John Herbert of LameJournal writes:
An interesting question from my daughter (who is NOT pictured above!), I thought, and it mirrors comments I’ve heard before that highlight what I believe is a misunderstanding about what the “invention” in question actually is. My daughter’s question seems to imply that what was invented was the circle (or at least, round things).
In actual fact the a wheel is not just a round thing, it’s a round thing with an axle; without the axle, it’s useless. The invention was to take a round rolling thing, cut a hole in the middle and put a stick through it so that you can have a rolling thing attached to a static thing. That is a wheel, I explained to her. It was reassuring to check later and confirm that the dictionary agrees with me:
John is on a roll here talking about SDN and what it is (and isn’t). Remember that the whole should be greater than the sum of its APIs.
