The FSF decided to investigate this AR9271 part. I'm not sure why.
The AR7010+AR9280 NICs are dual-band. There's AR7010+AR9283 NICs that are 2x2 2.4ghz only. The AR7010+AR9287 NICs are also 2x2 2.4GHz only but support a few newer things (like short-GI in 20MHz mode, and generally better behaviour all around.)
Hopefully the FSF certifies the AR7010 based firmware devices too. But, they've chosen this one and I'm glad they saw it through.
I don't know if there's a hardware list that shows the dual-band ath9k_htc hardware. But it's out there, somewhere.
The people that want to do dirty hacks, like mesh or TDMA offload on the USB NIC.
Or even improved hostap support.
Or an experimental platform for ${THING_YOU_HAVENT_THOUGHT_OF_YET}.
Yes, you can buy cheaper NICs. Same as buying cheaper anything. But here's a USB NIC with a well-understood wifi part (AR9285 on-die) and now open firmware with open tools to fiddle with the thing. If the FSF and manufacturers manage to ship a million units, great. I'm happy just knowing that people are doing interesting stuff with it. Doubly so if I haven't thought of it yet. Triply so if it's cool and turns out to be transferrable to the other Atheros wifi hardware out there.
The wifi part of the hardware does. One of the reasons we opened up the firmware was to let people at it to make it better at supporting master mode.
The NIC has a small embedded CPU to act as a PCIeUSB gateway and a small amount of RAM to run code and buffer frames. The problem with master mode is the amount of RAM that you need for each associated station. So there's been discussion about moving some of the stuff done in the NIC CPU (transmit aggregation, rate control) into the host, so the NIC itself doesn't need to store (that much|any) per-station state.
.. except, how will it play out if they decide to infringe on your patents? You can't attack them then; suddenly you fall afoul of their "free" patents and now you're screwed.
That's a common way of doing it in the US. I don't agree with it; it's basically saying "Hey your needs trump the needs of the social group", but.. that's very American.
PCBSD is getting there. I still run FreeBSD-9 and FreeBSD-HEAD on laptops. But I've used PCBSD on netbooks and laptops - when the hardware support is there, it's actually rather pleasant.
The only hardware support issues have been video and wifi. I can fix the latter, I can't fix the former.:)
It's 2013. You have two lesbian (or bi) parents. They want a child. A male comes along and donates sperm. THe child has two parents - the two female, married parents. They decide to split. What's the biological fathers responsibility?
For someone who claims to be progressive you're still proscribing mother/father roles here. What if the male really _is_ a donor and just there for reproduction, and there really _is_ two parents that then split up?
Seriously? You think the BSOD thing is because of the CPU architecture, versus the operating system architecture?
Please provide more information. I think you're getting it wrong here.
The alpha architecture was nice, but it was expensive, niche and single-vendor. It had floating point performance the smoked the i387/i487 of the day. It had 64 bit internal bits far before the PC architecture was 64 bits. But none of those prevent BSOD.
BSOD is because of poor driver writing, poor system architecture and crappy hardware quality. Not because of the CPU architecture.
You won't get significant throughput with the first generation kit if you deviate from the ideal behaviour.
Going through a wall counts as that.
Look at the encoding for 11ac MCS8 and MCS9. It's an insantly high QAM (256) up there. The slightest distortion from the ideal is going to mess up that constellation and it'll drop back down to 11n style encoding.
No, it's because of "fuck you, we may need to add positive and negative time_t values together to get a result, and boy do we not want things to be promoted to the wrong type over time."
Because it's 2012 and this is the internet. I shouldn't have to visit a public library to access data that by definition should've been publicly available in the first place.
And the argument that indexing the papers is kind of silly. It's 2012, there's a large variety of indexing software out there. It wouldn't be too difficult to grab that public data and create a public index and donation funded website (like say, wikipedia) that provided access to that information.
There's a simpler solution - stop buying access points with inbuilt (ie, crappy) gain antennas.
Some have _PCB printed_ antennas that are just plain crap at everything.
Spend a little more money, buy something 2x2 or 3x3 with external antennas worth a damn, and you'll find your reach and throughput drastically increasing.
The number of houses I've been in lately with crappy wifi due to their APs having onboard antennas is just plain ridiculous.
The inter-frame spacing is mostly the same. It's tiny compared to contention window handling and actual frame duration. It's not really the main reason for drastic slowdowns in mixed networks.
The main issue in mixed networks is:
* having to enable RTS and CTS-to-self frame protection to interoperate with legacy stations that don't understand MCS rates, and * just sheer length of non-aggregate frames (ie, 11abg frames, and 11n stations that aren't doing aggregation - eg if they're doing voice data that isn't being aggregated into A-MPDU or A-MSDU for whatever broken reason they have.)
The other major thing is that most consumer grade APs don't do fair scheduling very well, so when you have multiple stations all doing traffic, they can end up with an uneven balance of traffic, causing drastic reductions in throughput. I won't go into the handwave details unless people care; I've written about it before.
Now, _I_ get ~ 170mbit TCP throughput on FreeBSD -> FreeBSD atheros 11n devices (AR9280 2x2, 5GHz) _WITH_ RTS/CTS and legacy interoperability enabled. Things just tend to slow down when multiple stations show up.
We in the tech industry realise that a significant amount of what is new is actually old, just faster and shinier. A lot of the concepts that people are exploring now were explored in the 1970's, then forgotten during the microcomputer revolution when the computing world fell inward, away from expensive networked multiprocessor machines with lots of shiny IO and inward into stand-alone, single-CPU devices with very cheap IO. It's now mass produced, really fast, very well connected.. but a lot of the concepts aren't new.
Software and hardware is still failing, even today. Sheesh, at the risk of sounding inflammatory - anyone in the tech world would NOT make the argument that software and hardware is getting more reliable.
A photograph of the device gives more than just background about the device. It gives you a context, it gives you a setting. It gives you a hint about the state of the world at the time the device was introduced.
Slashdot Mirror
The FSF decided to investigate this AR9271 part. I'm not sure why.
The AR7010+AR9280 NICs are dual-band. There's AR7010+AR9283 NICs that are 2x2 2.4ghz only. The AR7010+AR9287 NICs are also 2x2 2.4GHz only but support a few newer things (like short-GI in 20MHz mode, and generally better behaviour all around.)
Hopefully the FSF certifies the AR7010 based firmware devices too. But, they've chosen this one and I'm glad they saw it through.
I don't know if there's a hardware list that shows the dual-band ath9k_htc hardware. But it's out there, somewhere.
The people that want to do dirty hacks, like mesh or TDMA offload on the USB NIC.
Or even improved hostap support.
Or an experimental platform for ${THING_YOU_HAVENT_THOUGHT_OF_YET}.
Yes, you can buy cheaper NICs. Same as buying cheaper anything. But here's a USB NIC with a well-understood wifi part (AR9285 on-die) and now open firmware with open tools to fiddle with the thing. If the FSF and manufacturers manage to ship a million units, great. I'm happy just knowing that people are doing interesting stuff with it. Doubly so if I haven't thought of it yet. Triply so if it's cool and turns out to be transferrable to the other Atheros wifi hardware out there.
The wifi part of the hardware does. One of the reasons we opened up the firmware was to let people at it to make it better at supporting master mode.
The NIC has a small embedded CPU to act as a PCIeUSB gateway and a small amount of RAM to run code and buffer frames. The problem with master mode is the amount of RAM that you need for each associated station. So there's been discussion about moving some of the stuff done in the NIC CPU (transmit aggregation, rate control) into the host, so the NIC itself doesn't need to store (that much|any) per-station state.
The underlying wifi parts are the same as the PCI(e) chips of that era; the same basic features are supported.
Now that the firmware source is open and the UART wiring instructions are public, there's enough basic stuff there to figure it out.
We're digging up instructions for JTAG debugging.
Have you tried PC-BSD?
There were plenty of games that installed their own loaders in order to bypass the intentionally-slow 1541 drive interface.
They could get it up to what, ~38400 reliably? Maybe faster? I forget. It was pretty zippy for the time.
.. except, how will it play out if they decide to infringe on your patents? You can't attack them then; suddenly you fall afoul of their "free" patents and now you're screwed.
That's a common way of doing it in the US. I don't agree with it; it's basically saying "Hey your needs trump the needs of the social group", but .. that's very American.
.. because they're making the cells, not using the cells.
PCBSD is getting there. I still run FreeBSD-9 and FreeBSD-HEAD on laptops. But I've used PCBSD on netbooks and laptops - when the hardware support is there, it's actually rather pleasant.
The only hardware support issues have been video and wifi. I can fix the latter, I can't fix the former. :)
It's 2013. You have two lesbian (or bi) parents. They want a child. A male comes along and donates sperm. THe child has two parents - the two female, married parents. They decide to split. What's the biological fathers responsibility?
For someone who claims to be progressive you're still proscribing mother/father roles here. What if the male really _is_ a donor and just there for reproduction, and there really _is_ two parents that then split up?
Seriously? You think the BSOD thing is because of the CPU architecture, versus the operating system architecture?
Please provide more information. I think you're getting it wrong here.
The alpha architecture was nice, but it was expensive, niche and single-vendor. It had floating point performance the smoked the i387/i487 of the day. It had 64 bit internal bits far before the PC architecture was 64 bits. But none of those prevent BSOD.
BSOD is because of poor driver writing, poor system architecture and crappy hardware quality. Not because of the CPU architecture.
.. sounds like a question for a lawyer. Is that particular oath legally binding?
So:
* 2ghz goes further through objects
* 5ghz is cleaner, there's more of it out there, but it gets attenuated strongly by walls and such.
For home deployments (ie, one AP, lots of rooms) then you likely want 2GHz.
For deployments where you have money (ie one AP per room then you want 5GHz, but with the power cranked down on each AP.
You won't get significant throughput with the first generation kit if you deviate from the ideal behaviour.
Going through a wall counts as that.
Look at the encoding for 11ac MCS8 and MCS9. It's an insantly high QAM (256) up there. The slightest distortion from the ideal is going to mess up that constellation and it'll drop back down to 11n style encoding.
No, it's because of "fuck you, we may need to add positive and negative time_t values together to get a result, and boy do we not want things to be promoted to the wrong type over time."
Because it's 2012 and this is the internet. I shouldn't have to visit a public library to access data that by definition should've been publicly available in the first place.
And the argument that indexing the papers is kind of silly. It's 2012, there's a large variety of indexing software out there. It wouldn't be too difficult to grab that public data and create a public index and donation funded website (like say, wikipedia) that provided access to that information.
Adrian
Know what you should do?
Submit a new petition, demanding a more balanced and thorough response, from someone who isn't in the reporting chain for the TSA.
Just keep submitting petitions; engage online and offline groups to participate. Get your 100,000 signatures.
That's how you get noticed. Sheesh, stopping after one bad response.
3) If it's successful, google, microsoft and apple will want to be paid per handset for any shipping ubuntu, firefox or webos shipping phones.
Competition is great. Especially when you get paid for it.
There's a simpler solution - stop buying access points with inbuilt (ie, crappy) gain antennas.
Some have _PCB printed_ antennas that are just plain crap at everything.
Spend a little more money, buy something 2x2 or 3x3 with external antennas worth a damn, and you'll find your reach and throughput drastically increasing.
The number of houses I've been in lately with crappy wifi due to their APs having onboard antennas is just plain ridiculous.
The inter-frame spacing is mostly the same. It's tiny compared to contention window handling and actual frame duration. It's not really the main reason for drastic slowdowns in mixed networks.
The main issue in mixed networks is:
* having to enable RTS and CTS-to-self frame protection to interoperate with legacy stations that don't understand MCS rates, and
* just sheer length of non-aggregate frames (ie, 11abg frames, and 11n stations that aren't doing aggregation - eg if they're doing voice data that isn't being aggregated into A-MPDU or A-MSDU for whatever broken reason they have.)
The other major thing is that most consumer grade APs don't do fair scheduling very well, so when you have multiple stations all doing traffic, they can end up with an uneven balance of traffic, causing drastic reductions in throughput. I won't go into the handwave details unless people care; I've written about it before.
Now, _I_ get ~ 170mbit TCP throughput on FreeBSD -> FreeBSD atheros 11n devices (AR9280 2x2, 5GHz) _WITH_ RTS/CTS and legacy interoperability enabled. Things just tend to slow down when multiple stations show up.
.. FreeBSD person here.
Which ports in question? I was under the impression that PHP/apache ports are kept up to date in the ports tree.
Erm. Let me rephrase that.
We in the tech industry realise that a significant amount of what is new is actually old, just faster and shinier. A lot of the concepts that people are exploring now were explored in the 1970's, then forgotten during the microcomputer revolution when the computing world fell inward, away from expensive networked multiprocessor machines with lots of shiny IO and inward into stand-alone, single-CPU devices with very cheap IO. It's now mass produced, really fast, very well connected.. but a lot of the concepts aren't new.
Software and hardware is still failing, even today. Sheesh, at the risk of sounding inflammatory - anyone in the tech world would NOT make the argument that software and hardware is getting more reliable.
A photograph of the device gives more than just background about the device. It gives you a context, it gives you a setting. It gives you a hint about the state of the world at the time the device was introduced.
You're obviously not an archeologist.