| Right, a monochrome monitor can not display color. Your old
cell phone could
not play Angry Birds. All hardware
limitations, not software. No amount of
tinkering with the
software could make new machines that
could.
Remember your Apple ][ days? It did color on the display.
However,
also remember, color monitors were very expensive,
so we used monochrome (green
screens, anyone?) monitors. Did
we need to change the software to run on the
monochrome? No.
Was it a different machine. No, just a different display.
Were
the program's results the same? Yes, just a little
greener, perhaps. Did you
get full 16 level color glory, no.
But that was a hardware limitation, not
software. No amount
of beating on the SW would ever get that to
change.
While I can't speak for your old phone per say, I've a
relatively
"current" Android table that doesn't play Angry
Birds either, yet it does most
all the Androidy things. And
even if it did run Birds now, ten minutes from now
I could
be checking my Gmail. That makes it a "new" machine? I don't
think so.
Sounds pretty general purpose to me. The fact that
my table can't run Birds
seems more like a bug in the SW or
an artificial limitation, though it could be
a hardware
limitation.
To flip the problem on it's side, I used to have
various
Palm based handhelds ever since the original Pilot to a Sony
Clie. I
had some game programs that I installed and ran on
each one, without ever
changing the SW. Resolutions
increased, levels of gray scale increased, color
was
introduced. I had one program that did use color, which ran
fine on both
B/W and color devices. So, while the hardware
did change, the SW remained
constant and oblivious to the
device it was on. Did running that old SW make it
a new
machine? No, the Palm just ran the SW as it should.
P.S. - Thank you
for presenting your views and expertise in
this area and listening to us rant
and think through our
thoughts.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
I think the problem here is trying to apply an inapplicable model to computers.
Computers are not a plow or a mousetrap, they do not produce a fixed set of
results. That is why they were made and what makes them so useful.
Sure, programs cause computers to do different things, but to most of us
anti-software patent types, it is preposterous to equate programmatic results on
a general purpose computer with adding a second wing on a plow. Programs do not
change the computer.
This whole meme is broken, there should be a different standard used.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
