I Love Walled Gardens

There is a direct analogy to creative writing.<p>The publishing equivalent of Apple would have stifled e.e. cummings for his abuse of punctuation. You wouldn't have Jabberwocky because it contained imaginary words. You wouldn't have Joyce because the App^H^H^HBook Store reviewers decided that it made absolutely no sense.<p>The examples above are all of writers tinkering with English, tinkering with writing, hacking the language to accomplish things that otherwise would have been impossible before. A closed system takes all these away.<p>You shouldn't dismiss the effect of walled gardens on hackers just because you can't or won't empathize with our bit-twiddling.

"Instead, they will go to the carefully-screened App Store, and they will search for “How do I make video games”, and they will find a little button that teaches them and gives them a run-time environment in which to tinker."<p>A small problem: run-time environments are not allowed in the app store.

<i>“But Rory, programming is my passion. I was willing to spend that long learning how to code.” No, I think back at them — programmers are not given the satisfaction of hearing my voice. No, you were willing to spend that long because you had obsessive-compulsive problems mixed with an antisocial attitude.</i><p>The fact that he's pretty clearly trolling in the passage above doesn't make it less worth reading, as it does discuss some interesting points about how people use and learn about computers.

&#62; Not when those open systems risk confusing and alienating people who just want to check their mail.<p>Speaking of mail, I would like to be able to host it at home, where it should be. (It's private, after all.) Thanks to the walled garden policy of blocking the outgoing SMTP port (and no one complaining, because web mail is soo convenient), I can't.<p>If Trusted Computing ever becomes the default, it won't be long before using open systems becomes a major hassle. Because, you know, they are dangerous, infected by viruses, used by cyber-pirates, in a word, <i>suspects</i>. Just like home hosted mail servers.

I was rather upset to find no awesome pictures of walled gardens included in this post.

trolls love walled gardens?