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David Thornley
David Thornley

My definitions: If I can hypothetically program it without actually being part of a team dedicated to the project, it's a computer. If I cared to learn Objective-C and pay for a developer license, I could program an iPhone or iTouch, so those are computers. I can't program anything on an iPod without actually joining Apple or subcontractors and working on the iPod project, so my iPod Nano is not a computer. I've got an old HP calculator that would qualify as a computer, since it does run programs.

Since I'm mostly on SO, something is programming-related if I can use it directly to support programming. An editor or IDE or hex calculator or something like that is programming related. I can only use an iPod for programming by playing music as I work; while this is sometimes a very useful function, it's too indirect to make me call it programming-related.

(For programming-related, I also have a mental model of UnbalancedTotals, a StackExchange program for accountants. If I can't see any reason why it should got into SO rather than UT, it isn't programming-related.)

So, a question about an iPhone is computer-related, unless it relates to some restricted canned functionality, like the clock or iPod feature. A question about an iPod isn't, unless it's about using it as a computer peripheral, such as using it for file storage. Of the questions in the original question above, the only one I'd consider computer-related is about jailbreaking the iPod Touch.