Comment by bogeholm

2 months ago

> firmware BLOBs

Nitpick, but it’s just ‘blob’ as in ‘a big blob of bytes’. It’s not an acronym or abbreviation for anything :)

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bogeholm

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dcminter  2 months ago

In the database world a BLOB is a Binary Large OBject ... are you sure of your etymology?

Edit: and I'm not btw - for all I know BLOB in DB land might be backronym from blob in the common usage.

  • bogeholm  2 months ago

    Wikipedia lists exactly the two cases you mention [0]:

    > > Not to be confused with Binary large object (BLOB).

    > In the context of free and open-source software, proprietary software only available as a binary executable is referred to as a blob or binary blob.

    [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_blob

    • dcminter  2 months ago

      I hadn't read that page, but now I do I note that it says:

      "The term blob was first used in database management systems to describe a collection of binary data stored as a single entity."

      So I guess I'm not any clearer on this point.

      edit: If I had to bet on it then I'd put money on the theory that "blob" became "BLOB" to sound more technical though...