Slashdot Mirror
First, WinModems. Now, WinWiFi.
zulux writes "Microsoft is actively encouraging WiFi (802.11b) hardware manufacturers to strip their devices of costly electronics, and use Microsoft software/drivers to make up the slack. And you thought WinModems were bad!"
Software underwares to cut costs? Geez.
... Now Tom's Hardware can benchmark AMD's running WiFi.
"Derp de derp."
Well... That means WiFi applications will depends on the software side more. Windows will crash more I guess.
Plus, with the flexibility comes the idea that it's ok to write in more and more features... software bloat is the result.
Great... wireless ethernet over COM1?
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
First, WiFi devices have been out for a few years now. Yeah, hardware modems had been too, but the markets are moving faster now than they had been 10/15 years ago. Furthermore, there's already a new big player in the WiFi market that won't stand and let Microsoft have exclusivity on WiFi drivers...Apple.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
As if WEP wasn't insecure enough as it is... Microsoft making it even more exploitable is just what we need... I can just immagine an 802.11x code-redish worm floating around... sounds like fun to me!
Just like MS to try and steal the thunder of something popular after the fact (coughcoughnetscape).
I wonder how much of an overhead 128bit WEP will put onto the WiFi "software". It already slows down some hardware cards, so using the host CPU really doesn't seem to be a good idea.....although when has MSFT ever been worried about my privacy?
... oh no. *sigh*
Whenever they see new tech, they'll try to get into it as soon as possible, you never know where the next internet is.
Yeah, they're monopolistic, but do you think they got there by being stupid? Not meant as a troll or anything, but people tend to underestimate Bill and flame him without adequate reasoning explained. The guy is brilliant.
-----
Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
Perhaps Microsoft wants to be a hardware company and has decided the easiest way to do that is to turn all hardware into software.
remember what a pain winmodems are/were for linux? almost impossible to get them working, at least in the old days. if m$ is successful in getting wireless companies to use software instead of hardware, could that be the end of wireless for linux?
Well, it may be a bit more costly if there are a lot of WinWiFi cards, but I'm sure there would be some companies that will make real wireless cards. If not, I guess I'll just hope that the card I have now doesn't get outdated...
Jeremy Baumgartner
And now, even Linux supports them, btw.
Winmodems are MUCH cheaper than the old style modems.
WinNICS will be too.
That's a bad thing? Linux will still support the old NICs, and eventually will support the new NICs.
Stop with the anti microsoft bullshit.
I think any company today who makes a "Soft WiFi" card will recognize that they're cutting out a serious chunk of their potential customers. It's not like the peak days of WinModems, where Linux users were a negligible percentage to the consumer hardware industry.
...people will go for this, because they dont know any better and because it's cheap. I just hope this doesnt become industry standard, because it will mean a step backwards instead of forwards, and because this is an obvious ploy by microsoft to push their domination of the OS market, anyone who's ever tried to install a winmodem in linux knows that. Oh well, thats my 2c.
I like replies better than Karma, even if they are flames, because that tells me I got someone thinking.
Look at the numbers... Most linux installs are for servers and high usage machines. You NEED linux for a reason. Most wireless installs are the for opposite reasons, light duty machines and the non-tech people that don't know the different between a 5 meg wireless link or a 100 meg switched network.
The only benefit to the consumer would be a slightly reduced cost. This proves that microsoft cares about us. Personally, I like my hardware to be OS specific, because it prevents me from doing foolish things such as installing so called "free" software (which is un-American, btw).
Ever try using a winmodem in linux? LOL, or in windows for that matter?
We've seen recent stories about software radio already; why not software WiFi?
.sig intentionally left blank.
--
This
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Fine... Someone's going to step up and write drivers for Linux... and that's not going to be the issue... Just like I'm really annoyed by flying icons sending rubish to the trash can eating up system resources... Sure very little but still... Having to crunch radio input is just sending more good hardware to the scrap sooner by making our processors do ALL the work. I'd hate to have a winmodem, winsoundcard, winwifi all plugged in at once... This is also isolating the hardware that does it inclusively into a higher price bracket as well... which would get a lot cheaper if we just leave the standard alone! Look at what you can get a good 10/100 card for these days.
If it brings wireless costs down then I'm all for it, windows only or not. Winwifis come out, then regular wifi makers will drop prices to compete. Regardless how you personally feel about MS, more options in the market make for a better market.
My wife has a winmodem on a win98 system. I had to wipe the drive & reinstall everything. Guess what? I can't find drivers. Well, I can, but they don't install. It's a USR 3595 winmodem.
So, I installed an external modem on com2. It works great.
Sometimes winmodems don't work on the OS they're intended on too.
Some of you have commented on the possible performance implications of "soft" WiFi, but there is an even bigger issue, the same reason we hated WinModems so much.
If the software routines / hardware API is kept proprietary, which is likely the case, us Linux/FreeBSD/other open-source OS users will be left in the dark.
Either [a] hardware vendor thinks they will look good and support Linux by releasing a binary-only driver that is only compatible with kernel version X, and needs to be hacked to work with anything else, FreeBSD users like myself are out of luck (and anyway I would _never_ use a binary-only driver in an open-source kernel - hence my gripes with NVIDIA).
or [b] some of the brave of us attempt to reverse-engineer Windows drivers.
Either way, consider the next wave of laptops coming with built in "soft" WiFi - a definite possibility considering the amount of money manufacturers could save, and offer WiFi standard even on their lowest-end models. This means chances are we have to fork out and buy a traditional PCMCIA hardware adapter. And a lot of us run Linux/FreeBSD/whatever on our notebooks, I know I won't be happy. I think I'll be paying the $US45 for an 802.11b card while I can!
Which raises another interesting point - you may think "yeah there will always be hardware PCMCIA WiFi cards". But look what happened to 56k modems - try and find a 56k modem on a PCI card that isn't a soft-modem!
Of course this is not bad for everybody - the new cheap WiFi will be more widely spread since 99% of computers run Windows NT/Windows anyway, and this good be a good thing for prices of WiFi cards,etc.
--jquirke
Informative. Truth.
Everybody seems to be making the assumption that there won't be drivers. Why not? Linux has a small but appreciable market share, and that market share is more apt to get WiFi than most other users. Unlike the situation when WinModems first came out, there is a viable base and thus economic incentive to release Linux drivers.
Now, let's hope they come with source - too many chipsets require that the end manufacturer can't release open source drivers. mda_hal.o and the like are workable, but not optimal - to a certain extent, open source drivers for software driven accessories like the so called Win* hardware makes it *more* powerful for the open source realm, where talented hackers can alter and upgrade the drivers to drive the hardware beyond the original specifications, purposes and features that were originally designed for it.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
the processor usage of this will be? Given that using a 56k winmodem can take a noticable amount of processor time, what will is it likely to take up in these high-bandwidth devices?
Personally I haven't had any bad experiences with winmodems, I've only had one (Lucent chip) and it seems to do a fair job in my linux gateway for browsing, but forget games!
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
What a roid!
MS is depending on Moore's law to save them again. And this seems to be a long term strategy - to convert hardware to software, which ties things into the windows OS again.
Another secret of bloatware is reveiled.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Maybe the WiFi thing is best done in hardware, but sooner or later we will find some hardware that have parts best implemented with software that runs on the host computer (lower cost, and not very high overhead), and then what shall we linux users choose from? A $40 soft one with crappy linux support (closed-source drivers that crashes every two hours), or a $500 hard one? Or otherwise make a totally-free soft solution?
Since WinModem IS so dependent on the CPU processing cycles, so IS the WinWiFi. This means Micro$oft is helping CPU maker in pushing the masses upgrading to more powerful CPU's. <sarcasm> Finally my 1GHz Pentium III would be obsolete. I have been waiting for the day to upgrade to 6.66 GHz CPU! </sarcasm>
..because it'll never happen.
Wireless is not a casual item like a modem is. Joe sixpack wants a modem to get onto AOL. He doesn't care about the method, only the result. Joe gets prOn, and on a modem that cost a whole ten bucks less! That's 5 blank cd's fer chrissakes.
But.
Joe Sixpack doesn't use wireless. It's a step-up on the tech ladder. And those who are in the know, are in the know and would *never* use a SOFT WiFi. No bottom feeders use wireless. And a soft-anything is a bottom feeder solution.
Let some clueless HW mfg make these things. If they're lucky they'll sell maybe five of them.
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
One way to reduce hardware cost is to put hardware functions in software.
You don't see anyone calling "monopoly" about software RAID cards, and those that do pay far more (andget only marginally better performance) from hardware RAID.
Winmodems may be a PITA for us, but you can get then for $5, vs. $70ish for a hardware modem (the 3Com Performance Pro comes to mind)
I can see that Microsoft may look at this as another opportunity to extend the duration of their doomed monopoly, but honestly I don't believe that they are morally obligated to keep hardware prices up by NOT integrating their functions into software. They are, after all, a software company.
Does it not make sense to introduce new stolen ideas to make more use of software?
Besides, these are Microsoft drivers. They'll probably be slow enough to help the ailing hardware industry sell a few more chips. That's aid that they could use now.
Yes, I know it isn't kisher to say that not *everything* Microsoft does is evil. Mod me down if you like.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
It wasn't that many years ago that Microsoft, along with just about everyone else in the PC business with an ounce of common sense, launched a jihad against Intel's NSP (Native Signal Processing) initiative.
NSP was the logical response to Intel's realization that CPU cycles in the Pentium era were becoming less and less valuable to the end user. They considered it a task of strategic importance to soak up extra cycles wherever they could be found... never mind that game developers still needed every cycle they could find at the time. Had NSP succeeded, it would have had a wide array of effects on the PC hardware and software businesses, almost all of them too ugly to contemplate. The nascent market for high-performance 3D and environmental audio hardware would likely have been crushed under the treads of Intel's marketing machine, and WinModems would have taken over the scene years earlier than they did. The development of online gaming technology would have been pushed back indefinitely, pending the ubiquitous adoption of broadband (which, obviously, has yet to happen).
Of course, MS's primary interest in killing NSP was to keep Windows from having to run as just another NSP client. Owning the boot process from BIOS to bluescreen was as important to them in 1994 as it is now. But now, it appears that they've taken leave of their technical senses as well as their ethics. If this is anything like Intel's earlier push to run modem data pumps on the CPU -- and to be fair to MS, the article is by no means clear on this point -- then 802.11 fans, and consumers in general, should fight it where they find it.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Cost.
Everyone knows it's a hell of a lot more efficient to do things via hardware.
However, Microsoft has figured out that people like cheap computers, and AMD and Intel's battle will continually cause processor speed to rise.
Cheap computers = more people buying them = more users hooked on MS Windows.
Not to mention that, with the advent of broadband, I think MS has caught on to the fact that home LANs are becoming more and more common place. Force MS-optimized software-based networking stuff on computers, and people are slightly more inclined to use MS products for that file server.
interesting way of making your 802.11b device only work on windows... imagine it if you don't activate your MS software they can not only disable your PC, but your entire network. fun fun fun
Anyone know where to find one these days, or if one ever got made? Barring that, do hard usb modems exist?
I don't think too many companies are going to fall for this. Remember most of them use the same cards in their base units too and these don't have anywhere enough extra power to run Windows let alone a winnic.
I wouldn't call this "all bad". Fundamentally, the idea seems pretty smart: move all the things that necessitate expensive chips over to the CPU, and lower the price of the finished product. Granted, when you make this proprietary to one OS, it sucks. But the kind of computing power available to the masses today is just ridiculous overkill. This was the case a year ago, and it's even moreso the case now. Why reinvent the wheel for every peripheral you have when most of the processing can be offloaded to the CPU? I wonder how much money you could save if you could buy a WinGeForce3 (granted, this is a stretch, even with today's computing power), WinRAID controller (which is actually what the HPT series of IDE RAID controllers are, as I understand it,) WinSoundblaster Audigy, etc. (When I say "Win" I don't mean "runs in Windows," but rather "runs in software.")
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
This is the typical slashdot blabbering. SoftWiFi is a GREAT idea. Currently WiFi devices are expensive and out of reach of many. Software Wireless would have the same effect of software mdoems: It will bring the cost of access down incredibly. Why do you want to slow down progress on this one? You'll still have your hardware to use in linux.
WinWiFi would definately slow down Linux/FreeBSD/FreeOS support in the short term, but think about the bright side. People now are using winmodems as a phone line interface; it gives us free OS users a tool we wouldn't otherwise have. We may have the same thing with WinWiFi: imagine if you could adjust the speed at which RTS/CTS/ACK/broadcast are sent, or send certain packets with a PIFS interframe spacing, or change aSlotTime... Maybe even make fundamental changes to the MAC, such as CEDAR.
This could be really great! Can you imagine Linux DoS tools based on flooding frames without participating in the MAC?
The sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home
'Tis summer, the people are gay
The corn top's ripe and the meadow's in bloom
While the birds make music all the day
The young folks roll on the little cabin floor
All merry, all happy and bright
By 'n by hard times come a-knocking at the door
Then my old Kentucky home, good night.
Chorus:
Weep no more my lady,
oh weep no more today.
We will sing one song for the old Kentucky home,
for the old Kentucky home far away.
They hunt no more for the 'possum and the coon,
On meadow, the hill and the shore,
They sing no more by the glimmer of the moon,
On the bench by that old cabin door.
The day goes by like a shadow o'er the heart,
With sorrow where all was delight.
The time has come when the people have to part,
Then my old Kentucky home, good night.
The head must bow and the back will have to bend,
Wherever the poor folks may go
A few more days and the trouble will end,
In the field where sugar-canes may grow.
A few more days till we totter on the road,
Then my old Kentucky home, good night.
I think it's a terrible idea!
Despite the speed of today's CPU's, having to use CPU cycles to do WiFi networking is not a great idea, especially when you also have to take into account for CPU cycles being used for everything else in the system.
I mean, consider the situation of playing DVD discs on a computer. Sure, you can do it completely in software if the CPU is fast enough, but the CPU cycles it requires to do this even on a very fast CPU can drag a system down pretty quickly. Now you know why ATI has Hardware Motion Compensation (HWMC) and Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (IDCT) decoding assistance on their graphics chipsets starting with the Rage 128 series, and nVidia has pretty much done the same with the current GeForce4 MX/Ti chipset series.
I don't think this is going to be as bad as WinModems. With WinModems, everyone and their cousin had a different way of dealing with emulating hardware with their drivers, so it was almost impossible to replicate functionality on Linux. If Microsoft is offering some kind of standard library that emulates the hardware they'd be removing from their boards, that means you have a documented API you can write an implementation of for Linux, and it wont' be as hard to make drivers for these WinWiFi devices.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Some of the concerns are the amount of processing horsepower required for security and maybe also for some of the communications functions, since it's easier to add computational horsepower when you're not crammed into a small card competing for space and heat load with the radio circuitry, and also convenience in upgrading the system, especially if upgrades may require even more substantial increases in CPU crunching, such as bigger RSA modular multiply/exponentiations.
The importance of convenient upgrades has been amply demonstrated by the repeated failures of WEP :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Let's get down to brass tax here.
From the article:
The radio, about the size of a can of beer, extends the wire line and connects with any mobile devices
"...the size of a can of beer"? I love it! Let's keep this going.
Mobile devices can use a PCMCIA card, slightly smaller than a Hershey chocolate bar. Pocket computers can use a CompactFlash WiFi modem, slightly bigger than a "Fun Size" Hershey bar.
The WiFi base station connects to your computer, which of course is bigger than a bread box.
The wire line is your telephone line, which is about the size of a really, really long strand of spaghetti. This connects to the telephone office, which is about the size of a telephone office. This in turn connects you to the Internet, which is sort of hard to measure the size of... let's just say it is the size of the whole world and be done with it.
Hope this helps.
P.S. I wonder what percent of Slashdot readers actually know how big a bread box is?
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
ok - tell us about living off EasyBake Oven produce.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Winmodems were a barrier for linux, but network cards are cheap and people will probably consider them inferior in design if they won't work on Linux. Linux servers are becoming popular in the average house, very well respected. This won't be seen as a weakness of Linux/Unix, but instead a weakness of the card itself.
Why use WIN modems when you can use GNUmodem?
Ok, its time to start the GNUModem project
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The WEP standards group was trying to avoid US Pretending-To-Be-Anti-Communist export laws (and also French and Chinese policies), so they took a conservative approach and designed a system that could be used with short known-to-be-easily-cracked keys, but could also be used with medium-but-still-inadequate keylengths or acceptable keylengths if you set the correct values in the ROMs. Of course, like Microsoft PPTP before them, they did so in an incompetent manner without adequate adult supervision, so their work was shredded by some of the same people at Berkeley who helped shred the initial RC4/40 "export-quality" code, and who also shredded the GSM Telephony incompetent encryption algorithms over lunch one day.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
After reading comments here, I seriously think that "linux" screw up peoples mind seriously. I cannot understand the reaction. When I read the summary on the front page I thought "Wow, finally the penetration of highspeed wireless communication will boost!, and there will be alot of interesting comments on this"...
Nope, instead it feels like a religious cult, and in this cult, we preach microsoft is bad....
The stories posted on slashdot is high quality, but discussions seem to f**k up.
\Peter Gullberg (junkmejl63@hotmail.com)
Exactly, the rest of us are smart enough not to let that happen...
microsoft is now encourage the new 'WinVid' style graphics cards. These new devices are much cheaper than regular video cards because they allow the manufactures to put much less electronics on the card. Gamers everywhere are protesting, saying the new cards will not perform as well, and in fact close resemble the video cards found in the discount bin at the local ma & pa computer shop. Microsoft, however insists they will work just as well as the current style cards.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
It's a sad, pathetic religion -- linux is.
From the sounds of LINUX coming here it sounds as if most of these LINUX posts are rants of some sort. Mindless drones who spew venom and mis-information to further their primary cause of brining others into the collective.
They are the most rude people I have ever come in contact with on chat board or forums.
Just like the old Russian "party line" statements or those of Rev. Moon or Jim Jones. It's like Amway or something.
How are these people brainwashed? I think it's massive doses of refined carbohydrates and constant sleep deprivation. But someone has messed with their minds.
Because of the CULT status of LINUX I know it's only a matter of time that they start selling roses on corners and begging for money at airports, BECAUSE THEY GIVE THEIR SOFTWARE away for free.
As for me, I hope they take more of a Jim Jones stance and have one hell of a cool-aid party.
The logic behind winmodems was to reduce the hardware costs and drive down the prices. My question is how much cheaper can they really drive these prices down. Right now you can pick up a wireless ethernet card for $50. Modems are runing as low as $30 for comparison.
So as demand increases, quantities of scale continue to increase, we can expect the cost for those same cards to come down. It's unlikely that WiFi cards will be able to press much further down in price even with using software drivers.
Another thing to keep in mind is that most of the wireless manufacturers tend to save costs by reducing redundancy in their wireless products. If you use a Lucent AP-1000 access point, it runs on the same cards that you'd put in your laptop. I have yet to see a wireless adapater for a desktop that wasn't, in reality, a PCMCIA slot with a wireless card. It's a big cost savings to them to only have to manufacture one set of devices to fill their needs in laptops, PC's, and access points. Trying to do software drivers would totally screw up these possibilities.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Am I not the only thinking about the bountiful hacking possibilities of a DSP controlled radio transciever card? Of course that assumes the card APIs are reverse enginnered (or pigs fly and the specs are published).
Anm
that most people don't realize when they buy a piece of hardware that it uses the operating system to replace a few chips in the device and that means using more CPU cycles to run the equipment.
They probably don't even realize that their computer isn't as fast as it could be.
Maybe someday this will blow up in Microsoft's face when people can't understand why a Linux box runs so much faster than the Microsoft boxes.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Conexant (formerly Rockwell-and one of the biggest winmodem makers) just released a lot of their drivers for linux with half-source/half-binary drivers for Mandrake and Redhat. (thanks to the hard work of Marc Boucher)
http://www.mbsi.ca/cnxtlindrv/index.html
The whole Winmodem thing isn't all about Microsoft evil, by the way, its about patents (that should be your second guess for sources of evil after M$ by now). My understanding is that Winmodem drivers expose the code for V.92 and other compression/transmission implementations.Because of this, the makers aren't allowed to open-source the code for these patented implementations.Think about it this way, the regular hardware modem makers aren't exactly shipping you microcode and chip diagrams in the back of your manual either.
For the first time, I'm using the modem that came with my 2 year old Vaio at 56K as I type this. (thank God modem/speed technology has-gone/is-going nowhere!)
I detest winmodems as modems as much as the next guy. However, since they are essentially ADC/DACs after a phone-grade coupling transformer (I think?) they offer interesting potential for phreaks (recording without pickup click, etc.)
WinWiFi would just be ADC/DACs behind... an antenna. So if it's done in an interesting way, we would have an arbitrary frequency digital tuner in our computers, capable of bandwidths limited only by the thruput of the DAC/ADC chip(s).
Now, if they made I2O WinWiFi, that'd be cool. Universally supported across all OSes, if I understand I2O correctly.
Just my b'10' cents.
-Knots
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
This sounds suspiciously like the "Software Base Station" available on Macintoshes for a number of years now (surprise, surprise!) It allows you to use a computer with an AirPort card to act as a Base Station for other computers with AirPort cards, instead of spending the $250 to buy a dedicated one.
rheiser
Judging from what I've read elsewhere, the submitter may have interpreted the article a bit wrong. It's not so much that MS and Intel (also mentioned in the article) want to have the WinModem equivilent of 802.11, but that they want to make the access points cheaper by providing a software solution.
Apple has had a similar product, the "Software Base Station," available for Mac OS 9 for quite some time!
See this (much better) article for details.
The components that will "benefit" from becoming win-components, by becoming cheaper, are not the costly parts of the system.. $25 for a winmodem or $50 for a real one, this is nothing compared to the cost of the monitor, CPU etc. Its a 'false economy' - I would need a faster system to support all these components, just to save a few $ on some chips on the component cards. I have experience with a winmodem - poor CPU performance under heavy graphics/modem load, to the point where the machine reboots once every few hours as the CPU gets hot under these conditions. (p3-933, 256meg ram, geforce2 GTS) Not to mention lagggggg! :)
Man im stoked, now I finally have something useful that can plug into the CNR slot on my MoBo.
Back when we had Pentium 100s with 16MB of ram and WIndows 95, the windows modem concept was a clear winner for the bean counters but dammit, it sucked the life away of the machine.
:-)
Now we are in the land of the 1+ GHZ Celeron with 128MB of ram. The overhead of the winmodem should be tiny, unless the drivers are horribly written.
Not that I give a crap, years ago I decided to bite the bullet and get a hardware modem that I eventually made work in Win95, Win98, WinME, NT4 Workstation, 2000 Pro, SuSe and RedHat.
The average WiFi card for a laptop right now is around $100. For $100 you can buy an Apple Airport or a Linksys WPC11. If companies start pumping out soft cards with less electronics that rely on a fat driver then the windows user can expect to pay a fraction of that cost. I doubt we are going to see $20 Lucent WinWiFi cards any time soon, but there is going to be a sweet spot in the price chart that is going to help with increasing the popularity of WiFi.
We have a bunch of early adopters at my office and so far people love being able to walk around the house with a laptop when they are telecommuting. I added a Netgear ME102 to my home network in December and use a WPC11 for my laptop and I like it so much sometimes I don't ever step into my home office when I telecommute. Had the WiFi card been $50-$60 instead of $100 I could have bought it a month or two earlier, plus it would make it easier to convince the IT folks at the office to shell out for a test base and a few cards to do a field test.
Now, we are always wary of Big Bad Microsoft getting their hands on anything, but dammit, this standard is already open, and non Microsoft entities are huge players. Apple bases all their wireless networking on the same standard! Making a cheap, reliable windows-only wireless card does not affect Apple since they are a niche shop. It does not affect the open source folks since there will always be a full hardware solution, just like we have always had real modems sold alongside winmodems. And there is always an enterprising soul that wants to figure out how to make a winmodem work under Linux, so let's be honest, I know theres a few people out there eager as hell to give it a try
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Of COURSE Microsoft is going to encourage offloading everything from independent circuits/chips and onto your CPU!!!!
That means you need a faster CPU, and the more processor YOU have, the less clean they have to be with their code, because, "hey, what's a few extra cycles?"
Also, do you really think they're not being monetarily compensated for this????
Here's a scenario:
Grove: "Bill, can you pleeease start making everyone use software-based components?"
Gates: "Sure, if it'll help your sales, and if you toss a Bill-ion or two my way"
Grove: "Money's not the issue, it's the availability of good hardware-based systems... while they're out there, we don't sell as many CPUs"
Gates: "Ok, so we'll just recommend that for maximum stability designers should create components that are software based, and which use our APIs"
Grove: "Great! Thanks Bill! You're Swell!"
Gates: "Ohhhh Andy...."
--smooch--smooch--giggle--noises from behind the curtain...
geeks are cats who dig a certain kind of cool
How about just saying any operating system other than Windows gets screwed over by Microsofts power over hardware manufacturers. This has nothing to do with linux. Any OS that runs on x86 is threatened by so much of what microsoft tries to do. And soft WIFI is a perfect example.
Like most people here I'd say most of us wouldn't give a damn what microsoft did if microsoft was a better corporate citizen. If microsoft had a few products that sat in the corner and I used them when I wanted to use them and ignored them when I didn't, then I wouldn't get so riled up. But microsoft's business practices are attrocious. Rockefellor is rolling in his grave for having been born too late to get into the racket of computer software. Expanded trust laws or no, Microsoft has its hands in so many of the information cookie jars in the world it makes my head spin.
Microsoft = limited choice
OSS = expanded choice. freedom
A simple solution to this dilemma: Never buy anything that has the word "Win" in it ;)
Does anyone else find it ironical that M$ wants 3-d hardware accelertion for 2-d software and graphics on one hand and soft-wifi for n/w deceleration on the other? Obviously, they are trying to once again encourage the closed specs/driver approach that many manufacturers took for win-modems with the unfortunate result that the hardware is unusable on a lot of non-ms platforms for a long time.
First of all, where did you learn to write? No, I won't be that petty...(note preterition)
This site is not a big shiny advertisement for "linux". It is a group of intelligent, childish computer users & programmers who, for the most part, tend to use the best software and hardware available. Unlike most people, however, these realize that a computer should not be an appliance.
You are very wrong to attribute these responses to some sort of "cult" mentality, in which everyone is brainwashed into hating Microsoft. These people love one thing. They love to fiddle with electronic gizmos. These are not "consumers" who just want their computers to "work". Many of them work in computer related fields and want to foster a genuine appreciation of computing and mathematics in others while enriching their own knowledge. All have used Microsoft products before. Most are disappointed when Windows continues not to live up to the "hype" of Microsoft marketing. Most see the productivity gains possible by using computers being stifled by Microsoft's elitist software model. Most are turned-off by Microsoft's secrecy and predatory business tactics. They see no room on a Windows computer for anything but Microsoft products. These disappointments cause them to eventually give up on trying to use Windows, and to try to convince others not to use it.
This is the sad part: If in the future you see yourself wanting a computer to do something that you think Microsoft might not be willing to implement, doing anything but actively fighting steps such as these is foolish. Believe me. Once a computer becomes an appliance that only runs Windows, the fun stops.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
...is "encouraging" :p
-iie1195
How does removing a DSP from a WiFi card clean up the signal? There is a reason WiFI operates in wideband, and thats for noise immunity. Less chips will make no difference in singal integrity at all just price. Besides with SoC designs coming along these days there might be a time when we will see a cheap 1 chip total hardware WiFi solution.
...and taking out all forms of communications on the transmission radius of the wifi card because they'd increase the spectrum from 2.400-2.483Ghz to 0-10^xGhz. (where x->infinity).
Better yet, at the same time, through some horrible fluke, all the power output of the PS would be redirected to the card, creating a massive wave of radio emissions. The said wave would fry anything in sight.
Hey, it could happen. Afterall, it's software, and knowing Microsoft, there's a bug in the drivers just waiting to byte us on the ass.
BTW, I'm joking...
You can get those at any compusa, they're a bit more expensive, but you can still find them easily.
Does this mean I have to start looking for init strings for Rockwell/Conexant WiFi cards? Just as long as they are not BCM WiFi
Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?
Seems to be a pretty clear decision by the /. readership that this is a pretty lame idea..
Gawd - WinModems were terrible devices.. even though CPU's are fast these days, they still put a hell of a strain on the system - not to mention their inoperability with other Operating Systems.
I personally though WiFi was at quite a good stage - a powerful technology that has been made relatively simple to setup and use.. dont let it get polluted by stripping it down and making it software based!
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
I think a software Wi-Fi implementation could be a good thing. Lets play a little thought experiment here. A soft modem is an interface to a phone line, this is commonly used to allow the processor to create the modulated waveforms and demodulate the incoming waveforms that would normally be done by a chip dedicated to the task. This allows one to write a driver that is capable of not only creating and understanding the common modem modulations such as V.90 but any future modulation scheme that comes along, instead of flashing a ROM on your modem (assuming it has a flashable ROM) to upgrade it you load a new driver that knows about the new modulation. This ability to create arbitrary waveforms over the phone line has allowed soft modem manufacturers to offer software that does things a typical hardware modem cannot like speaker phone software, and home voice mail systems. Now imagine this capability with a 2.4GHz radio transceiver. This soft Wi-Fi could be capable of 802.11a and, with a driver update, 802.11g (or whatever the new higher speed protocol is). A driver could be created to cover BlueTooth and/or HomeRF as well, as they sit in the same band. How about transmitting voice, or video? Why not rig it to pick up the baby monitor? Or the neighbor's cordless phone? A knowledgeable hacker could create a new protocol capable of 500Mbps (which would stomp all over everything else in the band within range). All kinds of fun can be had by amateur radio operators since Wi-Fi overlaps some of the amateur radio spectrum.
Did you remember the TI Win/4 printer? It works only with w95, eating the 5% of CPU time while idle.
The genicom.com, who bought TI printers line, wrote:
<CITE>
There is not and will not be a Win/4 driver for Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows 98, or any other operating system.
Customers requiring operation on these platforms are advised to purchase a more versatile printer.
</CITE>
Alas, this stuff wasn't reported on the Win/4 box...
Who has time enough to develope a linux driver for it can raise a lot of money buying them for 5$ each *before* to release the driver!
I think the whole 'soft' device argument is a red herring. DSPs and ASICs cost cents each in large lots, and their elimination means a CPU costing several hundred dollars has to make up the slack. Whereas these DSPs/ASICs are optimised to handle the task at hand, the CPU is not, meaning a slowdown for any other apps you're concurrently running. So whilst the manufacturer may save $0.50 per unit, each consumer suffers with decreased performance. Bah! Fight the insanity!
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
My first reaction to this topic was "Oh god here we go again" but then I sat back and thought a little.
First think of the popularity of CNR and AMR sound, ethernet, dsl and modem cards you have seen for sale. Answer none. It just never took off because noone wants to sell cheap hardware when they can make more money with a real hardware solution. At one point they litterd every intel bord I ever came across and then only appeared on cheap bargin pc motherboards. I have been hearing about soft dsl for a long time and I have never seen a soft dsl card, also all soft dsl cards support the G.light standard which no provider cares about.
Second face it, There is alot of money to be made with hardware. The 3D graphics market took the exact opposite approach to this problem. the first popular true 3d polygon game was quake. now the old dos quake ran in total software, everything from the AI to 3d graphics was done on your cpu (back then I ran it on a 486 with a p83 overdrive) and now look Nvidia took the whole graphics pipe and threw it on a chip which is totally opposite the software approach. Some people would sell there own mother for a geforce 4 if they could. Shure today the cost of CPU's have come down enough to justify the $400 tag on a GF4 Ti but take away that pipe on a chip and do it in soft. People would scream bloody murder. And sound cards are going this way too. Pretty soon we might be shelling out 200+ for a sound card with a APU (audio processing unit) that will imerse you in a whole new world of sound
And last relax people with SoC (System on Chip) design coming along nice these days I wouldent worry. There are already all in one SoC's for DSL modems and cable modems. I imagine a cheap WiFi solution is in the works as we bitch.
Hey man you don't have to be dumb to fall for a shemale! I mean look at RuPaul, she looks like a hot chick right? Well I've got news forya buddy, she's got a wang!
Special people have long socks, ride short buses, & invent witty sigs.
And let's not forget that Microsoft has a brand new way of leveraging its monopoly: Driver Signing.
..So a manufacturer announces that they're going to make a software WiFi card. Knowing that a significant portion of their market base are people running Linux, they publicize their intent to make both Windows and Linux drivers.
Now they go to Microsoft to get their driver signed. Behind closed doors, Microsoft says "Nice product! We don't approve of the Linux driver though. Make your product Windows only, or we won't sign your driver." If they refuse, then publically, Microsoft claims that the driver didn't meet Microsoft's standards of quality for a kernel driver. They both have a defensible excuse, and can smear the uncooperative company.
Now the company is faced with a business decision. Face the 95% of their customers who use Windows and tell them to "Just click okay" when Windows says "This driver isn't signed! It's really, really bad to install unsigned drivers," thus reducing their image in front of their customers. Or, don't release a Linux driver, and save face with their Windows clients.
..And it can only get worse. How long until Microsoft doesn't allow unsigned drivers to be installed in the name of reducing their tech support costs?
In softmodems the hardware is little more and A/D and D/A converters - the software driver needs to perform complex signal processing algorithms. The resources required for developing and testing these algorithms are probably beyond the capabilities of open source developers.
I don't think a soft WiFi card will continously receive bits and let the software do everthinng else - the hardware should still be capable of decoding packets, matching the MAC address and detecting CRC errors. The software will need to do the encryption/decryption and the algorithms for network detection and handshake, transmission speed power control and perhaps some other housekeeping stuff. This doesn't sound so bad.
Actually, in a card without firmware there may be less places for sneaky undocumented features than in a card that simply exposes the bare hardware capabilities to the host.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
"A Microsoft representative was
unaware of any additional details
about what was to be presented."
With the problems I have getting any support from their pay support for winmodem compatibility, this is such a telling statement.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
why? Because people don't have the time nor intelligence required to have the in-depth understanding of every product they buy. So instead they go for the rubbish the marketers spout forth. Saying capitalism doesn't work doesn't make you a communist...
Oh god, don't do this, we'll have NIC's next, its just flushing everything down the toilet, why buy a fast computer then? Is it just to make all those other components you shelled out your hard-earned cash for go faster? No, we want independance, that goes for everything, the more you rely on something, the more you get stuck to a platform or way of doing things, this is BAAAAD!
Anything from Microsoft is a plot against the universe. Get over yourselves. This initiative is about one thing and and one thing only: selling more stuff. Just as it was with WinModems. Despite what one poster believes, a difference of a mere $25 to deliver a feature is hugely compelling to PC vendors. This significantly lowers the price point for a laptop with built-in WiFi. To call this an undue burden on the CPU is ridiculous. The average user simply comes nowhere near making full use of what a GHz+ CPU is capable of providing. What they do know is that the new $1200 laptop they just bought has a hell of a lot more nifty toys built-in than the one they paid the same price for a few years back. More discriminating users will continue to have the option of buying systems using full hardwareimplementations for peripherals. They may pay more but then they're getting more, even with a CPU of identical performance. But they'll benefit from the existence of the performance draining soft-devices just the same. The expanded market thus created will lead to lower prices for items like access points and increased market for WiFi ISPs like BOINGO and Joltage leading to more access points for us frequent travelers. Three years ago at IDF there was an Intel guy who proposed going the same route for DSL adapters and cable modems. The rise of home networking and inexpensive routers made this a non-starter. Te MS initiative is driven by the same intent to stimulate market growth by reducing the cost of entry. Going the opposite direction, offloading functions from the CPU, will continue to make sense in the correct applications. Gaming is one of the few mainstream apps that truly uses every bit of power offered. Thus chips like the GeForce and Radeon series are extremely appropriate uses for supplemental processing in a PC. Likewise gamers will spend the extra money for full hardware implementations of peripherals to further free up the CPU for those things only it can do. Sure, there'll be a lot of low end systems that suck for Quake X because the CPU is also doing the job of several hundred bucks worth of hardware. (Consider that Intel's horrible embedded graphics core is so common on corporate desktops that Intel technically is a major player in graphics as measured by market share.) Just smile and remember that their contribution to the mass market is lowering the overall cost for your own systems.
Actually one needs to ask what do chipmakers
think about the conversion of their
"bread and butter" to software? Kind of leaves them out in the cold.
The difference between WinModems and WinWiFi would be that Linux is much more popular now than it was when WinModems were relevant. If the good hardware manufacturers went WinWiFi, they could probably be convinced to allow LinWiFi drivers. I can't imagine Lucent (who actually offers LTwinmodem Linux drivers now) not doing that, for example.
I think Lucent almost gets it. Other companies I'm not so sure of. Make sure to vote with your wallet, manufacturers have more incentive to listen now than they ever did.
Oh, and for all that people whine about hardware not being supported in Linux, I actually have hardware that works under Linux but is completely unusable in Windows 2000. Eat it.
RuPaul is Dennis Rodman in drag... hot, I think not.. enjoy your shemales.
No it doesn't. Keep in mind that the primary drivers behind softmodems were companies such as Motorola and Rockwell (now known as Conexent). THey knew exactly what they were doing, which was boosting the low end market for certain parts that remained in the soft device. The market for full implementations continued to do as well or better while the overall market grew a good deal.
Plus these same companies reaped the benefits when a portion of those systems were upgraded to better modems!
I dont see any problem with this in theory. After all, most winmodems are now covered by their linmodem driver counter-parts.
The problem, however, lies in the problem that manufacturers may be forced into 'doing what microsoft say' as it were, and work with microsoft to make it pretty much microsoft-specific. The same happened with winmodems.
From the hardware side, it certainly is a lot cheaper to let the drivers do all the hard work. As long as the manufacturers are willing to work with the linux developers as well, then there wont be a problem in making drivers that work without ugly hacks.
Where I live, buying a new lower-end pc sets you back the equivalent of 2 months average salary. A hardware modem costs on average 5 to 6 times as much as a winmodem.
Consequentially, it's winmodems that have people round here online in troves. I currently have both kinds of modems, having been forced out of linux's charm to buy a hardware modem, but most people are not like that; with most people, getting online and being a netizen is a priority overriding hardware design ethics and operating system chauvinism.
If wifi ever takes hold in this country, it will only be if they're cheap; that can only be helped if there's a software layer somewhere in there saving you some moolah.
Soaking up CPU cycles? C'mon. Even in a power-user thick forum such as this one, how many people utilise their cycles beyond 10 or 20% over time? Distributed.net and SETI@home don't count, mind you.
Seems to me the only question here is whether we will go through the same heartache we did with winmodems, what with closed chipset specs and chipset makers digging their heels in not to release such information. This seems to me to mainly be an issue of profit margins: what makes more money, hardware solutions or their corresponding software emulations?
Generally, a more expensive product is more likely to carry a larger profit margin for many reasons. The higher complexity of the product acts as a kind of barrier to entry into the market segment freeing up the supplier to play a bit with the price, and there are always economies of scale, even at this level.
In other words, the per-unit profit is likely to be higher for hardware solutions. Now the question has become one of pure demand and supply; are the incremental profits from a hardware solution greater than the incremental volume generated from a software solution?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
WinBoss - cannot work on anything but Microsoft Windows.
This is just a version of Apple's Software Basestation. The computer acts as an access point, and you have to leave it on and connected.
It may be useful in some situations, but as far as cost, they're obviously not adding the price of a whole other computer to the comparison. You can use an existing system, but you don't want to use a user system that might be shut down or rebooted, and if you want to put the burden on your servers, well, they're probably not in a good location for radio signal broadcasting.
One possible outcome of this is a fork in the wireless data protocols if the "real" protocols are too expensive (patents etc) or too difficult to implement. I do not find it hard to imagine a scenario where somebody says "screw it" and writes a lightweight packet radio implementation using just enough of the hardware to get by and inventing a protocol with real security (none of this WEP or 802.11x crap). Add an instant D.I.Y. gateway (mini PC with OS of your choice) and voila.
Of course, that assumes that getting enough info to talk to the DSP etc is possible. I guess the far more likely outcome would just be more pain and hurt for non-M$ folks (but that's what M$'s objective is anyway!). Sigh.
Windows XP already downloads new runtime firmware to my wavelan card... I discovered this because it broke my old base station that didn't support link layer fragmentation with WEP enabled. I had to update the firmware on the base station to get it to work again after installing XP.
And it's much faster than any of the internal winmodems and hardware modems I've used in the past.
I also have that silly String Ray junk. I feel for you man. I finally switched to cable.
Cable modem connected via Ethernet is very nice.
I personally consider winmodems to be very annoying, even with Windows. When I bought my most recent PC, it had a winmodem as part of the package, but I used an external modem instead and ignored the winmodem - it's comforting seeing the modem lights and knowing I can reset the modem any time I want.
Even with the low cost of winmodems, there have always been plenty of external modems available.. I'm sure the same will apply with WiFi
This is actually a good thing for those wanting to experiment. Think about being able to alter the software driving these things. What might be done? Might alternate coding schemes be used? How about your own encryption method?
The only sensible tidbit of information in this entire article, and me without moderator points :-( :-)
Note that in the article, Intel says that doing the equivalent of winmodems for wireless is too expensive computationally. If they say it, I believe it
But if you didn't burden the CPU with modem and other device functionality, you would have to buy a new PC less often, so I doubt that you save money with winmodems in the long run.
Me. My Pentium/166 MHz runs all modern applications just fine, but running five or six large programs simultaneously does utilise more than 20% CPU.
A couple of thoughts here:
This is out of my area of expertise, but what would stop the major hardware vendors from getting together and creating an open standard for software DSP for this? Customers could still realize the cost savings associated with handling the DSP in software, and hardware manufacturers could produce hardware that would conceivably work with any OS available for that hardware platform. Everybody wins, except Microsoft.
There's something to be said for the fact that much of the community-level WiFi stuff being done today wouldn't be available if it weren't for the easy availability of cheap Linux-based routing PC's (ie, that spare 486/66 sitting in a closet). Having switch to Windows to use the WiFi-based hardware could kill the software savings.
I'm not going to hold my breath that some of the "bravest of us" are going to reverse-engineer the new Win-Wifi hardware. How long have WinModems been around, and no one's been able to reverse-engineer them yet - not that many haven't tried.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
Heh. This reminded me of the old Timex/Sinclair's of the 80's.
There was no video controller chip.
The Z80 had to generate all the video addresses. It would run what it thought was a program full of NOPs while the generated addresses were used as an index to a character ROM.
Some technical information is at http://www.howell1964.freeserve.co.uk/ZX81/ZX_Tec
And you thought WinModems were bad!
Unless of course they're made by GNU...
I think many people seriously soured on softmodems because the earliest implementations of the concept (e.g., the US Robotics Winmodem) really sucked like a vacuum cleaner in terms of performance; this is because these early designs didn't take advantage of MMX, SSE, SSE2 and/or 3DNow! registers on modern CPU's.
Fortunately, the modern softmodem implementations from the likes of Lucent, PCTel and Conexent do use these CPU registers, so modem performance is pretty resonable. I've played with a US$15 PCI modem that uses the PCTel chipset and it ran just as well as my Zoom Telephonics 56Kx (Model 2949L) external modem.
Anyone else remember the GDI printers made by HP? Unfortunately I cant, because I have one sitting next to me (1000C). It's served me quite well in the 5 or so years since I bought it, but now that I have a home network I really wish I could TCP/IP share this thing. It also sucks to because if I do something CPU intensive while printing, the printer just comes to a hault (guess it's better than locking up the CPU, but still). These printers were hyped pretty big when they first came out, but I guess nobody really quite like them because HP stopped making these things before too long and reverted back to the regular design.
In no more than thirty words complete the sentence:
If Microsoft got into bio-engineering then....
Video Game cheats, hints a
Maybe this is just me...but WinXP no longer supports VxDs...so perhaps I'm unenlightened or mistaken in my understanding of what a VxD actually does, but I think the fact that VxD support is missing from Windows is what made so many older modems need patches to work under XP (especially in laptops). If WinModems had problems, how on earth is Microsoft going to pull this off?
"Life ain't interesting till you blow something up" --Anonymous
--Mike--
How many people utilize their cycles beyond 10 or 20% over time?
Well, checking my system right now:
load average: 1.37, 1.46, 1.17
But that's bogus, anyway. Running a software DSP in drivers isn't a batch job that can be offloaded to idle time -- it's a constant drain. Not much sense in getting the latest and greatest CPU when you're throwing a significant chunk of CPU time out the window.
For what people save on their system buy going the winmodem route, they could just buy a six-month old system and a hardware modem and have some money left over and not deal with driver issues and get the same level of performance.
May we never see th
If you do the work to reverse engineer a software driven WiFi system, you can do ANYTHING with the card, you can boost the power, provide a signal for switching on an external POWER AMPLIFIER at the appropriate times, change the modulation scheme to get stealth, do all sorts of cool tricks that would make the FBI, CIA, and NSA get a cold sweat worrying about, if put into the hands of a thinking citizenry.
With a software controled WiFi, you could potentially make an undetectable ethernet, that they couldn't tap, and couldn't block, and was really optimized for throughput.
This could be very cool for us, and very bad for those that wish to control us.
--Mike--
... the domain on which this thing is hosted? Djeez.
we have to find out which companies are complying and petition the hell out of the companies. write snail mail to their CTO's...
make sure you include pictures of ALL of your hardware- if they see 5000 people write in with 30 assorted PCI cards apeice, they're gonna take notice(hopefully).
microsoft can't lock you out if the companies show you the standards on how the stuff works- also include references to other companies who've agreed to expose their "api"s... show them that you CAN take your business elsewhere.
stand up for your consumer rights, and let the companies know it'll be a big mistake.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
Hey, guess what?! We don't have to buy it!
Trolls, it must be cool to be that bored.
Soft Wi-Fi is just for access points. This has nothing to do with making winmodem-like 802.11 devices. Their idea is that if you have a few computers with wi-fi cards, you might as well use one as a bridge to the internet rather than buying a wi-fi router.
Apple hit this years ago.
You'd think that on Slashdot people would be familliar with the concept of sharing an internet connection by using a spare computer as a router. Oh that's right, this particular solution has "Microsoft" in the title, therefore it must be bad.
t'nera semordnilap
Naughty naughty...
There's the DMCA (or whatever floated to the top of the "Alphabits"TM bowl of some congressman's breakast that morning,) to slap you down with if you even try that.
Don't you know yet that YOU have no rights?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
That's microsoft's typical way of putting somethign out of business. All i gotta say is the Kernel programmers better start making modules to support them.e.g. Windows Drivers
Ok, Here is the deal, Most companies that make wireless chipsets are not stupid, Intersil even funded the drivers for the newer prism (2?, 2.5 & 3) cards. The HostAP people are even talking about taking WEP to the system processor because they can't seem to get it to operate above 40bit wep with their code. Keep in mind, that this really wont happen, because everybody uses the cheap radios in their hardware. All the linksys gear is prism2/2.5 based, same with all the other makers for hte most part. Lucent isen't dumb, and their cards are also used in access points, so there would be no way in hell that they would move stuff over to the processor.
Its really simple, microsoft is wasting money. Just watch them try and develop their own chipset now.
Why would M$ be pushing for wireless broadband?
They definitely don't make the hardware. Its definitely NOT the cost. Since when did M$ ever give a fuck about cost? If they cared about cost, the M$ tithe to PC makers would drop like a stone. A broadcast station is around $100 or less if you've got some ingenuity?
Are the revenues from their cable company (ComCast etc.) purchases not enough to keep them out of the playground?
Have they just dumped their shares in some 10/100/1000BaseT cable company and are going for revenge after the wire maker's CEO pissed off Gates?
Or is it that they didn't define the standards?
HA HA!
Look for their customers, the ones who keep taking it in the shorts, using hardware which is saddled with their drivers, to suddenly develop some incompatibility with non-M$ APs and broadcast stations. Embrace, envelop and smother. Being the 800 lb gorilla again Mr. Gates?
Kee-rist. You can smell this one coming a mile away.
I can see this in a boardroom in Redmond: "There's got to be some way to choke the life out of a 1.2GHz CPU to keep people on the upgrade treadmill."
"How about we keep it so busy trying to keep up with real-time events with our crappy OS that they have to get a monster machine just to connect to OUR APs? If we control the modems, we'll be able to wring another GB of RAM and GHz of speed to wade through our bloatware"
"There won't be a repeat of the Windows For Workgroups 3.11 this time. We'll control the NIC cards."
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I bought some wireless cards based on the prism chip, and I couldnt get the windows driver to work reliably at all. The linux ones worked perfectly though, but unfoturunatly they had to go back because of that. Kinda worrying though
While this is true. To extend the trend were pretty much all the external hardware and quite a bit of the internal are soft-hardware. i.e. winprinters, winmodems. The impact will be much greater. The consumer will will once again be on the upgrade threadmill because his 2Ghz processor now runs like a 800Mhz because of the load. Also the ties that bind will be more numerous as well as harder to break because the drivers will be closed in every sense of the word. Now why would the consumer want to take a step backward?
There's more than one way to skin an OS. One doesn't have to ban anything. One only has to become a defacto standard to have the same effective effect.
I suppose no one around here is familiar with the concept of intent?
But if you didn't burden the CPU with modem and other device functionality, you would have to buy a new PC less often, so I doubt that you save money with winmodems in the long run.
I really don't foresee that. When I replace my current PC, it will be because the CPU broke, not because I need something faster.
I have heard that the extra electronics needed for a real modem, as opposed to a winmodem, is just a few pennies.
The cost to manufacture each additional unit for the extra chips is almost nothing.
Anybody know?
As someone who spends a considerable amount of time these days hacking on WiFi card drivers, Host-based MAC is actualla a VERY good thing.
A good analogy of this is PPP. The current situation is similar to a modem manufacturer embedding PPP in the hardware, which is horribly complex and expensive to implement. It is much simpler and cheaper to let the OS provide the PPP services.
WinModems come in two flavors; host-based controller and host-based signal processing. The latter is pure evil; the hardware is nothing more than a A/D/A converter, and the host CPU has to perform all DSP functions to make it into a modem. The host-based-controllers have real hardware DSPs and whatnot, but they just tell the DSP what to do, essentially replacing an on-board processor+firmware with the driver on the host machine.
WinWiFi (which is really host-based-MAC) is neither. The WinWiFi card would become about as smart as the average ethernet card; ie it would be able to transmit and receive raw 802.11 frames, and then pass them off to the driver which then figures out what to do with them.
A good portion of the wireless cards out there already do this, and nearly all of the new ones will do this. Why? complexity and cost.
802.11 is rather complicated. The MAC must handle a complex state machine; with all sorts of little nuances. Handling transmits/receives, and their acks, association, channel hopping, and then the real doozey: encryption.
WEP sucks. Not just because it's fundamentally broken, but because it takes a bit of oomph to work with, and it's a little complex. And if this is done in hardware, you can't update it to handle newer standards.
Every single one of the 802.11 extensions to replace/augment WEP will require considerably more computation power in hardware; but in fact, most 802.11 (windows) drivers now do WEP on the host, because it has far more computational power to spare with zero additional hardware cost.
This WinWiFi initiative is nothing more than "hey, all of you guys have already written this host-based-MAC stuff (or are going to have to write it anyway) so why not just use the stuff already part of the OS? It's already been extensively tested and that way, you don't need to reinvent the wheel."
It's called shared code, and makes a lot of sense.
I've been banging my head against the wall a lot lately because of buggy firmware in WiFi cards; If they let the host OS do the work instead, these bugs wouldn't exist, because the 802.11 spec is well-documented.
And again, it's not WinWiFi, it's Host-based-MAC. It's a work-in-progress for Linux too. And it is a GoodThing(tm).
- Pizza
-- I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.
Am I the only one who see's soft-hardware as justification for the all hardware solution?
Think about it. In essense one is using hardware(CPU registers,special instruction sets) on one end and hardware (the board you bought) on the other with software as the glue (true of a lot of hardware to begin with). Now why not move the two back together and put the software back into the rom it came from?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In this case, you should be even less concerned about the cost of a new PC. You can get a 386 or even 486 PC for a few bucks on eBay, after all. ;-)
Put it this way. How much "hardware" do you think you can move to your CPU before it starts to have an impact on what you originally purchased a computer for? Not much I bet. And if the trend in more and more winhardware continues jumping off that wagon will be harder both because of availability (most will carry only these because of cost and what people have been conditioned to purchase) and cost (no pressure to reduce that because the low end is taken care of). Amazing what we'll sacrifice in the name of the 'almighty dollar'.
"Currently WiFi devices are expensive and out of reach of many. "
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Ask yourself what happens to hardware over time?
Answer it starts out expensive and early adopters buy it. As the makers perfect their process it becomes cheaper and more common in the market, the cost comes down. The middle consumer starts buying more and more of said product. Soon it reaches commodity status were anyone can buy it. Lather, rinse, repeat for any other item.
Progress as you can see works just fine without the need for soft anything.
"" Microsoft, however insists they will work just as well as the current style cards."
If true then why do we have video cards with all those "electronics"?
MS as usual is stretching the truth to their own ends.
I am an avid hardware fan, why use the processor to do such redundant tasks that are better suited for hardware to do. Let the processor do what it does best, I always go out of my way to buy hardware products because they don't load the processor down with undeeded tasks and can work with just about any operating system. This is just another ploy by Microsoft to make sure vendors hardware will ONLY work with Windows.
rm -r windows
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
...this is bad, but you all use IDE drives because SCSI's too expensive, right?
Here's why that may not be true. If it costs the manufacturer say $15/card, and they sell it to a retailer at say $30/card (50% markup), then they are making $15/card. Now, let's see what happens if they are able to reduce costs per card by an additional $5/card.
The first manufacturer to do this would have a temporary advantage. They could sell those cards to retailers at $30 still, but now they are making $20/card, a substantial increase in their profits at the volumes we are talking about. That advantage maybe lasts them a month or two until the next manufacturer does the same thing.
Now, the other manufacturer has the same margin, but in an effort to grab market share undercuts the first manufacturer. Eventually this price competition will push down the price that they can sell to retailers to whatever maintains their razor thin profits (which is probably identical to what they were before if not lower). Since the price point the cards are at now is so low already, they are unlikely to sell more cards by further dropping the prices. So now what happens is that they've modified their product lines, changed how they support and develop these cards and they aren't making anymore money than they would have in the first place.
Now, if the wireless card manufacturers could actually sell more cards if they dropped the price then their would be an advantage to them to look at software drivers. In the modem market, the price differences between winmodems and regular modems was substantial so this made more sense. At $50/card, are you really going to choose not to buy it because it's too expensive? Is it going to make a real difference to you at $30? If not then there's no incentive to invest the money in changing the technology.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Yes, great idea !!
Right up until some hacker decompiles M$ code and finds the inevitable missing stack overflow check, timing flaw, or similar logic hole.
Given the inherent homogenous nature of M$ xxx86 SoftWiFi code, add in most of SoftWiFi's protocol stack will be running in the kernel, should offer the hackers & feds the ultimate in backdoors!
Instant, nearly undetectable, untraceable, unstoppable security breach in millions of SoftWifi'd PC's.
Boy, oh, Boy.. One can only imagine the possibilities!
Just like winmodems are a defacto standard?
If someone puts out a crappy driver and that crashes Windows all the time you blame Microsoft for putting out a crappy OS that crashes.
If, on the other hand, Microsoft insists on testing to certify the driver people get on Slashdot and make up stories about how they are "leveraging their monopoly" to "crush competition". Never mind that there isn't any basis in fact.
Microsoft may supply the drivers, but they don't care. It's just more work for them, for another component they will release for free with the OS.
This sort of thing benefits Intel, not Microsoft, because it demands more of those CPU cycles Intel keeps cranking out.
Of course, now, it also benefits AMD.
--Blair
Ok what is the exact definition of "hardware"?
The part of the computer you can kick when the fucking thing just won't cooperate.
--saint
Back when @home fell under, I was without cable modem for over a week. On the 2nd day I ran out to the store and bought an "emergency modem". It was a winmodem and i didn't care because it was only temporary. This was the worst hardware i have ever seen. Trying several ISPs the highest was getting was 1.2kbytes/sec from anywhere. I know people complain about in lag in games.... but that much lag in ssh are a complete new level. Needless to say, I had a lan party and we made a trophy for our "1000 frag unreal tournament contest" using lots of old hardware. My pathetic winmodem is now on someones desk as a bragging right. It has to be the best use for a winmodem that I can think of.
I finally figured out why Intel thinks I need a Pentium 4 to "Unlock the Power of the Internet". I've quickly and effortlessly reduced my US$400 n-GHz Pentium 4 to a US$40 DSP.
I have a great idea -- we can continue this trend into other periphials. Why bother buying a costly GeForce when you can just do all of the 3d rendering on the host processor? It'll save money, and besides, modern processors are overpowered for word processing anyway. If that works well, we can implement software hard drives, too; there's a lot of firmware devoted to the simple business of positioning the head on the drive that could easily be eliminated, thus making the device cheaper.
(Pardon me while I cower in terror.)
What is the chipset used in most WiFi cards? The Prism 2/2.5.
Who makes it?
Intersil
Are there linux drivers?
Yes! With full source!
And guess what, Intersil comissioned the drivers!
Not only that, but the drivers offer support for advanced functions typically not offered on Windows based PCs (host based access point support).
So, based on past history, there seems a good chance that there will be a path to Linux support for WinWi-Fi cards.
whoops
...start jumping the gun on Microsoft with this kind of stuff? I mean, why doesn't the linux community every come forward to manufacturer's saying "we'll develop software drivers for your hardware so you can 'strip costly electronics,' that will reduce your cost...and we'll do it for free." How could Microsoft possibly respond to that?? (other than a little floundering, sputtering and "uh uh, you can't do that! It's not fair!!") It's time the linux community stopped simply defending the little piece of land we have and started trying to take the whole continent.
I have also heard that the code had to be closed because of FCC regulations. You could violate phone regulations if you directly accessed the card, and they made the (foolish) assumption that lack of source code would prevent people from messing with the card registers (they seem to have neglected the fact that lack of source code means people are *more* likely to make a mistake messing with the registers, and they have completely underestimated the chances of bugs in the code violating the FCC regulations).
WiFi - oh, you mean AirPort. And the "radio"? Come on, how much time has been spent here trying to come up with alternatives to Apple terminology?
They did invent the spec, after all.
What I find ironic is that Apple did the same thing with the "GeoPort" on the first PowerPC Macintosh models. (And I think previously on the AV models where the UART handling was done by a coprocessor.)
You think it's slow on a 1.5Ghz processor? You should see how slow it was on a 60Mhz one!
Hello,
I am a bit surprised that no one has taken a look at the reasoning behind this product.
Microsoft is fundamentally a software company. When they produce hardware it is for a reason. For example, the original Microsoft Mouse was created in order to help stimulate demand for Windows. Likewise, all the joysticks and game controllers stimulate demands for games, which, in turn, stimulate demands for the Microsoft operating systems under which they run.
One use I can see for "soft" WiFi is to reduce the cost of wireless access in laptop, Pocket PC-like devices, and the forthcoming Microsoft "Mira" Tablet PC's. The allows Microsoft to license more operating systems to the folks who will manufacture and sell them.
Of course, another possiblity is this would help slow the development and deployment of wireless devices based on non-Microsoft operations systems, which, of course, would be a Good Thing for Microsoft.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
Dang, it gets hard to read Slashdot at times - Soft Wifi is a really great idea that will work and the suckerpunch underlying all of it is the general reluctance of the open source community to innovate on things that drive the market.
Want to make Linux succeed on the desktop? Move as much cost of intelligence for devices like networking cards, USB, sound, etc. into the OS and innovate on driving that cost out of these markets. When a fully loaded desktop PC costs $100's less than a Windows PC AND contains innovations that I can't get on Windows, then you will see switching behavior.
Making Linux as good as Windows is a recipe for disaster and hubris. Make it better.
Technology Marketing is what happens when people turn their hard work over to people paid to manipulate others.
There's the DMCA (or whatever floated to the top of the "Alphabits"TM bowl of some congressman's breakast that morning,) to slap you down with if you even try that.
DMCA only applies to reverse engineering copy protection systems. Propritary network drivers are not a copy protection system, so the DMCA does not apply.
Why?
WRONG. All they have to do is add DRM to the wireless driver. Presto! you're a criminal, reverse-engineering a copy protection system.
Sheesh....
Does anyone remember when there was a court case about the following line:
"Copyright (c) 1985, m$ Corporation."
--there was actually a court case where they claimed this wasn't a copyright since the 'c' wasn't enclosed in a circle.
The point is not what is theoretically better; of course dedicated hardware is theoretically much more capable than a general CPU-based approach. What is important is the total system cost to provide an end use-case to the consumer. The fact is that leveraging the highly commoditized Wintel architecture taps an enormous economy of scale, particularly now that most x86 processors are faster than what most people need. If it meets the user's need at a total cost of ownership that is lower, then it should rightly see deployment and be worthwhile to all parties involved.
...the winmodem fiasco.
Many experienced users like me (less so at the time) got burned by stupid sales people and improperly marked packaging (some USR modems didn't say Winmodem and deceptively required a mere 486).
When I actually started trying to use Linux online I learned the expensive rubbish I'd bought was the reason for my lag in games. Still no Linux driver...
Could be extended to motherboards. No nasty surprises. You know the design of the motherboard and its shortcomings when you buy it. The community could customise it. GPL-like hardware!