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Atheros Hardware Abstraction Layer Source Is Released
chrb writes "With the recent discussion here on proprietary blobs in the Linux kernel, it's nice to see that today Sam Leffler has released the source for the Atheros Hardware Abstraction Layer under the ISC license, which is both GPL and BSD compatible. The Atheros chipset is used in many laptops, so this is another important step towards running a completely free distribution."
it won't do anything but make your dick stink.
now show me your taut little asshole and i'll stick in your stinker.
A couple weeks ago, while browsing around the library downtown, I had to take a piss. As I entered the john, Barack Obama -- the messiah himself -- came out of one of the booths. I stood at the urinal looking at him out of the corner of my eye as he washed his hands. He didn't once look at me. He was busy and in any case I was sure the secret service wouldn't even let me shake his hand.
As soon as he left I darted into the booth he'd vacated, hoping there might be a lingering smell of shit and even a seat still warm from his sturdy ass. I found not only the smell but the shit itself. He'd forgotten to flush. And what a treasure he had left behind. Three or four beautiful specimens floated in the bowl. It apparently had been a fairly dry, constipated shit, for all were fat, stiff, and ruggedly textured. The real prize was a great feast of turd -- a nine inch gastrointestinal triumph as thick as his cock -- or at least as I imagined it!
I knelt before the bowl, inhaling the rich brown fragrance and wondered if I should obey the impulse building up inside me. I'd always been a liberal democrat and had been on the Obama train since last year. Of course I'd had fantasies of meeting him, sucking his cock and balls, not to mention sucking his asshole clean, but I never imagined I would have the chance. Now, here I was, confronted with the most beautiful five-pound turd I'd ever feasted my eyes on, a sausage fit to star in any fantasy and one I knew to have been hatched from the asshole of Barack Obama, the chosen one.
Why not? I plucked it from the bowl, holding it with both hands to keep it from breaking. I lifted it to my nose. It smelled like rich, ripe limburger (horrid, but thrilling), yet had the consistency of cheddar. What is cheese anyway but milk turning to shit without the benefit of a digestive tract?
I gave it a lick and found that it tasted better then it smelled.
I hesitated no longer. I shoved the fucking thing as far into my mouth as I could get it and sucked on it like a big half nigger cock, beating my meat like a madman. I wanted to completely engulf it and bit off a large chunk, flooding my mouth with the intense, bittersweet flavor. To my delight I found that while the water in the bowl had chilled the outside of the turd, it was still warm inside. As I chewed I discovered that it was filled with hard little bits of something I soon identified as peanuts. He hadn't chewed them carefully and they'd passed through his body virtually unchanged. I ate it greedily, sending lump after peanutty lump sliding scratchily down my throat. My only regret was that Barack Obama wasn't there to see my loyalty and wash it down with his piss.
I soon reached a terrific climax. I caught my cum in the cupped palm of my hand and drank it down. Believe me, there is no more delightful combination of flavors than the hot sweetness of cum with the rich bitterness of shit. It's even better than listening to an Obama speech!
Afterwards I was sorry that I hadn't made it last longer. But then I realized that I still had a lot of fun in store for me. There was still a clutch of virile turds left in the bowl. I tenderly fished them out, rolled them into my handkerchief, and stashed them in my briefcase. In the week to come I found all kinds of ways to eat the shit without bolting it right down. Once eaten it's gone forever unless you want to filch it third hand out of your own asshole. Not an unreasonable recourse in moments of desperation or simple boredom.
I stored the turds in the refrigerator when I was not using them but within a week they were all gone. The last one I held in my mouth without chewing, letting it slowly dissolve. I had liquid shit trickling down my throat for nearly four hours. I must have had six orgasms in the process.
I often think of Barack Obama dropping solid gold out of his sweet, pink asshole every day, never knowing what joy it could, and at least once did, bring to a grateful democrat.
I have a Macbook from just over a year ago, and it uses a Atheros wireless card, and it's the biggest pain to get running in Linux. Hopefully, with the Source released, it will be easier in the future to get the wireless working on this model of computer.
It is now official. Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
The argument about BLOBs - binary loadable objects in the kernel - is not new, despite Bruce Byfield's recent report. I guess he just doesn't read the kernel list and other distro internal discussions, where this has been going on for a decade. And FSF did not "redefine" anything, they've always held that opinion.
It would be nice to draw a line at the hardware bus, with all above that Open Source and all below that whatever the hardware manufacturer likes because we don't deal with it. But BLOBs break that, because they are both above and below the bus. If we're going to handle the code, we can't really deny that there's a computer there running closed-source code. And given the degree to which wifi firmware sucks the world would be nicer if it was Free Software. Now, we just have to drive some sense into FCC, etc.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I didn't see this coming, although I have to say I don't keep up with MadWifi news anymore since they fixed 64-bit support for the AR5007 chipset...
Does this mean the sleep function will finally work as it should without draining the batteries? I have yet to see a laptop running Linux go into hibernate mode and not bleed off the batteries.
Cool. Now we need free DVD and Blu-ray decryption. That always made me feel funny when I would try Linux. Totally free OS... but if you want to watch DVDs, you download an illegal DVD decrypter. (I know there are legal ones you can pay for.)
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
I noticed this on the dd-wrt.com website a couple of months back (dated 8.28.08) We would like to announce the release of a new HAL for Atheros WLAN devices. The new HAL is the result of a collaboration between OpenWrt.org, DD-WRT and MakSat Technologies (P) Ltd. It is the first result of a common effort, and the present collaborators would like to share the product of this work. It is the intention to provide reliable and continued support for other projects using this new HAL for Atheros WLAN devices. The HAL provides a defined API to access and contol Atheros WLAN chipsets, and is an integral part for many drivers such as MadWifi. Comparing it with the HAL that's currently used by MadWifi, the most important changes are: * many known bugs have been fixed * improved noise immunity measures * added support for additional architectures, such as ARM11, MIPS64 and MIPS32r2 * enhanced support for Atheros WiSOC (Wireless System on Chip) * added support for Atheros AR7100 Home of the new HAL will be the website of the madwifi.org project, http://madwifi.org./ Future development will be coordinated here, and the bug tracking facility can be used to report bugs or file feature requests. For commercial requests please contact hal@maksat.deThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . So with the new news maybe things will really get rolling
OpenBSD likes the ISC license. deRaadt was a bit unhappy with the old arrangement.
I wonder if this could be used to help port OpenWRT over to the atheros chipset. Currently the only routers that OpenWRT (and conversely by that DD-WRT) really work well on are the broadcom chipsets. Many routers that use the Atheros chipset have been written off as impossible to port to. Maybe they could be used if this proves any insight to how they operate.
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
Totally free OS... but if you want to watch DVDs, you download an illegal DVD decrypter. (I know there are legal ones you can pay for.)
You're on a free operating system, so why are you trying to watch non-free movies when there are plenty of free movies in .ogv (Theora+Vorbis) format?
What if it is not just about running a completely free distro, but also about running a completely functional one? The WiFi hardware in my notebook fails to work for a mysterious reason and a certain transparency of hardware internals would not hurt when trying to make it work.
Ezekiel 23:20
From the article apparaently he had "an agreement with Atheros" to "access to information about their devices". Does that mean he developed the HAL with little help from the company? (And apparaently he'll have no more access since the agreement is "concluded".)
It is nice to have an open source driver released, but it is NOT nice that an individual have to go jump through hoops and write it himself to make it happen.
I was under the impression that the atheros HAL is not a binary blob in the sense the summary refers to, but a program executed on the host CPU. That makes this even better news than if it were a blob. It is debatable whether or not a system that needs to load a bunch of blobs onto its peripherals at startup is free or not(personally, I'm inclined to say it is, as long as the mechanisms for loading the firmware and interacting with the peripheral are open and the firmware is freely redistributable); but a system with a big binary lump running in kernel space definitely isn't.
It is very encouraging to see progress towards removing one of the most common causes of tainted kernels(probably second only to video card drivers); but it isn't really related to the blob question.
Can someone please explain to me what the advantage (presumably to the hw manufacturer) there is by having binary loadable code on the computer? Why not just store it on the hardware? Is the h/w somehow cheaper to manufacture because this is done? I really don't see how that could be.. the things have flash memory already.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
What's the ICS license? I think someone may have got their acronyms mixed up... of course, that person may be me.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
I really wish people would stop repeating this myth that the UK (and Europe) are free of software patents. There many, many software patents here - you just have to write the patent in a certain way that gets around the very weak restrictions. See http://eupat.ffii.org/patents/samples/index.en.html for sample of these patents with summaries, from an anti-patent group.
I just wanted to say thanks for creating and supporting such a great product. I've been buying and recommending Atheros based wifi cards for years (for both Windows and Linux applications) specifically because of your fantastic support of open systems. They are rock solid and fast.
Kudos!
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
downward spiral. been looking for! Of the GNAA I national gay nigger be treated by your in eternity...Romeo deliver. Some of 200 running NT FreeBSD at about 80 the channel to sign about half of the they are Come walk up to a play declined in market is wiped off and don't want to ffel since we made the Said. 'Screaming About outside All major marketing become like they so that you don't for membership. Though, I have to real problems
As for existing installs, can it be used as a drop-in replacement for an existing blob hal?
This should have come a lot earlier, not when it is marked legacy.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Sam deserves a huge round of applause for all the work he has put in to wireless drivers and support. The long standing criticism of his work, that it was released as a BLOB, was Atheros' choice, not his. Sam stopped direct involvement in Linux drivers a while back, but continued to release BLOBs for many platforms. His release of the HAL source was accompanied by the announcement that his HAL was no longer the reference. Thanks a Whole Lot, Sam, you sure took a lot of grief that wasn't rightfully yours.
In the last couple of years,the Madwifi team undertook the initiative to negotiate opening the HAL source. Not long after the Madwifi team took up the task, a rework of the old BSD RE effort was used as a legal jimmy and Atheros agreed to accept that work without legal assault, This became the Ath5k driver. Atheros then did something remarkable, and embraced opening the source to several of it's chip lines. They have hired staff, released the 5112 HAL. Madwifi could no longer be written off as a closed source driver, but no one has made an official release of madwifi with the released HAL, so the label remains valid. Recently Atheros has tweaked their NDA rules to permit the HAL certified folks to work on the open drivers, so progress is apace.
The entire wireless community owes Sam and the old madwifi hands, like Mike Renzmann a world of thanks, and the new HAL coders like Nick Kossifidis and Felix Fietkau all the help one can.
As a user I found open source to be a lot more hassle free than closed source. Usually it open source is supported better and longer. I can download everything from Debian mirrors. When I used Nvidia I always had to do some additional steps.
Because those movies are shit?
Linux was shit once, even compared to Windows NT.
Not to mention some of the movies on this site are in formats that are not "free and open" like Linux.
The page I linked contained a link to a page titled Rederiving our movies to Ogg Theora and more.
Note that atheros already release a "legacy" HAL 2 months ago : http://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=122246623707038&w=2
If your are like me and you don't want to buy another card because you are broke and you like to distro hop, then this is a great thing! I do get tired of re-installing M/A and the like just to try it out.
Is this really a good idea? It seems that Atheros is just dumping this source out onto the web saying "Fix it, we don't want to spend any more of our time on this"
I really hope the programmers behind KisMAC are reading this thread.
We MacBook users are really hoping that we can run injections and other advanced features using our built-in network cards now. Until now, all our packets were trash and we couldn't work out the SSID.
Sad days they have been, but now we have reason to be optimistic!
Another really good idea would be changing the name. Every time I hear "atheros", I think of atheos, beos, skyos, and then, eventually, remember it's some obscure wifi driver.