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