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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 12 2013 @ 03:41 PM EDT |
That's the whole point though. While adding hardware in the shape of better
sound, better graphics, improved memory architecture etc does improve ther
machine itself, programming it does not. The machine does what it always has
done, runs the instruction cycle - no more no less.
Before the programmer had the idea to arrange instructions in a particular order
to perform a particular computation, the machine was already quite capable of
executing them. Machine+idea with no other changes is not an improved machine. A
perfect example is this laptop I'm typing on right now. Its graphics chip is
quite capable of hardware accelerated 3d graphics, even though I actually have
no software on here that utilizes this capability. Simply installing a couple of
openGL demos doesn't improve the machine at all, it simply makes use of an
already existing piece of functionality that wasnt being used before.
Any general purpose computer can, by doing nothing more than running the
instruction cycle, process the entire infinite set of possible sequences of
machine code instructions. Some few of these correspond to existing programs,
some to programs that havent been written yet and the vast majority will be
total garbage and the computer will, as it is already designed to do, abort
processing them. If all you are doing is adding software then all you are doing
is adding an expression of an idea and thats properly the realm of copyright,
not patents.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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