[kwlug-disc] peoples' thoughts on apple, adobe and flash?

[Kyle Spaans]

To play the devil's advocate a bit (and to reiterate some things that some of my
Apple-inclined friends have been arguing), the reason that Apple wants to lock
down the "platform" (hardware + software) that they sell you is because they
don't want their image tarnished by flora and fauna that aren't
originally from the
walled garden. To abuse the car analogy some more: Apple doesn't want you to
paint your ("their") iCar pink because a pink iCar would be ugly and turn off
potential iCar buyers.

If Joe User sees someone using an iPad, Apple wants to make sure that the
image of that iPad is uniform -- the screen shouldn't be a root terminal or some
funky non-Apple-UI app that your wrote yourself. I don't know if that
makes sense
from a marketing or psychology standpoint but, personally, I figure Apple can do
whatever they want with their own products. It just means they won't get
any of my money. :-) I do really hope that devices like these don't become known
as computers, because I think we can all agree that, as presented by Apple, they
are not general-purpose computing devices!

And as Charlie Stross suggested in his article[1], this probably means
the walled
garden can be free of rodents and cockroaches. Though, nothing is perfect, and I
suspect that if the iPad gets popular enough, someone will figure out
how to scale
the wall (or dig under it), with the end result probably being:

"""
Buy v1agara!

Sent from my iPad
"""

:-P

1 - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/why-steve-jobs-hates-flash.html

P.S. - I'd also be glad if we can finally move past Flash.