Hi Chris, On 10/25/16 1:51 PM, Chris Boyd wrote:
On Oct 25, 2016, at 3:10 AM, Ronald F. Guilmette <rfg@tristatelogic.com> wrote:
An IoT is -not- a general purpose computer. In the latter case, it is assumed that the owner will "pop the hood" when it comes to the software configuration. Ah, but they are. In many cases you can ship a product faster and cheaper with an ARM based system running a stripped down Linux and some specialty I/O than building a properly hardened custom microcontroller.
That something has a CPU doesn't tell you whether it is a general purpose computer. What tells you if a device is a general purpose is whether it is intended for particular uses or not (the key word there being "purpose"). More importantly, if you view every Thing as a general purpose computer you are missing an opportunity to impose an engineering constraint on the problem space. If that in turn let's you easily solve for the general case, you've had a huge win. Eliot