b4dm4rkFirmware.
sloonarkI’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. 🙄
CascadianBeamThere’s a surprisingly more expansive demographic that pro tip applies to.
Tip
Hehe
Baby Shoggoth [she/her]You called out “tip”, but you left “expansive” just lying there helpless?
Don’t worry, it’ll rise to the occasion
Expansive tip?
TheGreenGolemYepp, just the tip.
TheSaneWriterYeah, 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
DeezI 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 emojis for that.
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” 😂
I feel like you should really have seen that one coming.
coming for sure
Half-chubware
Whiskey-ware
This guy doesn’t fuck.
Not for lack of trying! He got that ropeware bug
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.
Holy shit! 😱
ellesperWow. TIL.
It all makes sense now. Damn.
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!
whalerossFirmware 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 helpful front facing user interface.
Thanks! Nicely explained!
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 know graphical interface.
I am a layperson so if an expert can weigh in on my take I’d appreciate it!
Thank you!
Yeah, nah…read the other reply. The comment you are replying to is a swing and miss.
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.
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.”
f1g4Liking disco sticks don’t make me gay
what ? why ?
“Mediumware” just doesn’t gave the same ring to it.
…… wow I just got that too…
I’ve always thought about it as the way the software and hardware talk to each other.
Turgidware, if you will.
Bachelors in Computer Science.... Never made the connection.
Mind?
Blown.
BaroqueInMindPants? Shat.
dopesharkHotel? Trivago
Doctor? Zhivago.
popemichaelIts firm where it counts.
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 🏆Chubware.
MortyMcFry 🇦🇺Like Tofu. Mind blown