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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."
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
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'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 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.
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
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
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.
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.
In no more than thirty words complete the sentence:
If Microsoft got into bio-engineering then....
Video Game cheats, hints a
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.
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.
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.