ERIC P. CHARLES wrote at 06/07/2011 12:59 PM:
> If by "enslaved to a corporate cabal" you mean that I use my cell phone
> mostly as a phone,
No, it really has nothing to do with _how_ you use any given device.
It's more about what you're paying for. Did you pay for an actual
_thing_ or did you pay for a key to a door or facility, someone else's
property?
The whole SaaS paradigm is reprehensible to a given degree. You "buy" a
phone and you really don't own anything. What you've "bought" is really
a fake, kinda startup fee.[*] If you stop paying the monthly fee, that
initial $100 or $150 is lost in the wind.
If they were more honest about it, they'd treat these devices like the
cable companies or ISPs treat their modems. You either buy the thing
outright (and admit that it'll be largely useless when you quit) or you
lease it during the time you use their service.
> Personally,
> I have trouble imagining why anyone would want to do otherwise. The
> complaints of people who have to 'go through the trouble' to jailbreak
> iPhones, for example, strike me as silly. If you don't like what the
> iPhone is, why did you buy one? It's like someone who buys a new house
> and then complains it is not laid out the way they want, and then
> complains about how hard it was to redo the floor plan: You know there
> were other houses, right? You know it was a perfectly functional house
> already, right?
I suppose there are two ways to think about this. (There are 2 types of
people in the world: 1) those who divide the people in the world into 2
types and 2) those who don't.)
1) There are those of us who find satisfaction in _doing_ rather than
having, and
2) There are those of us who enjoy "nesting", i.e. surrounding ourselves
with our own accomplishments.
(1) and (2) are, by no means, disjoint. When I look at my phone, I see
things that I've achieved (on the shoulders of giants, of course).
That's satisfying to some extent. Similarly, when the phone behaves in
some way that I didn't expect, it is relatively trivial for me to figure
out why it behaved that way and why I expected something different. Had
I not rooted it and replaced the OS, this would not be the case. The
former is a result of (2) and the latter is a result of (1).
If you think either (1) or (2) are silly, then we are at a rhetorical
impasse. ;-)
What boggles my mind are the tech-savvy people who seem to blank out on
some things. Like a programmer who can't change their own oil. Or a
mechanic who is baffled by computers. By saying it boggles me, I'm not
implying that they are _silly_, or wrong, or whatever. It just confuses
me. It seems that you either want to know how things work, or you
don't. It is _so_ EASY to root and replace the OS on Android phones
that I can't imagine any tech savvy person with disposable income _not_
doing so.
[*] There's also a kind of "consumerist", disposable culture, influence
at work, here. If you don't/can't root and replace the OS on your cell
phone, then that phone is a lot like a Bic lighter or disposable razor.
Your supposed to use it once, then throw it into some landfill because
it's become useless. Now, I'm no tree-hugging liberal. But it seems to
me that this disposable computer culture lacks an ability to account for
its externalities. I should be able to use my phone for many years.
And if, in order to do that, I have to maintain the OS _myself_, then I
should be allowed to do so. I used my G1 long past the point where
T-Mobile was pushing updates only because I used CyanogenMod. And when
I finally found the $$ to buy a new phone, I passed that old G1 on to a
less fortunate, but more geeky, friend who is still using it. I can say
the same about many of the desk- and lap-tops around my house. And when
they are finally of no use to me, I give them to FreeGeek.org, who
refurbishes them and gives them to people who don't have computers. It
just seems reasonable to me; but perhaps I've drunk too much Kool Aid?
--
glen
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I've a
friend whose first response to any new interesting piece of tech is: