And therein lies the rub. If hackers build things relevant to their own hobbies, and "hackers," as a group, tend to have really similar hobbies...
They'll build the same products. Over and over and over again. Not bad, per se, but a massive opportunity for someone with development skill and a different set of interests.
I meant was that hackers build those things because they are familiar to them. Patrick had some interaction, somewhere, that led him to realize that people need bingo cards.
Ask the non-hackers in your life what little pieces of software they occasionally have a big enough desire for -- big enough they'd pick $30 at the time. Then tell me. :)
My auntie was telling me this weekend that she has to keep running Windows to keep an old Quilting application running. There are newer/cross-platform ones available but they can cost thousands and she doesn't want to change.
Don't you think this might be a case of "boiling the frog slowly"?
That's the impression I get from both Apple and Microsoft's recent OS/App Store directions.
A few years from now the apologists for each will be saying "Well hardly anyone but super techies ever used those options to disable verification anyway, so I understand why they turned them off".
> Don't you think this might be a case of "boiling the frog slowly"?
No, because that would be fantastically stupid of them and none of them are stupid. Not even Microsoft--I mean, I think the Metro slop is a joke, but no, they're not stupid enough to do that. What you are peddling doesn't even make sense because precisely what the fearmongerers (see, this goes both ways, think about that next time you call me an "apologist") because it is fairly unlikely that anyone is ever going to be writing native applications from an iPad so it really does follow that they need a mostly-unencumbered environment from which to make the software that makes the whirly buy-the-iPad-buy-the-apps wheel go around.
Which, as it happens, is what Apple has said for quite a while that they're doing: iOS is the daily-driver car and OS X is the do-work truck. Which, though I don't use iOS myself anymore, is a completely reasonable division of labor for the majority of computing tasks.
Honestly? It's the first I've heard from someone with interests that would lead them to Hacker News. Gatekeeper was talked about at length well before it was rolled out and it is super, super easy to find out how to disable it. There's a sort of minimum awareness beneath which I'd certainly expect to hear of people having trouble, but I'm a little surprised that they're here.
Point well received, but just to be dead sure: System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Allow Applications downloaded from: [X] Anywhere will restore previous behavior.
Does the cost of housing in the Bay Area coupled with older people's need to provide bedrooms for their children cause them to move to other parts of the country even if they've spent their 20's in The Valley?
Moviegoers are biased, and Hollywood wants to create products which sell. The people behind the cameras often are old even if the female stars on screen are barely out of high school. If I see ugly shirts in a store year after year, I don't blame the fashion house behind them, I blame the people who keep buying them.
They'll build the same products. Over and over and over again. Not bad, per se, but a massive opportunity for someone with development skill and a different set of interests.