Another big name I am struggling with.
Computer – Another term that no longer seems to fit the bill.
Computers (as in laptop and desktop computers) no longer compute. They are appliances that do things that were once reserved for other machines. For example, we watch video, listen to music, browse text, send messages. No longer does the computer sit waiting for our command to crank something out (that is, compute) – we just use it to handle our media.
On the flip side, applicances have become like computers, that is, they have programmable chips embedded. I don’t call my car a computer, or my VCR, or my microwave, though I can program them or interact with them in a post-mechanical way.
Should I call my phone a computer? It sure is acting like one (in all descriptions above), but the name doesn’t really fit anymore.
You can review all my previous ‘Tired Words’ here on this page.
Generally I agree, but now we are in the age of DRM I believe “Computer” is a necessary word. As a law abiding computer professional I personally need to use a “Turing machine” that abides to the Church-Turing Thesis. I use Intel & AMD based PC’s and my ARM-8 based mobile phone as “Turing machines”. Everyone else can have a “computer” that will let someone other than the user decide what video is watched, what music is listened, etc. Modern “computers” that perform DRM fail to meet a fundamental Turing principal (Every function which would naturally be regarded as computable can be computed by the universal Turing machine) and I insist on having nothing to do with them. In these times it is imperative to distinguish “computers” from “Turing machines”.
Yah!! but computer an appliances are defferent uses…