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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!"
... Now Tom's Hardware can benchmark AMD's running WiFi.
"Derp de derp."
Plus, with the flexibility comes the idea that it's ok to write in more and more features... software bloat is the result.
What's next? Software underwares to cut costs? Geez.
:)
Yeah, this new WinUnderwear requires that you open all of the Windows in your house in order for them to operate.
qslack.com
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?
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?
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?
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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've got a Diamond Supra 56k winmodem laying around here..
it's performance is... well, crappy.
300ms pings and 3.5KB/s transfer rates != good
and before you say 'well, that's your phonelines'
a USR sportster external manages 150Ms pings and 5KB/s+ transfer rates plugged into the same socket.
both are fairly moot now, thanks to my 'wonderful' software based Alcatel SpeedtouchUSB (didn't have much choice there, they wanted a higher monthy fee for an ethernet connected DSL package.. and they weren't doing 'we provide the line, you provide the hardware' at the time)
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.
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?
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
one of the PCI ones?
the Sportster just totally outclasses the damn thing.
Currently WiFi devices are expensive and out of reach of many.
And it's great. Because the current generation of the protocol (802.11b, for example) can neither scale in a large network nor survive the high density of users with physically intersecting separate networks, and even without physical saturation of the bandwidth users will step on each other's toes. Another problem will be the possibility for buggy drivers to cause absolutely intolerable interference, ruining the network for everyone in a 300ft range from a lamer.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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
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.
the really sad part is, the efficient architecture/OS combinations get trampled underfoot by the sheer momentum of the x86/windows combination :(
(by architecture, I'm referring to the Amiga/BeBox/PowerPC is slipping somewhat.. etc)
a 1Ghz PowerPC G4 running something resembling AmigaOS would be a sight to behold...
Sorry, but Joe Sixpack wants to share his broadband connection across multiple computers. Home LANs are huge business these days. WiFi is a small segment of that because its too expensive for Joe Sixpack..However, these cards will be much cheaper, that's the whole point. They will be dirt cheap and a lot more convienent for Joe than plugging all the computers into the "linksys router thingy" he bought at CompUSA for $50. These will get made, and they will sell. Believe it.
apparently a couple of companies are already making 'soft' network cards :/
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
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 $30 for comparison.
So as demand increases, quantities of scale continue to increase, we can expect the cost for those same cards to come down. It's unlikely that WiFi cards will be able to press much further down in price even with using software drivers.
Another thing to keep in mind is that most of the wireless manufacturers tend to save costs by reducing redundancy in their wireless products. If you use a Lucent AP-1000 access point, it runs on the same cards that you'd put in your laptop. I have yet to see a wireless adapater for a desktop that wasn't, in reality, a PCMCIA slot with a wireless card. It's a big cost savings to them to only have to manufacture one set of devices to fill their needs in laptops, PC's, and access points. Trying to do software drivers would totally screw up these possibilities.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Am I not the only thinking about the bountiful hacking possibilities of a DSP controlled radio transciever card? Of course that assumes the card APIs are reverse enginnered (or pigs fly and the specs are published).
Anm
Conexant (formerly Rockwell-and one of the biggest winmodem makers) just released a lot of their drivers for linux with half-source/half-binary drivers for Mandrake and Redhat. (thanks to the hard work of Marc Boucher)
http://www.mbsi.ca/cnxtlindrv/index.html
The whole Winmodem thing isn't all about Microsoft evil, by the way, its about patents (that should be your second guess for sources of evil after M$ 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!)
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
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.
I had a Hayes 33.6K (actually, I think I've got it on a shelf somewhere still) that performed well, probably better than the Supra at least, and here's the killer. DIALING OUT with the Supra would stall the entire system for about a second, and I'm not talking a little machine here, I'm talking Coppermine P3 with a couple of hundred megs of ram... for 'in use' performance, different amounts (and frequencies) of line noise probably affect different brands of modem differently tho'
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 $100 I could have bought it a month or two earlier, plus it would make it easier to convince the IT folks at the office to shell out for a test base and a few cards to do a field test.
Now, we are always wary of Big Bad Microsoft getting their hands on anything, but dammit, this standard is already open, and non Microsoft entities are huge players. Apple bases all their wireless networking on the same standard! Making a cheap, reliable windows-only wireless card does not affect Apple since they are a niche shop. It does not affect the open source folks since there will always be a full hardware solution, just like we have always had real modems sold alongside winmodems. And there is always an enterprising soul that wants to figure out how to make a winmodem work under Linux, so let's be honest, I know theres a few people out there eager as hell to give it a try
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Did you remember the TI Win/4 printer? It works only with w95, eating the 5% of CPU time while idle.
The genicom.com, who bought TI printers line, wrote:
<CITE>
There is not and will not be a Win/4 driver for Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows 98, or any other operating system.
Customers requiring operation on these platforms are advised to purchase a more versatile printer.
</CITE>
Alas, this stuff wasn't reported on the Win/4 box...
Who has time enough to develope a linux driver for it can raise a lot of money buying them for 5$ 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.
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.
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.
It cracks me up more when people buy things reputed for high stability and then overclock the crap out of them and BITCH because it's become unstable.
you know, the "I only buy Intel" "OOH, P4 1.6A that'll clock up to 2.5GHZ!" crowd.
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.
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.
Get over yourself, lad. The PC market is vastly larger than that segment that interests you. Does the existence of tens of millions of Intel 810 -based business desktops somehow force you to use that chipset? I don't think so.
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.
If you're in the U.S., try Earthlink. They provide an external ethernet hub-style DSL modem -- standard. (Verify this with them for your area; I can't say it's the same everywhere.)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
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?"
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.
In no more than thirty words complete the sentence:
If Microsoft got into bio-engineering then....
Video Game cheats, hints a
--Mike--
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--
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.
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 can't get cable here (they won't come up the 400 metres from the road, I'm in a fairly rural area)
:)
I've got the speedtouch hanging off a dedicated firewall box tho', so it's not like it's eating the cpu time of a machine I'm actually using for anything
I'm not in the US, I'm in England (British Telecom Openworld DSL)
:(
:)
yay
I'm moving to Arizona sometime this year hopefully, at which point I'll give earthlink a look
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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
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.
The guy is brilliant.
Not brilliant. The guy is no Einstein, Newton, or Hawking. Not even close.
But smart, yes. Ruthless, sure. Willing to break laws in pursuit of the almighty dollar, we know this from court convictions of his company.
But let's not forget that Bill was also born rich (into a millionaire family), got his initial monopoly via Mama (who was on the Board for IBM at the time), and also happened to be very, very lucky.
But not brilliant. To say such demeans the word.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
whoops
Many things are "false economies" if you ignore who iss actually bearing the cost. For example, Microsoft has no motive to try to reuce code bloat in Office-- because slimming down the code costs them money-- the savings get passed on to the consumer who doesn't have to buy a bgger hard drive.
Similarly, if a PC vendor can save a little money by crippling their "Wifi" card, few prospective buyers will notice anything but the reduced cost or 0.1 Ghz adantage the model has is comaprison to a competitor's offering.
Winmodems offer a false economy-- but they cost one third of a external serial moddem or haalf of a UART incorporating ISA modem. This price advantage has not led buyers to shun these devices-- but rather, the opposite.
If I avoided spending money based on my disagreement with the philosophies of the owners of the companies, I'd be living in a cave eating worms >:(
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).
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?
I have the same kind of results here. I have a Pentium 166 with a generic 28.8K modem and a Pentium III running 1GHZ with a winmodem 56K. I use the Pentium 166 machine with the controllered modem for most of my web browsing and downloads because it is much faster. I can't blame it on the phone line. The 56K winmodem usualy connects at a much faster buad rate giving a false sence of speed, but the gain and more is lost in the latency and file transfer rate. I'm about to junk the 56K modem and get a real modem with a controller. As a trade-off, the 1GHZ machine does the annimations much quicker, but I usualy avoid the sites with lots of annimation as I am looking for content, not bright flashing pretty colors.
The truth shall set you free!