- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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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” 😂
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
👍
The Breakfast Club fist pump. There should be a dedicated emoji for that.
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!
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…
But third party firmware isn’t official
I thought exactly the same thing…
Okay, but now explain Hard and Soft
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.
glad that changed
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?
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.
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
TIL! I have never even wondered why it is called that. Just took it as a fact and went along with it.
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.
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!
fuck nestle
sorry, old habits
obligatory Fuck Nestlé!
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.
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!
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.
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.
Oh, that makes sense, thank you!
Can you provide an example for stupid people?
Say you have your display, this is made up of millions of lights that on their own just light up in whatever single colour you want, but together they light up to create an image.
Your software takes care of breaking down that image of a cat you want to look at into its corresponding pixels - with a value for colour and brightness.
For example it’ll say this area in the cat’s eye is black, so it’ll request the no light to come out of it. Another area might be a pale red so it’ll request red with some middle level of brightness.
Now your firmware takes that requested black for a specific Pixel and it’ll physically cut power to switch off all the lights in the required area. For the pale red it’ll power that the red ligh ON with hald power, whilst green and blue are OFF.
(things get more complex once you consider back-lightning)
Great explanation. Thanks!
Firmware is software that makes the hardware do what it is supposed to do that runs on the hardware itself.
The term is used somewhat ambiguously though.
- Sometimes it is just the pure functionality, “if button is pressed, flip the lights on/off”.
- Sometimes it glues communication with the functionality, “if signal is received over some interface, flip the lights on/off”.
- Sometimes it has an operating system, “when power is on, initiate communications with hardware and interfaces and load software if it is present to interact with any of these”.
- Sometimes it is a package with both operating system and software, “when power is on, initiate communications with hardware and interfaces and load software that I know is present”.
- Sometimes the OS and/or software in the firmware package has a
.
Thanks! Nicely explained!
It’s software that lives in the hardware. It provides low-level control and functionality specific to that device. It runs on the hardware itself, not the CPU of the computer.
For example, a hard drive. We don’t want the OS to have to know how to interact with every type of hard drive. Seagate does things differently than Western Digital, an SSD works very different than a hard drive, etc… The OS sends the same commands to all types of hard drives, but each hard drive needs to know how to actually comply with the commands. If the OS is asking for a dozen different files all over the drive, it would be dumb to try and read them all at the same time. The OS doesn’t really know where they are on the spinning disk, but the drive does. Firmware written specifically for the device can do a much better job planing how to fetch the data so the read head doesn’t need to go back and forth a bunch of times, but instead make one good pass fetching all the data as it comes to it.
Hope that helps.
FIRMware is SOFTware (code) that contains the instructions to run HARDware. In most cases you would experience it, hardware is running an OS (Operating System) which manages all of the firmware ‘packages’. Many electronics, particularly more sophisticated, have firmware that is directly loaded onto the device which has a proprietary OS with limited to no graphical interface.
I am a layperson so if an expert can weigh in on my take I’d appreciate it!
Firmware doesn’t run on an OS, you’re probably thinking of drivers which are different. Drivers are software that tell the OS how to interact with specific hardware.
Firmware is software that’s baked into specific hardware components and it exists outside of the OS. A visible example most people are familiar with would be the BIOS which is firmware for the motherboard. Hard drives, graphics cards, RAM, etc all also have their own firmware.
Other devices such as microwaves, washing machines, cars, or anything using microprocessors (so pretty much everything these days) also have components with their own firmware. It is true that device firmware can drive a UI on some devices such a as a microwave, but most people today wouldn’t consider that to be an OS (semantics, I know).
Thank you!
Yeah, nah…read the other reply. The comment you are replying to is a swing and miss.
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.
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.
I think most people get it intuitively without thinking too much about it.
It’s software that is tied to the hardware, in the old days most commonly on ROM, which makes it “firm”.
Also as many mention, it’s tied to the hardware by the “firm” that made the hardware, although I think that is more accidental, it kind of works for the logic too IMO.
It’s such a brilliant term that most people generally have an intuitive idea about what it means, without an actual explanation. Today though it’s a bit more murky where the line is drawn between software and firmware, since much firmware is distributed through the OS and Drivers, and can be changed on the fly.
