Apps? No root? Your device serves others, warns Berners-Lee
I don't know if it really matters to the average user to have root on their system; for technical people it certainly implies "true ownership" of the whole stack on the device. What I find bizarre and a bit unsettling is the appification of general purpose computing devices. When it was mobile phones, locking the user out (almost) made sense - the device was being financed by the carrier via subsidy, so they should have a bit of control. Then tablets came along and provided an identical interface in terms of restricting user access, but the user pays the entire cost up front[1]. Now Windows 8 (moreso RT, but even the x64 version) and Mountain Lion are moving to the walled-garden, segregated, impotent app approach. The best reason I can explain why this is terrible is XCode:<p>I don't really develop for Mac, but there was a Linux tool which also shipped a 32-bit Darwin binary. I thought "I'd like to use that on my 64-bit Mac, surely I can just compile it with XCode". Downloaded XCode from the App Store (after giving my mother's maiden name, my blood type, etc.), and it doesn't appear on the PATH, because it can only write to /Applications/XCode. Jesus [2].<p>My point is, somehow subsidized phones turned into locked-down tablets, turned into a compiler that can't install itself to /usr/local/bin. That seems daft to me.<p>1. ASUS let me root my tablet for free, no strings. So it's opt in, but not terribly evil.<p>2. If anyone has a good Mac homebrew tutorial, I was wondering if I could compile with a different toolchain than Xcode? I'm really not up on this stuff, I need to learn.