Joe;
Not speaking for Ge, but the impression I get is that he likes to make
things anybody can have fun with.
Maybe, yes. ChucK certainly made a lot of things very easy to have fun with that were previously more inaccessible. There might be a a lot of common ground there. Good point.
I think the dividing line is between people who want to just make
things for it and not pay anything to do it as opposed to the ones who
are perfectly happy to invest in it for a chance to do things in a
space that no one else offers.
That's not really how I looked at it. Personally I think the financial investment into instruments or systems is typically a very minor one, as a part of the whole equation. A 100E/$ will get you a acoustical guitar, but then you need to learn how to play it; if you rate those hours at minimum wage then the financial price is a very small part of the total investment. I don't think anyone here is scared to invest; most of us will have tens, hundreds or perhaps even thousands of hours invested in learning ChucK, developing our instruments and so on. Purely financially speaking it would make sense for me (if such a thing existed) to buy/rent a license to be permitted to develop code on Linux. Of course I'm very much in favour of things not being like that but the financial side is a very minor aspect to that.
No, what I really meant is that the iPad so-far seems more aimed at reading texts than writing them, more at watching movies than editing them, etc. Nowhere did I notice claims for portable "productivity" like we see with laptops. There is no issue with that at all; I carry a PSP on the train too and that's certainly not for "productivity" either. What fascinates me is that there is this new sort of device, that nobody seems yet sure what it can do or what it's good for, that comes with this set of rules and both the rules and the capabilities of the device lead to a lot of online debate.
The landscape of computational devices is slowly shifting, which is of course totally natural. On the one hand closed devices are thriving and apparently Sony can afford to block the PS3 from installing Linux with the latest update and Apple can afford to say "no interpreters" on the iPad as only a small section of the market seems to want that sort of thing. At the same time systems for DIY development like our own are also thriving too and making things easier than they have ever been. I don't think there will be "world peace thanks to multi-touch" nor do I think the sky is falling over one restrictive license for some portable devices but this device and the debate around it still seem like a interesting phase in the shifting of this landscape to me.
Yours,
Kas.