More like "Hey boss, we need to pay someone to make a keyboard icon!" "Hahaha, no. Work it out." and why worry about an icon when you have a perfectly good toaster as a placeholder?
Every USB toaster I've had has been too slow to be practical, so I always switched back to a conventional toaster eventually. Maybe when USB 3.0 toasters start coming down in price I'll give them another shot.
Firewire could deliver 30V and 1.5A (45 Watts). An average toaster uses around 1000 Watts. With a very small and efficient design you just might be able to get a small piece of toast to work.
As I understand it USB for power may reach 100 Watts, which could power an E-Z Bake oven.
That reminds me of my request to use the laser cutter at LA's hackerspace on beef jerky. Seemed to me that laser-etched beef jerky greeting cards would be pretty awesome, but they weren't so thrilled with the idea.
Does anyone know why a toaster icon was picked above other place-holder icons? My educated guess would be paying homage to the old flying toasters screensaver.
Microsoft's sample code for driver development is for a hypothetical toaster bus[0]. I'm guessing someone built their real driver off the samples and either forgot to find an appropriate icon or left in a UUID which is associated with that icon in Windows.
Sorry, my question wasn't very clear. I get that the driver icon came from the Microsoft's example driver code. My question was why MS chose to use a toaster as their example.
Of course, there is always the possibility that these things are chosen just out of pure chance / randomness. But often there's more history to the decision than that.
Wow are they a bunch of wet blankets. There is no more risk of EE having security issues than any other code. EE code is generally small (miniscule). Lots of rhetoric in that link, but almost nothing meaningful but 'we want to be taken seriously'.
Maybe I'm a wet blanket as well, but I'd rather not have undocumented features if there's even the slightest risk of it introducing bugs or vulnerabilities.
Sadly there isn't much room for Easter Eggs in the modern professional IT industry since software is constantly being attacked (it's hard enough keeping documented features secure!). Which is why these days most Easter Eggs tend to be hidden away online[1][2]
It's more likely that whoever wrote the driver and used the default package didn't even notice the icon - after all, it's a keyboard driver - it should just work when it's plugged in.
Apparently USB 3.1 -- called SuperSPEED+ (not to be confused with "Full Speed" (USB 1), "Hi-Speed" (USB 2) or "SuperSpeed" (without +, USB 3.0) supports up to 100 W.
A toaster takes 800-1500 W. But you could get a USB-compatible incandescent light bulb.
Perhaps in 2030, the European Union will require all wall sockets to be USB 7.0 compatible. As you plug in your vacuum it will not only receive 2000 W of power but will be able to share contents of the dust compartment with your friends via the Internet of Things. Lost an earring? Your friend's vacuum can now tweet you about it.
That's not actually all that crazy - I remember seeing a proposal for an electrical plug which had voltage and current negotiation - no power gets supplied until the handshake gets done. Makes the plug itself very safe (and you can have central transformers to provide 110v, 240v, 5v etc throughout your house).
- can you fix it?
- not sure, I tried a whole day and couldn't figure it out...
- whatever, ship it!