Seriously, I'm a nerd so this doesn't count... but isn't the first thing you do with a new piece of hardware is throw away the CD and download the current drivers off the net?
A friend once tried that with his Netgear Gigabit Ethernet card on XP.... it didn't work too well for him. It turns out that XP's built in ethernet drivers got in a fight with the hardware and kept trying to take down the OS.
He had no floppy drive in the computer nor was there a CD burner to be found for us to transfer the files to his computer. This was before the days of ubiquitous USB flash drives and the motherboard had no onboard ethernet, either, so we ended up commandeering an old-school MP3 player (you know... the kind the size of the iPhone with 64 MB storage) and converting it to mobile-disk-drive duty to save the day.
Well, first off, critical != meltdown. It is *good* that a reactor can go critical, that means that it is "on". "Critical" indicates that each fission reaction is creating 1 (or more) other fission reactions, meaning that the fission is self sustaining.
What happened at Chernobyl (in a nutshell) was that the presence of steam in their water-regulated reactors increased the reaction rate. (This is called a "Void coefficient" greater than 1.) You can see where this leads: more steam --> more reactions --> more heat --> more steam (from boiling the water). That is what caused the meltdown, not the fact that the reactor (like every other power-operating reactor) "went critical".
Modern nuclear reactors, on the other hand, have a Void coefficient less than 1. This means that the presence of steam (or other bubbles) in the reactor actually decreases the reaction rate, breaking the cycle above that led to the catastrophic meltdown at Chernobyl.
Three Mile Island, on the other hand, involved craploads of human error. Thankfully, the standard safety procedures down the line still prevented anyone from being harmed by the incident. Yes, it sucked, and was a massive wake-up-call to increase safety measures due to the "close-call" factor, but even the safety measures already implemented were sufficient to prevent a catastrophe.
Nuclear power isn't perfect--after all, there's the whole issue of what to do with the radioactive wastes--but it is well ahead of burning coal/oil and can be scaled up to meet rising demands using today's technology where wind and solar cannot (yet).
And besides... someday, we'll have clean, cold fusion, and this will be a moot point, anyways... but I'm not holding my breath.
Agreed. I am certainly a Nintendo fanboy, but I am one of those pushing the PS2 stat through the roof, for just the reasons you mentioned.
I own an NES with 60+ games (though ~15 are $1 total-crap-games), an N64 with ~25 games, and a PS2 with 5 PS2 and 4 PS1 games. Over the past few months I have disproportionally favored the PS2, pouring hours into Final Fantasy X, FF XII, Deus Ex, Burnout: Revenge, and the Mega Man X collection. I picked up the system used with controllers and memory cards for $40 US (it needed some cleaning to make it work, but it whirrs away just fine, now), and found of the games used at GameStops and the like.
Total price of everything I've spent on the system + accessories + game library? Maybe $100. That $100 has given me access to an amazing library of classic (remakes of Mega Man X, Final Fantasy IV, V, and VI, Deus Ex, etc.) and modern (the graphics on FF XII and Burnout: Revenge are comparable to early PS3 graphics, as long as you don't have an HDTV) games... why should I shell out three to four times that amount for a "modern" system?
Oh yeah. Halo 3. I still do long for thee, but it was not meant to be.
I'm curious... what is the replay value like for this game? Do you think that the save/time-sparing features affect its replay value at all? (Some would say it makes the replay value increase as the game is less frustrating, but others would say that it makes the replay value decrease as the joy/reward of the "mistake-free run" is removed from the game.)
The largest battery hog on your phone is the backlight and screen. After that, you have butt-loads of internal RF processing, and then, at a distant third, the antenna itself. The CPU, PMU, etc., are all eating from the same dish, as well. (I suppose if you have an Intel Atom, though, it would be sitting above the RF processor for power consumption.) My estimation on the increase in battery power would be in the range of low to moderate double-digit percentages, but it depends heavily on usage patterns, of course.
I have actually been able to successfully convince some of my relatives of the impossibilities and logical inconsistencies of homeopathy. The following simple, logical conundrum is perhaps the clearest way to reveal the paradoxes inherent in homeopathy:
Given: Homeopathy claims that mixing the "remedy" with water transfers the pattern or "essence" of the remedy to the water. Homeopathy then claims that the pattern or essence is preserved as the solution is further diluted with pure water, even when no molecules of the original remedy remain.
The crux: How is it possible to have "pure water" when even endless dilution preserves the imprint of anything that has ever been mixed with the water? Does not the water out of your faucet contain the imprint of every possible remedy that has ever existed?
If nothing else, it's at least a decent thinking point.
For my Masters Thesis, I designed a wireless powering system for a fully implanted bio-monitoring device for a mouse running around, untethered, in a cage. Now, a mouse is actually quite small, so our implant had to be about the size of a U.S. dime (actually, a bit smaller). The mouse was never more than a few cm away from the cage floor, but could move around, stand up, roll over, etc., so we could not make the powering system very "directed" in nature. As a result, our optimized average power coupling efficiency we near 0.08% (Page 25, specs on Page 95), which was actually pretty good for the application. It did mean that our implant needed to be extremely low-power, however, involving all sorts of power supply optimizations (Chapter 3), MEMS sensors, and the like.)
The problem with trying to power your wireless devices anywhere in a room is similar, due to the fact that you can move around and change the orientation of your devices. As the ratio of power-receiving-antenna to "cage" is even lower, you are likely looking at even lower power efficiencies. Yes, you can perform all sorts of fractal antenna optimizations and the like, but, if you want to be able to receive power anywhere in the room, then you are limited by the laws of physics: If your powering system covers the whole room, your efficiency is limited by the simple ratio of the area of your receiving antenna in the plane parallel to the floor (or wherever you place your powering system) to the area of the powering antenna itself.
The recent demos of wireless power by Intel and others have all involved highly directed powering antennae, where moving the receiver even a small amount cuts off the power supply. Directed power does have its uses, however. Imagine medical implants that can be powered in a short time by placing a directed antenna on your skin each morning, or even wearing a battery pack on your belt with a directed antenna to power a device with a built in radio communicator. No (highly infectable) wires penetrate the skin, no surgery is necessary to replace batteries that run low, and, even in the worst cases, you should still be able to remove the battery back for a time to perform certain functions (exercising, bathing) without losing device functionality.
Though TF2, HL2, and the like may be CPU limited, the bottleneck is so low (think: early P4) that any decent gaming rig from the past few years can produce much better graphics quality and framerates on these Source titles than they can with other games out at the same time, such as Oblivion.
it makes the integrated graphics in eee class PCs that much better when the tech trickles down 5 years later.
This is also good news right now for the "sweet spot" gaming PC builders. Each time these new bleeding-edge-$500-200W-XXTREME cards come out, the previous two generations of graphics cards tend to suddenly drop drastically in price.
When I built my current middle-of-the-road gaming computer, I put in an ATI HD3850 for $150, with the expectation of adding a second on Crossfire once the price drop occurred. Looking at Newegg.com, the 3850's have hit ~$55.00 this week. My computer looks to be due for an upgrade after Christmas, it seems!
Larry Gonick has been doing this in english for a long time. His books are good.
Hear hear!
I was able to understand parts of Larry Gonick's Cartoon Guide to Physics while in elementary school, and it gave me quite the head start to ace AP Physics in high school. I went on to use the same book to help study for my intro Engineering-Physics exams in Undergrad, and still pick it up from time to time for a good laugh.
While his guides are not driven by overarching plot lines or motivated by romantic subplots, they're still an engaging and amusing read for anyone with an interest in the subject--be it a beginner's or a master's interest.
I've some fond memories of many games and mods run on my LAN with friends running around maps in low gravity, movement speed set to several hundred miles per hour or friction set to be negative, throwing everyone all over the place.
Agreed. In my old LAN parties, one person would serve as a "referee" to control the physics of our TFC or CS world while the rest of us duked it out in a game world with friction that might turn off at a moments notice, or a gun that could turn into a rocket launcher when you least expected it. It wasn't "fair", but it was hilarious and immensely entertaining to all involved.
There's another important use for the console, as well: Fixing mistakes from the original developers. I can't count the number of times in Oblivion that I've had to use the console to get my character un-stuck from a pile of rocks at odd angles, or to edit the status of my quest log to get the game to realize that, yes, I did actually kill the mark, now let me progress in the storyline. The bug-fixing powers of the console become even more essential once you begin experimenting with user-created content with even less QA.
Regarding your third group, I recently learned of Henry D. Eyring, an almost-Nobel-Prize winner who authored many books, both scientific and religious/philosophical in nature. The books from the latter half focus on the oft-presumed dichotomy between religion/faith and science--an interesting read.
I'm reading his biography currently, and here's an interesting thought from his perspective:
Is there any conflict between science and religion? There is no conflict in the mind of God, but often there is conflict in the minds of men.
But... if you're talking about a normally distributed [Gaussian] statistic such as IQ and you have a sufficiently large, randomly selected sample (or if you are looking at the population as a whole), then the median is, for all intents and purposes, equal to mean/average.
Therefore, I stand behind GP's 'scathing intimation'.
The summary mentions graphene transistors "clocked" at 26 GHz. Though the summary author could be using "clocked" to simply mean "measured" (like you clock someone's speed in the 100m dash), it is easy to confuse this with the clocking that occurs normally in digital circuits.
What is measured at 26 GHz here is the f_T of the transistor, which is a measure of the frequency limit at which point the transistor provides unity gain (or, in other words, past which point the transistor attenuates, rather than amplifies, a signal). It is essential in RF circuits to be operating well below the f_T of your transistors in order for your oscillators, amplifiers, and the like to perform properly and produce minimal noise.
In other words, yay graphene! It's taking its first steps toward becoming a viable alternative to Si, which is always good to have, if even just on the back burner.
Yeah, I was thinking about that. But even scaling up the PMU transistors, you'd still be stuck with the poor voltage tolerances, leakages, etc... I mean, it's certainly possible, but it looks like Broadcom has decided to off-chip the headphone, USB, battery charging, and similar functions which are normally implemented in the PMU.
As far as System In Package goes, I'm all for that. You can even use multiple dies (say, a 65 nm RF die, a 65 nm digital die, and a 180 nm PMU die) and get around all these problems. (In fact, that's done all the time today. Most modern wireless devices have at least one SIP running their insides.) But Broadcom claimed a 1-chip solution, which seems to mean 1-die, so I was intrigued.
We're talking 21 Mbps downstream with far more mobility even than WLAN, once they get these networks operational. That's more bandwidth than I get from my cable internet connection on a device that can go anywhere the towers are without breaking connectivity (thanks to CDMA's no-drop handoff style).
Perhaps the title could more accurately read "World's First 21Mbps EHSPA/HSPA+ Data "Network"", as 21 Mbps HSPA+ calls (which, though the summary downplays them, are really big breakthroughs) are "old news".
Yeah, it's good to see this technology taking root out there, but don't forget about the engineers who made the tech happen in the first place! (In fact, given that Telestra's HSPA+ is not yet an active commercial network, I'm wondering what makes this trial so different from the dozens of "laboratory calls" made so far?)
I'm kind of surprised that crammed the power management unit on there--not because of size, but because of the fact that the chip was done in 65 nm tech. In fact, the reason that most PMU's are not on the same chip as RF circuitry is because of the significantly decreased efficiency of power management in a cutting-edge process. Yes, 65 nm is a good place to put your speedy RF circuits, but it tends to require too many inefficient concessions to host a good PMU.
I wonder about the power efficiency and battery life of a mobile device that runs on this chip. Maybe there are advantages to this approach -- though, given that Broadcom holds the specs, we'll probably never know.
From what I understand from the techs with which I've spoken, it's one of those issues where *most* draft n devices *should* be firmware upgradable to be *mostly* compatible with finalized n. The problem is that nobody knows exactly what finalized n will be, so it is impossible to make a device that is absolutely hardware and firmware compatible with finalized n. As a result, there are all sorts of draft n products out there which implement some version (3.0, 3.02, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, or 7.0) of draft n, but in a way that doesn't guarantee compatibility down the line.
What's there for Broadcom to gain by making it harder to write drivers?
Now, I work for a competitor, so take what I say with a grain (or more) of salt.
...That said, Broadcom is one of the most patent/trade-secret paranoid companies I know of. Their shotgun approach to patent lawsuits and insistence on playing their cards as close as possible to their chest is famous in the wireless industry. If they haven't released the specs on their networking devices, it's likely because they are terrified of *something* leaking out.
On another note, (and this is a beef I have with more than just Broadcom) how can they claim to have released an 802.11n device when 802.11n does not yet exist? Yes, a draft version of.11n is out, and the final version *should* be *mostly* compatible with the draft versions... but there will almost certainly be features/protocol in the finalized version of the specification that differ from these different draft versions coming out at the rate of one every few months. It's like buying Vista (or OSX) before the first patches--except here, you can't patch hardware.
the planet would do better without than with us on it
I hear this sentiment quite often and, though I agree that we as humans are certainly making a mess of things around here, it is important to remember that we are still part of "nature" ourselves, and we are "nature"'s best (and, some would say, only) chance of spreading beyond this planet and surviving a world-ending catastrophe.
I don't see why intelligence cannot be a part of nature. Rather, it seems to be an important step in the growth, spread, and self-preservation of life.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention the n-thousand fans watching the game from above and all around...
Hmm... Most interesting--I'll have to add a few of those to my repertoire, or at least my keybinds.
One question, though... culturally, how does "A young child should be named after him" end up being an insult?
Seriously, I'm a nerd so this doesn't count... but isn't the first thing you do with a new piece of hardware is throw away the CD and download the current drivers off the net?
A friend once tried that with his Netgear Gigabit Ethernet card on XP. ... it didn't work too well for him. It turns out that XP's built in ethernet drivers got in a fight with the hardware and kept trying to take down the OS.
He had no floppy drive in the computer nor was there a CD burner to be found for us to transfer the files to his computer. This was before the days of ubiquitous USB flash drives and the motherboard had no onboard ethernet, either, so we ended up commandeering an old-school MP3 player (you know... the kind the size of the iPhone with 64 MB storage) and converting it to mobile-disk-drive duty to save the day.
Hooray for the sneakernet!
Well, first off, critical != meltdown. It is *good* that a reactor can go critical, that means that it is "on". "Critical" indicates that each fission reaction is creating 1 (or more) other fission reactions, meaning that the fission is self sustaining.
What happened at Chernobyl (in a nutshell) was that the presence of steam in their water-regulated reactors increased the reaction rate. (This is called a "Void coefficient" greater than 1.) You can see where this leads: more steam --> more reactions --> more heat --> more steam (from boiling the water). That is what caused the meltdown, not the fact that the reactor (like every other power-operating reactor) "went critical".
Modern nuclear reactors, on the other hand, have a Void coefficient less than 1. This means that the presence of steam (or other bubbles) in the reactor actually decreases the reaction rate, breaking the cycle above that led to the catastrophic meltdown at Chernobyl.
Three Mile Island, on the other hand, involved craploads of human error. Thankfully, the standard safety procedures down the line still prevented anyone from being harmed by the incident. Yes, it sucked, and was a massive wake-up-call to increase safety measures due to the "close-call" factor, but even the safety measures already implemented were sufficient to prevent a catastrophe.
Nuclear power isn't perfect--after all, there's the whole issue of what to do with the radioactive wastes--but it is well ahead of burning coal/oil and can be scaled up to meet rising demands using today's technology where wind and solar cannot (yet).
And besides... someday, we'll have clean, cold fusion, and this will be a moot point, anyways... but I'm not holding my breath.
Agreed. I am certainly a Nintendo fanboy, but I am one of those pushing the PS2 stat through the roof, for just the reasons you mentioned.
I own an NES with 60+ games (though ~15 are $1 total-crap-games), an N64 with ~25 games, and a PS2 with 5 PS2 and 4 PS1 games. Over the past few months I have disproportionally favored the PS2, pouring hours into Final Fantasy X, FF XII, Deus Ex, Burnout: Revenge, and the Mega Man X collection. I picked up the system used with controllers and memory cards for $40 US (it needed some cleaning to make it work, but it whirrs away just fine, now), and found of the games used at GameStops and the like.
Total price of everything I've spent on the system + accessories + game library? Maybe $100. That $100 has given me access to an amazing library of classic (remakes of Mega Man X, Final Fantasy IV, V, and VI, Deus Ex, etc.) and modern (the graphics on FF XII and Burnout: Revenge are comparable to early PS3 graphics, as long as you don't have an HDTV) games... why should I shell out three to four times that amount for a "modern" system?
Oh yeah. Halo 3. I still do long for thee, but it was not meant to be.
I'm curious... what is the replay value like for this game? Do you think that the save/time-sparing features affect its replay value at all? (Some would say it makes the replay value increase as the game is less frustrating, but others would say that it makes the replay value decrease as the joy/reward of the "mistake-free run" is removed from the game.)
...Just curious to hear some opinions.
The largest battery hog on your phone is the backlight and screen. After that, you have butt-loads of internal RF processing, and then, at a distant third, the antenna itself. The CPU, PMU, etc., are all eating from the same dish, as well. (I suppose if you have an Intel Atom, though, it would be sitting above the RF processor for power consumption.) My estimation on the increase in battery power would be in the range of low to moderate double-digit percentages, but it depends heavily on usage patterns, of course.
I have actually been able to successfully convince some of my relatives of the impossibilities and logical inconsistencies of homeopathy. The following simple, logical conundrum is perhaps the clearest way to reveal the paradoxes inherent in homeopathy:
Given: Homeopathy claims that mixing the "remedy" with water transfers the pattern or "essence" of the remedy to the water. Homeopathy then claims that the pattern or essence is preserved as the solution is further diluted with pure water, even when no molecules of the original remedy remain.
The crux: How is it possible to have "pure water" when even endless dilution preserves the imprint of anything that has ever been mixed with the water? Does not the water out of your faucet contain the imprint of every possible remedy that has ever existed?
If nothing else, it's at least a decent thinking point.
For my Masters Thesis, I designed a wireless powering system for a fully implanted bio-monitoring device for a mouse running around, untethered, in a cage. Now, a mouse is actually quite small, so our implant had to be about the size of a U.S. dime (actually, a bit smaller). The mouse was never more than a few cm away from the cage floor, but could move around, stand up, roll over, etc., so we could not make the powering system very "directed" in nature. As a result, our optimized average power coupling efficiency we near 0.08% (Page 25, specs on Page 95), which was actually pretty good for the application. It did mean that our implant needed to be extremely low-power, however, involving all sorts of power supply optimizations (Chapter 3), MEMS sensors, and the like.)
The problem with trying to power your wireless devices anywhere in a room is similar, due to the fact that you can move around and change the orientation of your devices. As the ratio of power-receiving-antenna to "cage" is even lower, you are likely looking at even lower power efficiencies. Yes, you can perform all sorts of fractal antenna optimizations and the like, but, if you want to be able to receive power anywhere in the room, then you are limited by the laws of physics: If your powering system covers the whole room, your efficiency is limited by the simple ratio of the area of your receiving antenna in the plane parallel to the floor (or wherever you place your powering system) to the area of the powering antenna itself.
The recent demos of wireless power by Intel and others have all involved highly directed powering antennae, where moving the receiver even a small amount cuts off the power supply. Directed power does have its uses, however. Imagine medical implants that can be powered in a short time by placing a directed antenna on your skin each morning, or even wearing a battery pack on your belt with a directed antenna to power a device with a built in radio communicator. No (highly infectable) wires penetrate the skin, no surgery is necessary to replace batteries that run low, and, even in the worst cases, you should still be able to remove the battery back for a time to perform certain functions (exercising, bathing) without losing device functionality.
Though TF2, HL2, and the like may be CPU limited, the bottleneck is so low (think: early P4) that any decent gaming rig from the past few years can produce much better graphics quality and framerates on these Source titles than they can with other games out at the same time, such as Oblivion.
it makes the integrated graphics in eee class PCs that much better when the tech trickles down 5 years later.
This is also good news right now for the "sweet spot" gaming PC builders. Each time these new bleeding-edge-$500-200W-XXTREME cards come out, the previous two generations of graphics cards tend to suddenly drop drastically in price.
When I built my current middle-of-the-road gaming computer, I put in an ATI HD3850 for $150, with the expectation of adding a second on Crossfire once the price drop occurred. Looking at Newegg.com, the 3850's have hit ~$55.00 this week. My computer looks to be due for an upgrade after Christmas, it seems!
Now, the iPhone isn't my cup of tea at all; but I believe the term is "ph0wn3d."
FTFY
Larry Gonick has been doing this in english for a long time. His books are good.
Hear hear!
I was able to understand parts of Larry Gonick's Cartoon Guide to Physics while in elementary school, and it gave me quite the head start to ace AP Physics in high school. I went on to use the same book to help study for my intro Engineering-Physics exams in Undergrad, and still pick it up from time to time for a good laugh.
While his guides are not driven by overarching plot lines or motivated by romantic subplots, they're still an engaging and amusing read for anyone with an interest in the subject--be it a beginner's or a master's interest.
I've some fond memories of many games and mods run on my LAN with friends running around maps in low gravity, movement speed set to several hundred miles per hour or friction set to be negative, throwing everyone all over the place.
Agreed. In my old LAN parties, one person would serve as a "referee" to control the physics of our TFC or CS world while the rest of us duked it out in a game world with friction that might turn off at a moments notice, or a gun that could turn into a rocket launcher when you least expected it. It wasn't "fair", but it was hilarious and immensely entertaining to all involved.
There's another important use for the console, as well: Fixing mistakes from the original developers. I can't count the number of times in Oblivion that I've had to use the console to get my character un-stuck from a pile of rocks at odd angles, or to edit the status of my quest log to get the game to realize that, yes, I did actually kill the mark, now let me progress in the storyline. The bug-fixing powers of the console become even more essential once you begin experimenting with user-created content with even less QA.
A car industry...?
Not anymore.
I'm reading his biography currently, and here's an interesting thought from his perspective:
But... if you're talking about a normally distributed [Gaussian] statistic such as IQ and you have a sufficiently large, randomly selected sample (or if you are looking at the population as a whole), then the median is, for all intents and purposes, equal to mean/average.
Therefore, I stand behind GP's 'scathing intimation'.
The summary mentions graphene transistors "clocked" at 26 GHz. Though the summary author could be using "clocked" to simply mean "measured" (like you clock someone's speed in the 100m dash), it is easy to confuse this with the clocking that occurs normally in digital circuits.
What is measured at 26 GHz here is the f_T of the transistor, which is a measure of the frequency limit at which point the transistor provides unity gain (or, in other words, past which point the transistor attenuates, rather than amplifies, a signal). It is essential in RF circuits to be operating well below the f_T of your transistors in order for your oscillators, amplifiers, and the like to perform properly and produce minimal noise.
In other words, yay graphene! It's taking its first steps toward becoming a viable alternative to Si, which is always good to have, if even just on the back burner.
Yeah, I was thinking about that. But even scaling up the PMU transistors, you'd still be stuck with the poor voltage tolerances, leakages, etc... I mean, it's certainly possible, but it looks like Broadcom has decided to off-chip the headphone, USB, battery charging, and similar functions which are normally implemented in the PMU.
As far as System In Package goes, I'm all for that. You can even use multiple dies (say, a 65 nm RF die, a 65 nm digital die, and a 180 nm PMU die) and get around all these problems. (In fact, that's done all the time today. Most modern wireless devices have at least one SIP running their insides.) But Broadcom claimed a 1-chip solution, which seems to mean 1-die, so I was intrigued.
But HSPA+ is cellular!
We're talking 21 Mbps downstream with far more mobility even than WLAN, once they get these networks operational. That's more bandwidth than I get from my cable internet connection on a device that can go anywhere the towers are without breaking connectivity (thanks to CDMA's no-drop handoff style).
Perhaps the title could more accurately read "World's First 21Mbps EHSPA/HSPA+ Data "Network"", as 21 Mbps HSPA+ calls (which, though the summary downplays them, are really big breakthroughs) are "old news".
Yeah, it's good to see this technology taking root out there, but don't forget about the engineers who made the tech happen in the first place! (In fact, given that Telestra's HSPA+ is not yet an active commercial network, I'm wondering what makes this trial so different from the dozens of "laboratory calls" made so far?)
I'm kind of surprised that crammed the power management unit on there--not because of size, but because of the fact that the chip was done in 65 nm tech. In fact, the reason that most PMU's are not on the same chip as RF circuitry is because of the significantly decreased efficiency of power management in a cutting-edge process. Yes, 65 nm is a good place to put your speedy RF circuits, but it tends to require too many inefficient concessions to host a good PMU.
I wonder about the power efficiency and battery life of a mobile device that runs on this chip. Maybe there are advantages to this approach -- though, given that Broadcom holds the specs, we'll probably never know.
From what I understand from the techs with which I've spoken, it's one of those issues where *most* draft n devices *should* be firmware upgradable to be *mostly* compatible with finalized n. The problem is that nobody knows exactly what finalized n will be, so it is impossible to make a device that is absolutely hardware and firmware compatible with finalized n. As a result, there are all sorts of draft n products out there which implement some version (3.0, 3.02, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, or 7.0) of draft n, but in a way that doesn't guarantee compatibility down the line.
What's there for Broadcom to gain by making it harder to write drivers?
Now, I work for a competitor, so take what I say with a grain (or more) of salt.
.11n is out, and the final version *should* be *mostly* compatible with the draft versions... but there will almost certainly be features/protocol in the finalized version of the specification that differ from these different draft versions coming out at the rate of one every few months. It's like buying Vista (or OSX) before the first patches--except here, you can't patch hardware.
...That said, Broadcom is one of the most patent/trade-secret paranoid companies I know of. Their shotgun approach to patent lawsuits and insistence on playing their cards as close as possible to their chest is famous in the wireless industry. If they haven't released the specs on their networking devices, it's likely because they are terrified of *something* leaking out.
On another note, (and this is a beef I have with more than just Broadcom) how can they claim to have released an 802.11n device when 802.11n does not yet exist? Yes, a draft version of
the planet would do better without than with us on it
I hear this sentiment quite often and, though I agree that we as humans are certainly making a mess of things around here, it is important to remember that we are still part of "nature" ourselves, and we are "nature"'s best (and, some would say, only) chance of spreading beyond this planet and surviving a world-ending catastrophe.
I don't see why intelligence cannot be a part of nature. Rather, it seems to be an important step in the growth, spread, and self-preservation of life.