Kit
john.jubjubs.net
john.jubjubs.net
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.
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.
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.
You can mess with TVs, but not many people do because there isn't much point due to the natural evolution of the technology. That's very different from the iPad, where there are lots of interesting things we could do, except that Apple has arbitrarily declared them to be illegal.
No way am I giving up my hackable Linux.
"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.)
Depends on the metric. If you have to pay 10 times the price for spare parts because the whole module has to be changed and the garage can't even repair anymore, that's hardly an improvement. I'm persuaded that ecologically the times of black boxes, when you change instead of repairing won't last that long. Perhaps I'm still too optimistic.
Anyone can see how a web page works under the hood and see that it's not magic.
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.
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.
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.)
http://www.xgamestation.com/ "The XGameStation is the world's first build-it-yourself video game console kit."
.. cool stuff.