I'm sure Cory would have given a talk in 1970 on "The Coming War on General Purpose Hardware" where he bemoans the rise of the integrated circuit and an end to you being able to rearrange the components in your computer to suit your whims.
There's nothing worrying about it. What's happening is what used to be general purpose is now becoming an appliance.
Until Cory is out there petitioning blender makers to open their firmware, he's just grabbing headlines with this nonsense.
"Components" as in individual transistors, resistors, and capacitors as opposed to integrated circuits. And MS already has veto power. You can't run device drivers that haven't been OK'd and cryptographically signed by them. DRM is baked into the media layers (e.g. you can't watch a blu-ray movie on a non-HDCP monitor).
> I find the prospect of Apple or Microsoft having veto power over how I use "my" computer extremely worrying.
This is because we expect "computers" to do so many things. When their area of responsibility shrinks to more trivial tasks, like only browsing or running simple apps, the limitations become less of an issue.
There will always be a need for a "development" caliber platform where you can do whatever, install anything, build whatever you want.
It's just that for 90% of the people out there, they don't need or want this. While I find it amusing that grandma's new MacBook Air comes with a C compiler, bash, and Perl, this really isn't something she's ever going to find a use for and would hardly notice if it was absent. For the 10% of the market that does care, perhaps they need a different sort of product. The two markets are destined to split.
Funny you should mention that. I put a blender there. It was made out of printed parts, so it would only last a month before I’d need to print new bearings and other moving parts.
Anyway, no, the problem is that other people get to decide what software you get to run on your computer. And those people aren't engineers who want to build cheaper and more convenient, if limited, appliances. The people who will be deciding what software you can run are the lawyers and congressional lobbyists.
"I'm sure Cory would have given a talk in 1970 on "The Coming War on General Purpose Hardware" where he bemoans the rise of the integrated circuit"
Well, Erich Fromm criticized the death of rationality and the rise of the purely manipulative and blind intelligence a decade before that. Bleh to integrated circuitry: we're so far away from ourselves that even we became a black box, accepting a neverending, meaningless stream of impressions which we compare with other impressions, but not ever understand.
So yeah. That this now takes on physical manifestations isn't exactly surprising if you've paid attention.
IMHO they're both right, and "they're criticizing something I assume to be beyond criticism", isn't an argument. Neither is "this could have been extrapolated before".
"he's just grabbing headlines with this nonsense."
Ahhh, sweet complacency, and the peaceful dreams of those who don't.
There's nothing worrying about it. What's happening is what used to be general purpose is now becoming an appliance.
Until Cory is out there petitioning blender makers to open their firmware, he's just grabbing headlines with this nonsense.