• sloonark
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    2421 year ago

    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. 🙄

    • @CascadianBeam
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      1091 year ago

      There’s a surprisingly more expansive demographic that pro tip applies to.

      • the_itsb (she/her)
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        331 year ago

        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” 😂

      • @MudSkipperKisser
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        71 year ago

        Are emojis acceptable here? Because I’d like to insert the hand raise one here

        • Deez
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          131 year ago

          I think yes, let’s make a new culture of restrained emoji use 🙌

      • TheSaneWriter
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        61 year ago

        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.

    • @kog
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      161 year ago

      I feel like you should really have seen that one coming.

        • @Sixner
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          61 year ago

          Not for lack of trying! He got that ropeware bug

    • @TwanHE
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      41 year ago

      Half-chubware

    • Doug [he/him]
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      21 year ago

      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.

  • @kog
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    851 year ago

    Firmware is just software that runs in a different place.

    Source: me, I write firmware sometimes at work.

  • @jantin
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    461 year ago

    Wait… It’s not “firm” as in “company that made the stuff”? FIRMware = the official software a firm pushes to patch things they make

  • @fubo
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    431 year ago

    By the way, “joystick” was kinda rude back in the day, but nobody even notices now.

    • @cybervseas
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      141 year ago

      What was more acceptable? “Control stick”?

      • @fubo
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        401 year ago

        No, “joystick” was the original term. Everyone in the past were a bunch of perverts.

        • ChapolinColoradoNZ
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          21 year ago

          It could have been worse. It could have been named enjoystick…

          • @fubo
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            61 year ago

            It was named by pilots. It’s in the, um, cockpit.

            • lorez
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              21 year ago

              Nowadays it’s analog stick, where did all the joy go, I say?

      • @axtualdave
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        181 year ago

        Disco stick, as in

        “Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick / I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.”

      • @FightMilk
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        51 year ago

        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

        • @[email protected]
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          41 year ago

          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.

  • Max_Power
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    421 year ago

    TIL! I have never even wondered why it is called that. Just took it as a fact and went along with it.

  • @[email protected]
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    411 year ago

    Damn… I always thought it meant the “firm” putting their “ware” on the chips. 😂

    • El Barto
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      91 year ago

      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.

    • Ends
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      181 year ago

      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.

      • J.M.
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        31 year ago

        And they arrived (because I don’t want to use ‘came’ given this thread already) on cereal boxes.

        • Ends
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          41 year ago

          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 :)

          • J.M.
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            11 year ago

            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.

            • Ends
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              21 year ago

              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!

      • @[email protected]
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        31 year ago

        I think demos are coming back. I have a bunch on steam recently, and Nintendo has a ton of them on thier storefront.

        • Ends
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          21 year ago

          That’s good news. I hope that trend persists then.

    • @Odo
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      61 year ago

      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.

      • Ends
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        11 year ago

        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.

  • @irkli
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    32
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    1 year ago

    deleted by creator

  • @[email protected]
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    271 year ago

    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.

    • Nakari Lexfortaine
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      31 year ago

      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.

      • @WiseassWolfOfYoitsu
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        21 year ago

        So technically, the Pigeon Bomb means wetware predates both software and firmware.

    • @WiseassWolfOfYoitsu
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      31 year ago

      Of course there’s people, the ID-10-T module needs to be installed somewhere!

  • @[email protected]
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    261 year ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
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    251 year ago

    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?