Thoughts on software and hardware

By -
There is no essential difference between software and hardware except the economic difference. The people who put forth metaphors such as "hardware is like the brain and software is like our thoughts" apparently have no understanding of how computers work.

Everything that is done in software can be done in hardware. In fact, the way software works is by reconfiguring the hardware. The introduction of the programmable computer was the invention of a machine that could be endlessly reconfigured without having to actually take tools to it and physically adjust its parts. And various features of computers have at various times moved from hardware to software or the reverse: The original Macintoshes could get by with so little RAM because a lot of the operating system was actually put into the hardware. The real difference between software and hardware is that it is cheap to reconfigure software and expensive to reconfigure hardware.

So software is simply a way to cheaply and continually reconfigure an electronic machine into new states. Those states by themselves have no meaning: any state could represent an attempt to solve a differential equation, a position in a chess game, or a line of music, depending upon what its users intend it to mean. The "analysis" of a chess game by a computer could be hooked up to a synthesizer and treated as a musical composition instead.



Comments

  1. Ken B4:18 PM

    Stockhausen.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Keshav Srinivasan4:23 PM

    Gene, if the same piece of software exists on different pieces of hardware, doesn't that suggest that software is a pattern, as opposed to a concrete object?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah5:07 PM

      Keshav, it is only the existence of a higher level languages that allow us to consider the "same" software on different pieces of hardware the "same" program. The compiler for that platform must always render the code as something platform specific.

      Of course, these higher level languages exist in order to let us express our ideas about what should be done in a form abstracted from the particular machine in question. In that sense, you are correct: The source code representation of a program in, say, Java, is an expression of an idea. But in order to run on any actual computer, that expression must be transformed into a concrete machine using that hardware.

      Delete
  3. Samson Corwell12:15 AM

    Could this be a symptom of the Cartesian paradigm?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more