<story><title>Tinkerer’s Sunset</title><url>http://diveintomark.org/archives/2010/01/29/tinkerers-sunset</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yan</author><text>I really don&apos;t understand the wave of alarmist posts on the &apos;end of a tinkering era&apos;. Today, we have more communities and devices for tinkering than we&apos;ve ever had. Magazines like Make, sites like Hack-a-day, platforms like Arduino, and &lt;i&gt;countless&lt;/i&gt; open source projects that are simply there to be messed with, and one device that comes out with a (probably) justified need to be locked down, and everyone raises panic? If I ever have the desire to mess with anything technological today, I can literally get my hands on anything, from affordable FPGA boards with great I/O, to open mobile devices, to even RF hacking! (GNU Radio&apos;s great.)&lt;p&gt;The iPad will &lt;i&gt;never&lt;/i&gt; harm anyone&apos;s ability to tinker with technology that want to. There will &lt;i&gt;always&lt;/i&gt; be platforms that are open by design and &lt;i&gt;always&lt;/i&gt; be platforms that have been rooted/hacked/jailbroken/etc. Being a geek/hacker today is far more socially acceptable and wide-spread than it was in the 80s. I&apos;d even argue that it is doing much more to advance the technology than a completely open device like OpenMoko. Completely open devices are rarely better designed than their commercial counterparts. They don&apos;t inspire complete neophytes (&quot;I have to do &lt;i&gt;what&lt;/i&gt; just to get a decent resolution?&quot;), they don&apos;t push boundaries -- they only appeal to people who are already waist-deep in tinkering.&lt;p&gt;Frankly, if anything, all of this comes off as elitist. God forbid people get their hands on technology that doesn&apos;t have a steep learning curve or require you to write BASIC to be useful. Well-designed products that have a lot of concentrated money (and more importantly, talent) inspire people much more so than completely open systems. I think of them as (and please pardon the extremely hyperbolic analogy) well-polished, completed works of art. They won&apos;t teach you how to paint or let you alter them, but they&apos;ll show you what&apos;s possible with the canvas and advance the art.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m actually now thinking back to a discussion with a friend of mine, who&apos;s a collector of 60&apos;s-era oscilloscopes. He was raving about them as being the pinnacle of electronics engineering. Not only were these scopes beautifully designed, but their manuals detailed &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt; about them, how they worked, what tricks they used to function, what micro-components they used. Their documentation authors really &lt;i&gt;wanted&lt;/i&gt; you to understand exactly what made it function. Maybe that&apos;s the ideal, but I still believe that beautifully-designed products, even closed, further the state of hacking far far more than completely open platforms. If you don&apos;t believe in it, don&apos;t buy it.&lt;p&gt;If you believe they&apos;re a step in the wrong direction for open platforms, make another blog post tomorrow when you have &lt;i&gt;less&lt;/i&gt; open platforms, &lt;i&gt;less&lt;/i&gt; hobbyist projects, &lt;i&gt;less&lt;/i&gt; educational materials, and &lt;i&gt;less&lt;/i&gt; hobbyist communities than yesterday.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tinkerer’s Sunset</title><url>http://diveintomark.org/archives/2010/01/29/tinkerers-sunset</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jdminhbg</author><text>This whole tinkering panic is ridiculous.  Did tinkering end when Nintendo released the NES? Or more recently with the Wii? His dad could have bought a word processor instead of a ][e, would he have been able to tinker with that?&lt;p&gt;Some devices are more open than others.  This is not a new phenomenon, nor did anything change on Wednesday.</text></comment>