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- cross-posted to:
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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.
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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
👍
The Breakfast Club fist pump. There should be a dedicated emoji for that.
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
This guy doesn’t fuck.
Not for lack of trying! He got that ropeware bug
I feel like you should really have seen that one coming.
coming for sure
Half-chubware
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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
This is a common result of firm firmware and tinkering.
Super firm trust on first use.
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…
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.
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.
Nibbles can also be used with image types that are less than 8-bit
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
<whispers> it’s in the walls
'Til the sweat drop down my balls
All these rootkits crawl
Ahahhaha, good one
Firmware is just software that runs in a different place.
Like in the kitchen?
Jk
Wait… It’s not “firm” as in “company that made the stuff”? FIRMware = the official software a firm pushes to patch things they make
I thought exactly the same thing…
Okay, but now explain Hard and Soft
But third party firmware isn’t official
I thought it had something to do with firms (the noun)…
“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?
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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
Device functionality software, which is low-level? Probably won’t win any minds.
Besides, if we (and others reading) know what concepts each other is referring to then it really doesn’t matter what word we use.
Firmware is easier to say, at a company I worked at we also called FPGAs gateware which was both interesting and convenient
It’s closer to the hardware. Generally harder to update. It’s less frequently updated. And it’s less fault tolerant.
Idk, sure, it’s technically software. But it’s pretty clearly at least a distinct subsection that deserves it’s own moniker.
The only common thing between software and firmware is the coding part. Everything else is different. Fault tolerance, memory management, MCU optimization, etc.
This reminds me of when, during the building and development of the Apollo program- electrical engineers were tasked with effectively creating the “software” of the guidance system, and when one of the lead developers told his wife “I’m working on the software for the rocket” She replied “We’re not going to tell people that you’re working in underpants.”
Mind? Blown.
Hotel? Trivago
Doctor? Zhivago.
Pants? Shat.
Rule of thumb: Firmware is essentially software that can break the hardware if something goes wrong.
I always think of it as software that’s saved on the hardware. But I guess technically all software is saved on hardware, but firmware is saved on hardware that’s different from the hardware you normally save it on.
But maybe your definition is better.
oh my god you blew my mind and I also work in IT
TIL! I have never even wondered why it is called that. Just took it as a fact and went along with it.
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.
Nowadays it’s analog stick, where did all the joy go, I say?
glad that changed
Disco stick, as in
“Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick / I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.”
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.
