This is the definition used by people that actually hack hardware, people who are used to performing brain surgery on set-top-boxes and such like. It's not bricked unless unbricking requires a soldering iron or similar, and some JTAG action.
These days its getting harder and harder to brick devices, as bootloaders are becoming more and more advanced and more separate from the cores of the devices themselves. Once upon a time a faulty network cable could render your router forever inoperable due to a dropped byte in a firmware flash.
Today, my galaxy S phone has had some truly awful things done to it, including corruption of the supposedly sacred NVRAM data, and the USB bootloader has always faithfully come up after the button combo, ready to accept a new flash. It must run on totally separate hardware from the phone proper.
Most of the newer SoC chips like Freescale iMX and TI OMAP have the USB core hardware built into the chip, so it's easy to have the chip provide it's own USB bootloader that doesn't require any code out of flash or RAM to get started. The only trick is to make sure the chip can start in this mode when necessary, usually a little helper PIC or some custom gates takes care of that.
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This is the definition used by people that actually hack hardware, people who are used to performing brain surgery on set-top-boxes and such like. It's not bricked unless unbricking requires a soldering iron or similar, and some JTAG action.
These days its getting harder and harder to brick devices, as bootloaders are becoming more and more advanced and more separate from the cores of the devices themselves. Once upon a time a faulty network cable could render your router forever inoperable due to a dropped byte in a firmware flash.
Today, my galaxy S phone has had some truly awful things done to it, including corruption of the supposedly sacred NVRAM data, and the USB bootloader has always faithfully come up after the button combo, ready to accept a new flash. It must run on totally separate hardware from the phone proper.
Most of the newer SoC chips like Freescale iMX and TI OMAP have the USB core hardware built into the chip, so it's easy to have the chip provide it's own USB bootloader that doesn't require any code out of flash or RAM to get started. The only trick is to make sure the chip can start in this mode when necessary, usually a little helper PIC or some custom gates takes care of that.
You say this because you haven't tinkered with wireless routers...
Just because it's harder to brick things doesn't mean the meaning of the word has changed. People are right to think this is a mis-statement.