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. π
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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Thereβs a surprisingly more expansive demographic that pro tip applies to.
Tip
Hehe
You called out βtipβ, but you left βexpansiveβ just lying there helpless?
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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" π
Are emojis acceptable here? Because Iβd like to insert the hand raise one here
I think yes, letβs make a new culture of restrained emoji use π
Oh were they referring to praise hands? I thought they meant π
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 doesnβt fuck.
Not for lack of trying! He got that ropeware bug
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Wait... It's not "firm" as in "company that made the stuff"? FIRMware = the official software a firm pushes to patch things they make
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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.
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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.
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.
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."
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 β or β or β 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.
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TIL! I have never even wondered why it is called that. Just took it as a fact and went along with it.
My non-tech wife tried to tell me βobviously thatβs why itβs called thatβ when Iβve 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...
By the way, "joystick" was kinda rude back in the day, but nobody even notices now.
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Mind? Blown.
Hotel? Trivago
Doctor? Zhivago.
Pants? Shat.
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