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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!"
Plus, with the flexibility comes the idea that it's ok to write in more and more features... software bloat is the result.
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."
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?
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?
Eh? I know a lot of people with wi-fi setups. Not one of them is a non-tech person. Wi-fi is still so new that only the techies get into it. And believe me, they realize the limitations of the technology. And if you're accessing the Internet over a DSL or cable modem, that 5 meg wireless link is plenty good enough.
--Be human.
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"
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.
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.
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
Ever since that fiasco, i started actually looking at what i was buying, though it seems to be impossible to get a non win PCI modem these days.
Just as well we have the good ole external DSL modem now :-)
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
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.
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?
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--