jcuervo's Journal: More fun with the Sidekick 2

Last one for a while, promise.

Some people are still having problems with their Sidekicks, apparently, while others are doing fine. Go figure.

I'm still rolling the idea of writing applications for it around in my skull, but there's a snag: Danger wants you to fill out some freaking paperwork and fax it into them. I read something on the dev boards about how they know this process sucks, and they made some vague allusions to fixing it, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Pretty soon, the motherboard manufacturers are going to be saying things like "you can't put anything but Windows XP on your hard drive unless you contact us and wait 2-4 weeks for a developer key, and in the meantime, might we suggest a nice game of solitaire". GMC is going to be locking you in to a select chain of gas stations, it'll be illegal to vote for certain political parties without authorization, dogs and cats lying together, swords into plowshares, etc. etc.

Okay, maybe a little melodramatic, but hey, this is irritating. I own a gizmo I could be writing software for, but I have to wait for someone's permission?

I'm a programmer, damn it, I don't want to fax paperwork around the solar system and wait for your damned bureaucracies for permission to write programs, I just want to fire up a half dozen xterms and get on it.

Look, put up a CGI that spits out a dev key for the user-submitted serial number, pass it on to T-Mobile's automated "this guy is no longer supported as far as software goes" program, and call it a day.

Making people who want to write your software for you wait through this sort of stupidity is not, repeat not, a good thing.

Incidentally, now taking bets on how long until the first Sidekick virus pops up (no, uClinux doesn't count).

Okay, I'm done with my Sidekick rants -- at least for tonight. Sorry, Slashdot.