[OT] Re: [PD] Piksel'05

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Thu, 18 Aug 2005, Piotr Majdak wrote:

> However, what I wanted to show was that there is a very smeared border
> between hardware and software.

Maybe we should call them harderware and softerware.

or somewhat-soft-ware and somewhat-hard-ware.

But there's already the word firmware for that.

I think that what causes the border to be smeared is that computing is
based on abstraction, that is, blackboxing, and so as one component you
don't have to know another component intimately, just be able to speak one
protocol.  Therefore the other component could be any mix of hardware and
software and you wouldn't notice the difference as long as it does its
job.

Thus what we call hardware or software is mostly dependent on what we're
used to call hardware or software. It's just a convention according to how
things have been traditionally/originally.

> And, it's very difficult to create a fair system of distributing
> hardware and software, or let's use a better differentiation,
> information and goods, as long as we have money.

What does money have to do with it, and what would you replace money with?

____________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada