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.
I feel like you should really have seen that one coming.
coming for sure
Whiskey-ware
This guy doesn’t fuck.
Not for lack of trying! He got that ropeware bug
Half-chubware
I had a physics teacher who measured something against his hand in front of class and started to say, “You should try to…” then stopped before telling us he almost said “you should try to use your body to measure whenever possible” but stopped because he remembered he was talking to a room full of high schoolers.
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
Closed source source, motherfucker!
Ahahhaha, good one
Firmware is just software that runs in a different place.
Like in the kitchen?
Jk
Mind? Blown.
Pants? Shat.
Hotel? Trivago
Doctor? Zhivago.
Wow. TIL.
Wait… It’s not “firm” as in “company that made the stuff”? FIRMware = the official software a firm pushes to patch things they make
This was my assumption too, but I like this description better.
I’m here like “whynotboth.gif”
I like it…
I thought exactly the same thing…
Okay, but now explain Hard and Soft
But third party firmware isn’t official
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.”
Liking disco sticks don’t make me gay
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.
TIL! I have never even wondered why it is called that. Just took it as a fact and went along with it.
Damn… I always thought it meant the “firm” putting their “ware” on the chips. 😂
I actually never tried to find any meaning to it. I thought it was just software for the BIOS (which it is), and that’s it.
But this half wat between soft and hard? Whoa.
It’s not software for the BIOS, it is the BIOS.
You’re or course right!
Same
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.
I think demos are coming back. I have a bunch on steam recently, and Nintendo has a ton of them on thier storefront.
That’s good news. I hope that trend persists then.
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 :)
obligatory Fuck Nestlé!
fuck nestle
sorry, old habits
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.
Got no “vintage” hardware sadly. In a VM it’s not the same. I still have a Floppy drive, but those disks were all corrupted eons ago. I wonder how long my heaps of gamer magazine and bundle-box (bought at Aldi for practically nothing _) CDs are still gonna last…
They were the best of times, that’s for sure!
I sharewared my firmware and got malware.
I got malware in my wetware and had to change my underwear
Oh man, Doom. Getting 1/3 of the whole game was incredible. Also Deus Ex years later. Some people hated the Ellis Island level, but I spent so much time exploring everywhere.
doom shareware was a life changer, nothing had been the same since
I fucked around so long that I failed the mission. It gave a prompt that I had 17 minutes left to do the last thing, and ran out by 20 seconds or sth.
Gotta give that game a whirl again soon, with proper textures & mods & fool around with ReShade for hours until my back hurts and I gotta lay down after an hour of actual gameplay, muhaha.
The kinkiest of the wares
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Then there’s wetware (people).
I miss some of the older ones from my college days (1990s)… million logical instructions per second (megalips), and measuring mouse speed in mickeys/pixel.
Of course there’s people, the ID-10-T module needs to be installed somewhere!
I thought they required a PEN-15 adapter back then?
With the advent of lab grown animal neurons interfacing with parts, we need to expand the definition of “wetware”.
It’s meat. Doesn’t even need to be people meat. Just meat that can be trained to react to stimuli, which opens up some options depending on complexity.
So technically, the Pigeon Bomb means wetware predates both software and firmware.
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.
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.
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
