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TheiPad 9 - 11 Apr 2010 - Main.DevinMcDougall
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| | -- NonaFarahnik - 05 Apr 2010
My dad has never made the effort to be fluent in anything more than basic technology. When he wants music on his iPod he asks me or one of my siblings to do it for him. It is painful to watch him use his blackberry. He probably opens a web browser 4 or 5 times a year to google something (after calling and asking me how to get to google) and has no idea about what he is actually doing or what is actually happening when he interacts with the Internet. He also refuses to learn. At the same time, he is a compulsive tech-shopper who always wants the latest version of what he cannot use. | | | This is probably why the ipad works for her.
-- NonaFarahnik - 08 Apr 2010 | |
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> | Tim Wu has an interesting essay on the iPad up on Slate.
Snip:
Wozniak's design was open and decentralized in ways that still define those concepts in the computing industries. The original Apple had a hood, and as with a car, the owner could open it up and get at the guts of the machine. Although it was a fully assembled device, not a kit like earlier PC products, Apple owners were encouraged to tinker with the innards of Wozniak's machine—to soup it up, make it faster, add features. There were slots to accommodate all sorts of peripheral devices, and it was built to run a variety of software. Wozniak's ethic of openness also extended to disclosing design specifications. In a 2006 talk at Columbia University, he put the point this way: "Everything we knew, you knew." To point out that this is no longer Apple's policy is to state the obvious.
While a computer you can modify might not sound so profound, Wozniak contemplated a nearly spiritual relationship between man and his machine. He held, simply, that machines should be open to their owners and that all power should reside in the user. That notion mattered most to geeks, but it expressed deeper ideas, too: a distrust of centralized power and a belief, embedded in silicon, that computers should be tools of freedom.
In 2006, when Wozniak gave his talk at Columbia, I asked him what happened with the Mac. You could open up the Apple II, and there were slots and so on, and anyone could write for it, I said. The Mac was way more closed. What happened?
"Oh," said Wozniak. "That was Steve. He wanted it that way." Apple's origins were pure Steve Wozniak, but the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad are the products of the company's other founder. Steve Jobs' ideas have always been in tension with Wozniak's brand of idealism and the founding principles of Apple. Jobs maintained the early, countercultural image that he and Wozniak created, but beginning with the Macintosh in the 1980s, and accelerating through the iPhone and climaxing with the iPad's release this month, he has taken Apple on a fundamentally different track, one that is, in fact, nearly the opposite of the Wozniak vision.
-- DevinMcDougall - 11 Apr 2010 | | | |
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TheiPad 8 - 08 Apr 2010 - Main.NonaFarahnik
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| | -- NonaFarahnik - 05 Apr 2010
My dad has never made the effort to be fluent in anything more than basic technology. When he wants music on his iPod he asks me or one of my siblings to do it for him. It is painful to watch him use his blackberry. He probably opens a web browser 4 or 5 times a year to google something (after calling and asking me how to get to google) and has no idea about what he is actually doing or what is actually happening when he interacts with the Internet. He also refuses to learn. At the same time, he is a compulsive tech-shopper who always wants the latest version of what he cannot use. | | | Pointing and grunting indeed.
--Nona | |
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This is probably why the ipad works for her.
-- NonaFarahnik - 08 Apr 2010 | | | |
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TheiPad 7 - 08 Apr 2010 - Main.NonaFarahnik
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| | -- NonaFarahnik - 05 Apr 2010
My dad has never made the effort to be fluent in anything more than basic technology. When he wants music on his iPod he asks me or one of my siblings to do it for him. It is painful to watch him use his blackberry. He probably opens a web browser 4 or 5 times a year to google something (after calling and asking me how to get to google) and has no idea about what he is actually doing or what is actually happening when he interacts with the Internet. He also refuses to learn. At the same time, he is a compulsive tech-shopper who always wants the latest version of what he cannot use. | | |
Pointing and grunting indeed. | |
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> | --Nona | | | |
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TheiPad 6 - 08 Apr 2010 - Main.DavidGoldin
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| | -- NonaFarahnik - 05 Apr 2010
My dad has never made the effort to be fluent in anything more than basic technology. When he wants music on his iPod he asks me or one of my siblings to do it for him. It is painful to watch him use his blackberry. He probably opens a web browser 4 or 5 times a year to google something (after calling and asking me how to get to google) and has no idea about what he is actually doing or what is actually happening when he interacts with the Internet. He also refuses to learn. At the same time, he is a compulsive tech-shopper who always wants the latest version of what he cannot use. | | | Or my dad might just be a few decades too late and we can't learn much from his generation's Internet use. | |
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> | -- NonaFarahnik - 08 Apr 2010
| | | -- JohnSchwab - 06 Apr 2010 Nona, I tend to think your last sentence is correct. I remember reading somewhere after the unveiling of this "magical" device that it would be a great gadget for old people (which I interpreted to mean really old, not me-level old). To anyone who is intimidated by the web, I can see the appeal of a whole bunch of well-marked buttons that will instantly deliver applications without fear of landing on some scam website or not being able to find the service I want. | | | Having never owned an Apple product, I can't really comment on the usability of the devices. (I don't have anything personal against Apple; I just like to play computer games and prefer my own mental iPod.) Eben had a comment in an interview from 2001 which I think provides the other side to the usability debate. | |
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< | " In 1979, when I was working at IBM, I wrote an internal memo lambasting the Apple Lisa, which was Apple`s first attempt to adapt Xerox PARC technology, the graphical user interface, into a desktop PC. I was then working on the development of APL2, a nested array, algorithmic, symbolic language, and I was committed to the idea that what we were doing with computers was making languages that were better than natural languages for procedural thought. The idea was to do for whole ranges of human thinking what mathematics has been doing for thousands of years in the quantitative arrangement of knowledge, and to help people think in more precise and clear ways. What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user. Users wanted to be infantilized, to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers, and the Xerox PARC technology`s primary advantage was that it allowed users to address computers in a pre-linguistic way. This was to my mind a terribly socially retrograde thing to do, and I have not changed my mind about that. I lost that war in the early 1980s, went to law school, got a history PHD, did other things, because the fundamental turn in the technology - which we see represented in its most technologically degenerate form, which is Windows, the really crippled version. I mean, I use Xwindows every day on my free-software PCs; I have nothing against a windowing environment, but it`s a windowing environment which is network transparent and which is based around the fact that inside every window there`s some dialogue to have with some linguistic entity. " | >
> | " In 1979, when I was working at IBM, I wrote an internal memo lambasting the Apple Lisa, which was Apple`s first attempt to adapt Xerox PARC technology, the graphical user interface, into a desktop PC. I was then working on the development of APL2, a nested array, algorithmic, symbolic language, and I was committed to the idea that what we were doing with computers was making languages that were better than natural languages for procedural thought. The idea was to do for whole ranges of human thinking what mathematics has been doing for thousands of years in the quantitative arrangement of knowledge, and to help people think in more precise and clear ways. What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user. Users wanted to be infantilized, to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers, and the Xerox PARC technology`s primary advantage was that it allowed users to address computers in a pre-linguistic way. This was to my mind a terribly socially retrograde thing to do, and I have not changed my mind about that. I lost that war in the early 1980s, went to law school, got a history PHD, did other things, because the fundamental turn in the technology - which we see represented in its most technologically degenerate form, which is Windows, the really crippled version. I mean, I use Xwindows every day on my free-software PCs; I have nothing against a windowing environment, but it's a windowing environment which is network transparent and which is based around the fact that inside every window there's some dialogue to have with some linguistic entity. " | | |
Pointing and grunting indeed. | |
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< | -- NonaFarahnik - 08 Apr 2010 | >
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TheiPad 5 - 08 Apr 2010 - Main.NonaFarahnik
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| | -- NonaFarahnik - 05 Apr 2010
My dad has never made the effort to be fluent in anything more than basic technology. When he wants music on his iPod he asks me or one of my siblings to do it for him. It is painful to watch him use his blackberry. He probably opens a web browser 4 or 5 times a year to google something (after calling and asking me how to get to google) and has no idea about what he is actually doing or what is actually happening when he interacts with the Internet. He also refuses to learn. At the same time, he is a compulsive tech-shopper who always wants the latest version of what he cannot use. | | | Having never owned an Apple product, I can't really comment on the usability of the devices. (I don't have anything personal against Apple; I just like to play computer games and prefer my own mental iPod.) Eben had a comment in an interview from 2001 which I think provides the other side to the usability debate.
" In 1979, when I was working at IBM, I wrote an internal memo lambasting the Apple Lisa, which was Apple`s first attempt to adapt Xerox PARC technology, the graphical user interface, into a desktop PC. I was then working on the development of APL2, a nested array, algorithmic, symbolic language, and I was committed to the idea that what we were doing with computers was making languages that were better than natural languages for procedural thought. The idea was to do for whole ranges of human thinking what mathematics has been doing for thousands of years in the quantitative arrangement of knowledge, and to help people think in more precise and clear ways. What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user. Users wanted to be infantilized, to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers, and the Xerox PARC technology`s primary advantage was that it allowed users to address computers in a pre-linguistic way. This was to my mind a terribly socially retrograde thing to do, and I have not changed my mind about that. I lost that war in the early 1980s, went to law school, got a history PHD, did other things, because the fundamental turn in the technology - which we see represented in its most technologically degenerate form, which is Windows, the really crippled version. I mean, I use Xwindows every day on my free-software PCs; I have nothing against a windowing environment, but it`s a windowing environment which is network transparent and which is based around the fact that inside every window there`s some dialogue to have with some linguistic entity. " | |
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Pointing and grunting indeed.
-- NonaFarahnik - 08 Apr 2010
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