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” 😂
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.
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
👍
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
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.
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.
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.
Chubware.
TIL! I have never even wondered why it is called that. Just took it as a fact and went along with it.
holy shit
What the hell!
How did I understand that just now?
possibly because a “firm” is also a word for a business / company, so “firmware” as the chipset software coming from the firm that manufactures said chipset makes perfect sense. at least that’s why I never sought an alternate explanation - and I am not fully convinced OP is right, actually.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmware
History and etymology
Ascher Opler coined the term firmware in a 1967 Datamation article,[2][failed verification] as an intermediary term between “hardware” and “software”. In this article, Opler was referring to a new kind of computer program that had a different practical and psychological purpose from traditional programs from the user’s perspective.
As computers began to increase in complexity, it became clear that various programs needed to first be initiated and run to provide a consistent environment necessary for running more complex programs at the user’s discretion. This required programming the computer to run those programs automatically. Furthermore, as companies, universities, and marketers wanted to sell computers to laypeople with little technical knowledge, greater automation became necessary to allow a lay-user to easily run programs for practical purposes. This gave rise to a kind of software that a user would not consciously run, and it led to software that a lay user wouldn’t even know about.[3]
Originally, it meant the contents of a writable control store (a small specialized high-speed memory), containing microcode that defined and implemented the computer’s instruction set, and that could be reloaded to specialize or modify the instructions that the central processing unit (CPU) could execute. As originally used, firmware contrasted with hardware (the CPU itself) and software (normal instructions executing on a CPU). It was not composed of CPU machine instructions, but of lower-level microcode involved in the implementation of machine instructions. It existed on the boundary between hardware and software; thus the name firmware. Over time, popular usage extended the word firmware to denote any computer program that is tightly linked to hardware, including BIOS on PCs, boot firmware on smartphones, computer peripherals, or the control systems on simple consumer electronic devices such as microwave ovens, remote controls.
Fair enough :)
But firmware doesn’t have to be from the firm that manufacturers said chipset. Third party firmware is a common thing.
see that’s something that makes perfect sense but that I wasn’t actually aware of… Sorry for the late reaction, lemmy.world had enough server problems that I didn’t see my notifications in > 2 weeks…
How can you be 30 years in the industry and not know what firmware is?
I think he does know what a firmware. Just didnt’t realize the origin of the term.
A firmware is neither soft nor hard… it’s firm.
(Or maybe I completely misunderstood the tweet 🙄
Oh the name, completely misunderstood this as “I don’t know what firmware is”.
You can know the name of a thing without realizing where the name comes from.
Yes my bad, misunderstood this as “I don’t know what firmware is”
My non-tech wife tried to tell me “obviously that’s why it’s called that” when I’ve been writing software (and even some minor firmware hacking) for 30 years.
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in the landslide…
No escape from mediocrity…
