Why? Seriously? Because you want your print layout to be tightly controlled?

It's totally practical to do large scale document editing without WYSIWYG. Know why? Because we all did it before word 6.0 became a defacto standard. We would concentrate on document content first, then design a layout, then flow the content into that layout. Yes, like the HTML/CSS split.

These days people do poster layouts in _excel_.

Gah, sometimes I wish my beard were longer.

Erm.

The IBM PC, PC/XT has an 8088 (or clones with 8086's) that has a 20 bit address bus. It's still a megabyte, no matter what.

It doesn't matter where you put the BIOS - beginning or end. It's still a megabyte.

The BIOS is up the end there because the 8088 reset jump vectors are at the end of RAM, not the beginning (like the Z80, etc.) So you need to have something at that memory range for the CPU to start executing.

The 8086/8088 software interrupt vectors are at the beginning of your address space. So, there needs to be RAM there. The interrupt handler, NMI handler and all the software vectors can't be in ROM - well, they can be, but then they'd have to jump to RAM at some point to do anything flexible.

So, you:

* need RAM in the first 4k for jump tables and such (0x00000000 -> 0x00001000)
* need ROM at the end for the reset/power-on vectors .. so, the IBM PC memory map makes sense.

The IBM PC architecture also assumed people would build ROM add-on applications, like BASIC (which they did) but also word processors, spell checkers, etc. That's why there's 8 ROM slots on the PC and PC/XT. But people soon adopted disk applications rather than ROM applications.

So, I don't buy that "it's Gates' fault." The only things I can see he could've done differently are:

* advocate a 68000 CPU - but then he'd have issues at 16MB - and Amiga/MacOS had exactly that
* add more RAM and less peripheral address space - but you're still capped at 1MB
* advocate for an EMS (page-flipping) architecture early on, and encourage people to make use of it.

My point wrt the Civil Rights Movement was not anything to do with skin colour. It was that a growing group of people decided not to simply subscribe to the rules and customs of the community around them and started increasingly taking a stand against it.

I'm surprised people didn't connect the dots.

Whether or not I agree with Sarah isn't the point. It's that she's able to stand up for what she believes in, going against the community as a whole, and (at least a little bit) forcing a few people to temporarily re-evaluate the idea of what the group norms are. I'm glad she's trying.

American Civil Rights Movement.

Done, done.

Actually, re-read what the right of free speech in the united states means. Then please re-evaluate your statement.

I've seen that happen with git.

git "encourages" developers to share often. It doesn't mean that they will.

The 802.11ac spec lets you do that.

You can use 40, 80, 80+80 or 160. Right now I think everything is shipping 80 only, but I could be wrong. But the chip is allowed to transmit on whichever channel is free. If the primary 20MHz channel is free, it transmits on that. If the Primary and Extension 20Mhz channel are both free (ie, the "HT40" channel in 802.11n parlance) it transmits on that. If all 80MHz is free, it transmits on that.

It's pretty nifty stuff.

Netflix OpenConnect pushes 20GBit+ on a FreeBSD-9 base with nginx and SSDs. Over TCP. To internet connected destinations.

Please re-evaluate your statement.

Nope, I just grew up hacking on computers that came with a "hack me! i dare you!" manual. If you're going to hand out lots of single purpose devices like this, why not let the kids decide what to do with them when they don't need/want a wikipedia-only reader anymore.

Apparently so - http://toddbot.blogspot.com/2010/05/wikireader-forth-and-hacking.html .. FORTH? Wow. Amusing. :)

Cool, and can you modify, upload and run a replacement image?

.. aren't they opening up the software stack on it too?

I bet some of those same kids would hack at the software. It's a general purpose computer, after all, just running an ugly looking renderer.

.. really? You mean, all of the phone firmware and wifi firmware and bluetooth firmware and drivers are all 100% open source?

Cool.

Otherwise, yes, the phone vendors will have to co-operate even further with the Pentagon over what is offered today in open source.

The AR9280 and later NICs support spectrum analyser mode, as a diagnostic thing.

Yes, this includes the AR7010+AR9280, AR7010+AR9287, and the AR9271 (which is an AR9285 wifi core.)

Atheros make high end and low end chips. It's up to the manufacturers as to what they choose. They choose price. Sad, but true.

You can buy the higher-end 2x2 and 3x3 devices. The unit prices are more than the low end chips.

Driver support? It's up to the company you bought the laptop from, not Atheros. Atheros only makes the chips. We don't make the NICs or the rest of the device. Especially in the windows world, vendors have a habit of doing 'strange ass shit' here and there. Please don't blame QCA for the weird, cheap-ass, cost-cutting crap that goes on elsewhere.