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Why do you need root access to the hardware for it to be considered a general purpose computing device? If someone provides you an account on a server where you
by shawnz 8y ago
Why do you need root access to the hardware for it to be considered a general purpose computing device? If someone provides you an account on a server where you don't have root access, would you not describe that a general purpose computer device with a real filesystem where you can run your own programs?
- Jedi72 8y agoI would call it a general purpose computing device and also would say you're not in control of what's going on.
- shawnz 8y agoIsn't your software the thing that's really "going on"? Who cares about the intricacies of how the hardware works? I understand being interested for hobbyist reasons, but is there a practical reason? EDIT: Here's another example. Let's say you have a VPS on which you have root, but you don't have ring 0 access on the machine where it's running. Are you in control then?
- chii 8y agoif the remote server has better IO and net access, but if you chose to use your own software, the vendor decides to cap you access (or force an inferior api on to you), then you have an equivalent analogy.
- shawnz 8y agoHow does android cap TCP/IP access for the user?
- chii 8y agoI m talking about the camera features, the radio, and any other hardware features etc.
- shawnz 8y agoSo if a general purpose computing device comes with a camera, but the camera is restricted, then it's not a general purpose computing device anymore? What if it didn't come with a camera in the first place? Plus, there is no restriction against connecting your own camera peripheral which you do control.
- josteink 8y ago> Why do you need root access to the hardware for it to be considered a general purpose computing device? Unless you have root access someone else gets to define what “general purpose” is. Someone else gets to tell you “no, that’s off limits”. That’s doesn’t sound like being in control of your own device to me.
- shawnz 8y agoThe manufacturer gets to decide if they're manufacturing a general purpose computing device or not, but they don't get to define what general purpose is. Either it executes arbitrary code or it doesn't, which my Android device does just fine without root access. So I would call it a general purpose computing device. Root access is just a platform specific construct, and it doesn't necessarily have an important purpose on every platform. Furthermore there are lots of ways that a platform could take away your control even if you had root access, such as through binary firmware blobs (which I'm sure you're running dozens right now, as am I probably).
- josteink 8y ago> Root access is just a platform specific construct Root access is the machine never being permitted to tell the human owner “no”. Nothing platform-specific about that what so ever. On the contrary I’d rather say it’s so detached from platform it’s more like a fundamental principle than anything else, a technological ism of sorts.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- shawnz 8y agoBut there are lots of situations where you can't do things even with root access on a unix-like machine. I gave one example already -- root access doesn't give you control over the operation of system firmware. But there are others, too. For example, root access doesn't let you write to kernel memory, it doesn't let you bypass SELinux policies, etc. The way you are defining root access here essentially doesn't apply to any modern computing system.