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.