On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 07:29:04PM -0400, Richard Pieri wrote: > Except for Apple's first-party applications which know how to tell > Quartz and Quartz Extreme to override this scaling and use the > native pixel density. Now factor the glued-in battery pack which is > good for 300 charge cycles before requiring the entire device be > replaced. Factor the fused display panel. Factor the soldered-on, > non-upgradable RAM. Factor the proprietary SSD. Now tell me how > this is a general-purpose computer.
Easy. Neither the permanence of affixment of its parts, nor the inability to upgrade them relate at all to whether or not a device is a general purpose computer. That is purely a function of its hardware's capability to execute instructions to achieve a variety of purposes. Typed with a serenely straight face. Concern about the loss of general purpose computing devices might be pretty reasonable, however. Here's an article which I found expresses that concern rather well: http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html The article makes what I think is a pretty astute observation: Vendors' own circumvention prevention mechanisms behave rather a lot like malware. It might bear investigation into whether or not the slew of anti-malware laws which have been passed, in their various forms in various locales, can reasonably be used against the vendors themselves... -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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