3 ms·

Is hardware becoming more complicated without being more capable? I just think that we’re taking lots of things for granted nowadays, which require complexity t

• mjg59 4y ago
  > Is hardware becoming more complicated without being more capable? I don't think so. Every component on my system that runs firmware is significantly more complicated than the iterations that didn't. 802.11ax is much harder than 802.11b, for instance. > But to an end-user, is there a difference between having a blob in ROM vs firmware, if both are closed source? Yeah, bugs that are discovered after release can be fixed.
  • hypothesis 4y ago
    > Yeah, bugs that are discovered after release can be fixed. I definitely understand that real benefit. But I was questioning the premise that having blob in ROM is somehow better than needing same blob in firmware, simply because that one doesn’t need/want to distribute non-free firmware on media. If one wanted libre hardware, then both cases are not great.
    • mjg59 4y ago
      > But I was questioning the premise that having blob in ROM is somehow better than needing same blob in firmware, simply because that one doesn’t need/want to distribute non-free firmware on media. Oh right! I absolutely believe that having non-free firmware on media is preferable - in some cases this has led to free implementations that replace the non-free firmware, and even outside that, given the choice between non-free code that doesn't work and non-free code that does, I'd prefer to take the latter.