.. 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.