

Kit - dhotson
http://john.jubjubs.net/2010/03/23/kit/

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orangecat
Good post. I've never quite figured out how "users shouldn't have to mess with
their devices to get them to work" became conflated with "users shouldn't be
allowed to mess with their devices". Especially when the company most
responsible for that idea produced Mac OS X, which is widely praised by both
technical and nontechnical users.

~~~
ynniv
OMG sign up for the developer program and calm down. Or buy a zenPad. Or both.

Only people who have written assembly code for an embedded system, or
installed an open source OS on a mobile device should even be allowed to make
these "everything should be open" comments. The capability for you to tinker
has been around for years, and in that time what have people created?
Apparently nothing as good as Apple's closed system.

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shadowsun7
_Don’t misunderstand: I don’t think it’s a real problem that I can’t change
the capacitors in my television today — I think that the most interesting
surfaces for tinkering tend to evolve over time — and today the primary
tinkering substrate appears to me to be the open web._

This is so true. Growing up, what I remember most was playing with web tech -
buying my own server space, hosting my own sites, installing random stuff like
Wordpress and Drupal and messing with the code running these sites; learning
CSS, HTML and doing random stuff in PHP ...

So what if we've lost the ability to mess with TVs, and computers, and iPads?
It may very well be that the TV/computer/Heathkit equivalents today are
Wordpress/Rails/Opentape installations, that kids run on their servers and
play around with. We may not have another Apple on our hands (which resulted
from arguably the king of tinkerers himself, Wozniak) but we might have the
next Larry Page/Sergey Brin/Mark Zuckerberg.

And that's not entirely a bad thing.

~~~
Groxx
Especially as the TV / Computer / whatever electronic hacking crowd still
exists, and _creating_ things from scratch has become _insanely_ easier thanks
to things like the Arduino.

Though the average consumer product is _definitely_ less hackable now than it
used to be, mostly due to significantly increased complexity, the
intentionally-hackable world has if anything _improved_ , and lowered the
barrier of entry to the level where almost anyone can jump on within a day or
so.

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neonfunk
The article underestimates kids -- but the sentiment is understandable given
the short history of computing. These guys witnessed the birth. Now things are
vastly improved, just like how you open the hood of a car and it looks like an
amorphous plastic object ("Back in my day, you could see how everything
worked."). So while I enjoy the nostalgia, I suspect kids will be tinkering
far into the future. That kids have the web to learn from is still amazing to
me (I can't imagine programming without it) -- and it is itself a great
platform for tinkering.

~~~
lsc
have you ever tried to fix a modern car? it's really not that hard. sure, you
need a manual, and yeah, there are parts you can't fabricate with a good
machine shop now, but it's still pretty accessible.

~~~
evanrmurphy
makes sense, it's just intimidating because you open the hood and it resembles
a source file with all the whitespace removed.

~~~
lsc
the thing is, compared to what you see in the computer industry these days
(I'm given to understand this wasn't always the case) the manuals for fixing
cars are /ridiculously good/

"Does the car start? if so, go to page 45, if not, go to page 2." etc...
There's a word for it but I call it "choose your own adventure documentation"
- It's quite effective, even an inexperienced mechanic can solve most problems
when given the factory service manual. (I'm speaking of the factory service
manual here, The much easier to obtain Chilton brand "Book of Lies" is
considerably less useful, but still much better than most of what you get with
a computer.)

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jbellis
You know what I want?

I want a handheld that is so easy to program that you can do real app
development, right on the handheld itself. Not just toy app development, the
real deal. It might not be as awesome as Eclipse or Xcode but if it's doable
without an external host, kids will start playing with it.

The Newton could do this, 15 years ago.

From my limited knowledge only WebOS is close to being simple enough that you
could reasonably develop for it without a "real" computer and all its baggage.
Which is too bad, because it's a long ways from taking the world by storm.

~~~
lsc
the nokia n900 is essentially a full-scale Linux box; hell, it's a lot more
powerful than the computer I had when I started learning Linux myself. the
only handycap is the small monitor and keyboard; but it does have TV-out and
bluetooth, so you can fix those parts yourself, if you like.

~~~
jbellis
The nokia N900 is open, but hardly easy to develop for.

~~~
lsc
it's not any harder than any other linux platform; you just need to account
for the small screensize (800x480 if I remember correctly)

The big win is that you can port existing linux apps targeted at other mobile
platforms (or even desktop platforms, if you can make them work at 800x480)
You also have a full linux stack for debugging on-device.

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david927
My understanding of the argument for the iPad is: we (technical guys/early
adopters) don't want one, but it's not for us, it's for the mass market.

The diffusion of innovation is well studied. (Read more here:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_%28business%29>) If technical people
don't buy something, no one else will. My geek friends bought an iPhone the
second it came out. They won't buy an iPad.

So how do you convince the "early majority" that it's something worthwhile,
something they should own, if _you_ as an innovator or early adopter, don't
want one. (Answer: _you can't_.)

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dhotson
Somewhat off topic, but has anyone seen this?

<http://www.xgamestation.com/> "The XGameStation is the world's first build-
it-yourself video game console kit."

.. cool stuff.

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impeachgod
I dunno about the part about it being inborn or not though - I had been taking
things apart for as long as I can remember, and the fact that I was
'different' didn't not bother me AT ALL - until puberty.

