The publishing equivalent of Apple would have stifled e.e. cummings for his abuse of punctuation. You wouldn't have Jabberwocky because it contained imaginary words. You wouldn't have Joyce because the App^H^H^HBook Store reviewers decided that it made absolutely no sense.
The examples above are all of writers tinkering with English, tinkering with writing, hacking the language to accomplish things that otherwise would have been impossible before. A closed system takes all these away.
You shouldn't dismiss the effect of walled gardens on hackers just because you can't or won't empathize with our bit-twiddling.
If you want to be experimental, be it online. Nobody can deny access to your HTML5 creations. In fact, Apple's one of the biggest pushers of compliant modern web browsing.
A small problem: run-time environments are not allowed in the app store.
Can you make one that downloads to the iPhone/iPad and run natively? There's nothing in an RTE that needs to access Internet files, right? So theoretically you could program it in its entirety and have people download that.
I'm sorry I didn't know that when I wrote the article, though; certainly it throws a nasty complication into the works.
Not sure what Apple would say if you wrote an interpreter for something else than JavaScript in JavaScript...
The fact that he's pretty clearly trolling in the passage above doesn't make it less worth reading, as it does discuss some interesting points about how people use and learn about computers.
I am not a troll. I am a creative writer. I care much, much more about whether I'm writing in interesting and fun and amusing ways than I do about any pretense of formality, particularly in this piece. (I alternate between phases of more serious writing and more tongue-in-cheek. This is very much the latter.)
I don't like the suggestion that the instant a piece of writing stops being formal or serious, it becomes a troll piece. In this case in particular, I thought that there was a very specific reason to write it in the way that I did: Partly it's to highlight the fact that I think this particular criticism of Apple is a tad silly, for a variety of reasons. But it also deflates me, and indicates that perhaps this argument, while relevant, should not be taken as my attempt to speak the word of God.
Speaking of mail, I would like to be able to host it at home, where it should be. (It's private, after all.) Thanks to the walled garden policy of blocking the outgoing SMTP port (and no one complaining, because web mail is soo convenient), I can't.
If Trusted Computing ever becomes the default, it won't be long before using open systems becomes a major hassle. Because, you know, they are dangerous, infected by viruses, used by cyber-pirates, in a word, suspects. Just like home hosted mail servers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/whereilive/coast/images/southw...
"It is not productive to spend an hour learning how to change the font on your computer’s clock. Even if while you’re doing that you’re learning about how computers work, you’re wasting your time and getting somewhere trivial very slowly."
This reminds me of "computer education" programs that just teach how to use MS Word. Yes, this will get you a job, but you'd be learning at a more fundamental level with Squeak eToys. Or some of this:
Would a half troll be something like a half elf with a troll father and human mother? :-P I believe such a player class exists in the game Arcanum.
More seriously, the author drowns whatever valid points he may have in trollish blather.
As to the "endless tinkering that an "open" system allows is viewed as a useless waste of time by the vast majority of people," the value of tinkering is to the tinkerers.
Non tinkerers making vlaue judgments on its utility is irrelevant to its desirability to tinkerers. I think music is irrelevant so you shouldn't get to play your violin? A more viable argument is that I shouldn't have to subsidize your violin, not that my judgment about your musical tinkering being "a useless waste of time" is "not completely wrong".
Tinkering is just play. Play has useful evolutionary purposes to the individual and the group. Consumers not finding such stuff useful isn't any indicator of it's actual value to society.
