I’m a high school teacher and I recently was discussing this. Protip: don’t talk to 14 year olds about how if something is in between hard and soft, it’s firm. 🙄
There’s a surprisingly more expansive demographic that pro tip applies to.
Tip
Hehe
You called out “tip”, but you left “expansive” just lying there helpless?
Don’t worry, it’ll rise to the occasion
Yepp, just the tip.
I’m 41f (going on 13 at times), and this is why my husband hates(loves) having me around the shop - all the mechanical everything is full of euphemisms and innuendo. “mating surfaces” 😂
Are emojis acceptable here? Because I’d like to insert the hand raise one here
I think yes, let’s make a new culture of restrained emoji use 🙌
Oh were they referring to praise hands? I thought they meant 🙋
I was high fiving their raised hand
👍
Yeah, that tip is applicable for a lot of people who understand what sex is, this isn’t something that really goes away with age in a lot of cases.
Whiskey-ware
I feel like you should really have seen that one coming.
coming for sure
Half-chubware
Wait… It’s not “firm” as in “company that made the stuff”? FIRMware = the official software a firm pushes to patch things they make
But third party firmware isn’t official
I thought exactly the same thing…
Firmware is just software that runs in a different place.
Source: me, I write firmware sometimes at work.
Well, it’s usually closer to the hardware though. Your average x86/64 software dev doesn’t have to struggle with pins, addresses, buses and timings that much, if at all.
Everyones a hardware engineer they just don’t want to admit it.
I’'d like to know that where spyware is located?
Windows
Ahahhaha, good one
<whispers> it’s in the walls
Firmware is just software that runs in a different place.
Like in the kitchen?
Jk
Extra firmware cannot be modified.
Firm firmware might be able to be modified, but documentation is largely unknown.
Silken firmware is easily modified by the user.
These names are taken from tofu packaging.
My favorite is smoked firmware.
Mmm … Tender ware
Firmware is a metaphor, not an analogy.
Hardware is… Hard. Changing it is a big deal. It has mass!
Software is… Soft. It goes away when you turn the power off, and it’s modified at runtime. It weighs nothing, changes “instantly”.
Firmware is neither and both. It’s stored in hardware (EPROM, EEPROM, Flash, …) that you can take out and insert.
The metaphor is around temporality and physicality.
Sorry, pedant nerd.
At the time EEPROMs were becoming common, core memory was still common enough. Core was great! Power fail circuitry caused registers to save and the whole machine state was remembered.
Started computer science in grade school with only an hour of actual computer time a week. A LOT of theory and history. Charles Babbage, Ada, ENIAC, etc.
This stuff was drilled into our heads. Same with bit, byte and, halfway between bit and byte, a nibble. It’s a thing. 4 bits is a nibble.
Funny enough, I couldn’t code to save my life now.
Nibbles are still a thing in embedded programming and in ultra low bandwidth comms like LoRa. For example you can pack 2 BCD digits into a byte, one for the high nibble and one for the low nibble. This results in the hex representation of the byte actually being directly readable as the two digits, which is convenient.
Datasheet for sensors will sometimes reference nibbles as well, often for status bits on protocols like Onewire where every bit counts. i.e low nibble contains a state value 0-15 and high nibble contains individual alarm flags.
Nibbles can also be used with image types that are less than 8-bit
QBasic came with NIBBLES.BAS, a snake game using text-mode characters as “pixels”. Specifically it faked a 80x50 “pixel” grid using the standard 80x25 text screen where each 8-bit (=1 byte) text character made up two monochrome pixels using ▄ or ▀ or █ or an empty space.
I assume the name derived from the fact that, in a way, one pixel was “using half a byte”, i. e. a nibble.
Such good memories of learning to code as a kid in QBasic, I remember NIBBLES.BAS.
I was totally spoiled as my dad had the professional paid version which had an incredible IDE for the time and things like user defined types and structs that I later found out weren’t usually part of BASIC. It also had a ton of fancy graphics modes, double buffering, and even a sprite library. I loved playing around making crappy games.
By the way, “joystick” was kinda rude back in the day, but nobody even notices now.
What was more acceptable? “Control stick”?
No, “joystick” was the original term. Everyone in the past were a bunch of perverts.
It could have been worse. It could have been named enjoystick…
It was named by pilots. It’s in the, um, cockpit.
glad that changed
what ? why ?
Wikipedia seems to suggest it was an original term, first recorded use in 1909, and mentions nothing about alternative terms or controversy. I call BS
He means rude as in people made a sexual innuendo out of it.
I remember in late 90s my brother bought a joystick. The brand was ThrustMaster. Literally, that was the name. ThrustMaster Joystick.
We still laugh about it sometimes.
Mind? Blown.
Hotel? Trivago
Doctor? Zhivago.
Pants? Shat.
Chubware.
I thought this was common knowledge. I distinctly remember this being taught in a basic high school computing class back in the 90’s.
So in the 90s I had different computer based classes in high school.
There was a “computers” class, which is probably the closest to what you’re talking about, in which we mostly learned how to use Microsoft Works.
I also was fortunate enough to have some programming classes. We started out with QBasic and then the more advanced level was visual basic.
None of these discussed firmware. If it came up at all it was probably a casual side conversation because someone bricked something trying to update it.
We started out with QBasic and then the more advanced level was visual basic.
fun times with gorilla.bas? :)
I did have a classmate try to replicate Simon in QBasic but he kept needing the input reversed.
I told him the “feature not a bug” line and suggested he call it NOMIS
Had to look that up - seen it before but never played. Sorry for the late reaction, lemmy.world had enough server problems that I didn’t see my notifications in > 2 weeks…
No worries. Lemmy feels way more casual than Reddit anyway and I got notifications for months old comments there from time to time
Now if only I could find a way to open - from my notification about your response - your comment in the context of the community - but on my own instance. I have tried clicking on “Show context” -> links to the home server of the community, where I can not post / respond. Clicking anywhere else:
- Username: takes me to your profile
- Community: takes me to my instance’s view of the community in which we are communicating
- Post name: takes me to my instance’s view of the thread in which we are communicating, but of course without context to the comment
- link symbol: does nothing
- Show context: see above, takes me to the correct place, on the wrong instance
- Timestamp: does nothing
:(
Anyways, I like lemmy a lot, but I think with the recent nasty defederation announcement at lemmy.world from hexbear I’ll have to find another instance as home…
FWIW I home at midwest.social. It’s not strictly for the Midwest US but you’ll see a lot of stuff for that region there. It’s also left leaning and I think the only instances they’ve defederated so far have been for extremism.
I’m also using jerboa on my phone and from my inbox there’s a speech bubble button which lets me make this response from my inbox.
I don’t know if either of these things will help you but I figured I’d offer them just in case they did.
TIL! I have never even wondered why it is called that. Just took it as a fact and went along with it.
holy shit
Anyone remember shareware?
200+ Shareware games on a CD, played the shit outta those. And they came in magazines or were given out completely free.
I believe demos for games should still be the norm.
And they arrived (because I don’t want to use ‘came’ given this thread already) on cereal boxes.
I had never heard of that around here (Germany). Got my first PC '99, so I should have noticed; was looking everywhere for cheap Software deals. But there were some other companies which gave out free CD-ROMs as advertising with shareware and demo games. Some of those games were never finished, lol.
The Internet Archive has those Nestlé CDs btw :)
Happened in Canada for sure. The post made me go dig through boxes in the basement and try to remember where my old cdrom drive and cable that would connect to a new Mac would be found. Good times and worth it.
“Firmware” is a terrible name, it’s exactly software.
I disagree. Firmware originally referred to things in ROM or EEPROM. Basically software that is firmly in place and doesn’t change, providing an abstraction layer between the hardware and software.
This treats the software as if it were a physical chip which can’t be practically changed due to the physics of microchips. The imutability of the storage medium is just a choice of the manufacturer. Sometimes this is a good cost saving feature and sometimes this so they can include anti-features such as preventing repairing your device (e.g. OneWheel).
I’m just telling you where the word comes from. It’s like floppy disks, the 3.5mm ones weren’t floppy but that’s still what we called them because they once were. Firmware used to be something you couldn’t easily change. It sits between the hardware and the software. What exactly would you call it if you think the term is bad?
deleted by creator
Honestly, I think you’re wrong here, they were colloquially called floppy disks because at the time the whole thing was floppy. If the first floppy disks came in hard casings, they would never have been called floppy disks
Take apart a 3.25" floppy disk, you’ll find the magnetic platter (disc shaped thing) is floppy.
Take apart a hard disk drive, you’ll find the magnetic platter(s) inside are metal.
If a floppy disk wasn’t named after the thing inside the casing, why wasn’t it called a floppy square or floppy rectangle?
It actually was originally a floppy diskette, but eventually shortened to disk because people are lazy
Nope it came from the housing, it was originally called a diskette. The disk itself isn’t really floppy tbh, more bendy. But the old diskettes were floppy af
Can someone ELI5 what firmware actually is though? I kind of knew it was half way between, but i don’t know what that looks like.
Hardware is the physical part of computer.
Software is the code that runs on the computer to do the thing you want to do.
Firmware is the code that is installed on the hardware itself, usually in some sort of permanent or semi-permanent memory to make the hardware work.
