Always make sure you get that name right.

I'm happy that opinions like yours are the minority, and people like you are seen as prudish freaks.

It's really not about the updates that makes something "firm". Hardware is hard because it's a real physical thing. Software is soft because it's a non-physical thing, a set of instructions. Firmware is firm because it's less physical than hardware, and is more physical than a set of instructions. Firmware is software, in that it's a set of instructions, but additionally it needs to be loaded or flashed or programmed into the hardware, and stored either on-chip or in some ROM or NVRAM nearby, differentiating firmware storage from software storage on disk, tape, or some other peripheral storage. At the time, this made pretty clear sense, but over time, things were made murky by multifacted uses of NVRAM and peripheral storage.

So, "software built into hardware" is a pretty good definition. When you say something isn't firmware, it's software, that seems mistaken. All firmware is software, not all software is firmware. The size doesn't matter. Whether it's an application or a device driver doesn't matter. What defines the "firm" part of firmware is whether it's "built into the hardware". That's it.

So, yeah, you're having a definition problem. If you keep whatever definition that you currently have, then you're gonna have a bad time. If you try to "draw a firm line somewhere between the code in a tiny microcontroller running a battery charger and the operating system running on a general-purpose application processor", with this new definition, the question becomes "where is this code stored?". It doesn't matter how large it is, whether it's 100 lines of code in your battery charger or 1,000,000 LOC for your OS. If it's in on-board storage, it's firmware. If it's in peripheral storage, it's software.

... and I hope you realize that your bank account CAN be completely drained without the money being recoverable. If you're trying to say it can't, then might I suggest to watch some scam-baiting videos to see how those scammers operate, and how they try to do exactly that to the elderly and the unaware. You can call it a bug all you want, but it's quite possible to have your bank account drained; and, despite what others in this thread have said, an attacker can do that from thousands of miles away.

1) Find out where you are 2) Take a small step toward you goal 3) Adjust your understanding based on what you've learned 4) Repeat

I think this is useful as a high-level guide, and it's both easily memorizable and generally memorable. I use a silly mnemonic "FI-TA-AD-RE", and I come back to it whenever I'm working and get to a point where I have to ask myself "What the hell am I doing?"

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29298028

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If you're treating the government as a solitary nebulous entity, then accountability goes out the window. It's important to keep the individuals that make up the government accountable and responsible, as President Biden has with Jerome Adams, who is no longer the Surgeon General. Accountability is also why Fauci still serves as the NIAID Director of the NIH.

I'm surprised that people had forgotten this already. You don't hear much about a "democratic hoax" or a "bioweapon" nowadays, but those words were a part of the conversation a year ago.

Note that the phrase "politically motivated people" was substituted for the original term "whack jobs", which I think is more appropriate; however, your asked me to use "non charged terms", so I did my best.