This premise assumes a building full of vacuum tubes and the punch cards are two different things.
One immutable set of toggles, and then an infinite variety of suggested settings for those.
It's not clear to me that's as true any more, when, randomly for instance, HEVC is in chips, or iPhones include an ASIC that's actually an FPGA.
This seems to require a new principle, that a device maker may decide how far up the stack their logic goes, regardless of the form in which that logic is represented.
As a check and balance on this, perhaps device makers do not get to retroactively (for a given device) take back intentional open parts of that waterline, as we've seen console makers do with what were deliberate and marketed capabilities, sometimes long after release.
> It's not clear to me that's as true any more, when, randomly for instance, HEVC is in chips, or iPhones include an ASIC that's actually an FPGA.
Ignoring that it would be pretty wild if I could actually throw Verilog (Yuck) at my phone, I would draw the line at roughly the OS kernel or at least it's rough outline. The OEM wouldn't be allowed to include any time bombs under that layer, but ultimately the focus is on "day to day" work rather than complete control of the hardware.
One immutable set of toggles, and then an infinite variety of suggested settings for those.
It's not clear to me that's as true any more, when, randomly for instance, HEVC is in chips, or iPhones include an ASIC that's actually an FPGA.
This seems to require a new principle, that a device maker may decide how far up the stack their logic goes, regardless of the form in which that logic is represented.
As a check and balance on this, perhaps device makers do not get to retroactively (for a given device) take back intentional open parts of that waterline, as we've seen console makers do with what were deliberate and marketed capabilities, sometimes long after release.