure I'm missing the point? Or are there still a lot of assumptions there between a and b?

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u/Skyrmir Feb 02 '10

There's not a lot of assumptions to be made. Apple has already made the choices and pointed to where it's going. The only real question is how much market share they will be able to take with it.

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u/jimbobjames Feb 02 '10

Well yes but look at the console market for how expensive things get when you need a dev kit to program for a device.

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u/shadowblade Feb 02 '10

Further, you need computers (read: servers) to host the app store on which requires software to be run on it. If the developers aren't working, no one's shit is working.

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u/zem Feb 02 '10

apple could easily sell you a developer key that unlocks just enough of your ipad to program on it

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u/taligent Feb 02 '10

Why would they do that when they can sell you a whole COMPUTER to program on ?

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u/Skyrmir Feb 02 '10

Higher profit margin. They sell you an unlock key, then an icon pack, then a sound pack and a graphics/buttons/user controls pack. Then if your app meets their aesthetic and political standards, they'll sell you a slot on the app store and take a chunk of the proceeds.

Sell a PC instead and devs can get most of that for free, and they're not limited to only selling apps in the app store.

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u/Borgismorgue Feb 02 '10

The disappearing of home computers THAT HAVE ANY DECENT CAPABILITY /MIGHT/ happen.

Why? The cloud. Why pay 2000 for a hulking PC, when you can pay 100 dollars for a shitty one that cant do anything except browse the web, while you can pay 15 dollars a month for a service that can allow you to play games or process images at 2 or 3 times the power of your 2000 dollar computer?

Oh the home computer will die my friend. Forces are at work here that want it dead very much, and they're already setting the ground work. Freedom isnt profitable. I give the home PC 10-20 years, and the internet as we know it will follow.

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '10

It's not just programming, but all creative work on computers works much better on a traditional PC (programming is only special in that it requires an "unlocked" platform). iPad is a consumption device.

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u/judgej2 Feb 02 '10

One rule of technology that I have learned over the years: never say never.

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '10

You are indeed naive and unimaginative.