| good god... every screen is an all-in-one. Kicker is, I don't even necessarily mind that as far as it goes. As time goes on it's just sort of inevitable that more and more functions get performed by little computers instead of hardcoded electronics. There is some engineering argument against that. It makes systems more complex and thus less robust and generally less performant. It's just that it also makes them more flexible and in some ways makes the hardware simpler even though a cpu is more complex than a few diodes. It's simpler once a cpu is taken as a black box unit where the complex magic is all hidden inside, and it's cost to design and produce is amortized to nothing by economy of scale. And it allows for potential better perfmance through tuning that isn't available in a fixed system. So fundamentally as a general rule applied to just any random thing, you can't really say the cpuization of more and more ordinary devices and functions is necessarily a net negative. What makes it all bad is only who controls all these cpus and what purposes they put them to. If my freaking tv was open source, fully open including all the special modules for wifi and hdmi and booting etc, I would have no problem at all that my monitor now has a cpu and ram and net connection. Or at least a whole lot less problem. It's only that "Who is this stuff working for?" that makes it bad. I wish I could somehow poison the money I pay for the TV with my own agenda against the wishes of the manufacturer and retailer the way they have my tv. So that the money would somehow do my bidding after I gave it to them, just the way the tv does for them after they gave it to me. |