oh what the heck, i've nitpicked this much, might as well:
>>It's called firmware because it is something that resides between
>>software and hardware. Sigh.
>glad u at least know something
if "between" means on the scale from hard to change to easy to change, then yes.
if you mean it operates somehow as a middleman, then not particularly.
modern firmware is code that operates on an eeprom (previously defined, and not really structurally different from modern flash drives.) it's "firm" for two reasons: it takes a special process to rewrite the eeprom, and it doesn't cease to exist when unpowered. software is run from ram, and does go away when unpowered; hardware is pretty much synonymous with the physical layer. there are cases when firmware exists "in between" in that it can be the definitions of the functions that the computer will use when translating higher level function calls down to the machine code that a chip will execute, but that's not usually the case, and definitely not for a mouse.
>If they need to cheat to jump, they aren't a good jumper in my book.
I'm not with that, people that use tool-assistance can still be very skilled in my book.. not as inhumanly skilled as people who don't, but still very skilled. nor do i consider it whole-hog cheating. sometimes it's just meta-changing. the forward pass didn't always exist in football, and when it first was used, it was regarded as cheating by many. still, people generally recognized it still required skill, and instead of being outlawed, it came to define an entirely new meta, forever changing how football was played.
>Purple font. Triggered!
purple is DEFINITELY cheating.
>It's way too difficult to distinguish whether it's an actual player input or not
>since there is no inherit give-away to tell otherwise (with something so simple as jumps that is).
far more difficult, but hardly impossible. the most obvious approach would be signals intelligence, or sigint. it's how anti-terrorism research can be done without falling afoul of privacy rules. the govt may not be allowed to eavesdrop your calls, but they are allowed to look at things like the duration and recipients of your calls. (whether they stay within the rules of warrantless tapping or not is a whole other can of political worms). wow already does this when looking for botters, tracking the precision of people's repetitive actions as gathered evidence. even if it's something like a macro'd jump interspersed with otherwise manual input, they'd be able to see that at times you're using frame-perfect actions, and if it shows up too often and too identically, it could be held against you. the arms race against such would involve inserting some randomization, but that'd defeat the point of macroing a frame-perfect jump.
sometimes game companies go overboard and have their software seek out cheating software on your computer. that usually results in public outcry, but it happens how and then. going so far as to inspect someone's hard drives is almost always cried foul on, inspecting what's currently loaded in ram is less outrageous, and something you see often in mobile games. os's have gratefully moved towards isolating programs from inspecting outside of the ram reserved to just itself for other reasons. this would not be effective vs firmware, as it literally operates inside the mouse. there's nothing theoretically stopping a manufacturer from putting such complex logic into a mouse's firmware other than it's a stupid cost-benefit tradeoff for any reason other than "cheating".
>thankfully, the blinkenlights settings reside in firmware
and lastly, apropos of nothing really, i made myself laugh because i forgot where i got the word blinkenlights from. there used to be a sign in many server rooms that used ww2 "anti"-german humor to tell people not to touchenzie thingies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights