[Prism54-users] Re: [Prism54-devel] Prism54 development update

[Rainer Weikusat]

Feyd <feyd at seznam.cz> writes:
> On Sun, 11 Sep 2005 15:24:07 +0200
> Rainer Weikusat <rainer.weikusat at sncag.com> wrote:
>
>> Eh ... are you aware of the fact that a Linux-driver that allows
>> control of a radio fully from the host will likely be illegal just
>> about everywhere?
>
> I don't think so, at least in Czech Republic (and probably most Europe)
> it would certainly not.

In Germany (and at least in the US, too) you may own a radio that can
be tuned to arbitrary frequencies, but you are legally forbidden of
ever using it.

>> > This may not be the right thing to do in the long term,
>>
>> This depends. If you are hardware vendor looking to increase your
>> margins, you want Win-modems, GDI-printers and 'SoftMAC' 802.11,
>> because the hardware becomes cheaper to produce if you offload
>> functionality to the host CPU. I am using this device (fullmac) in an
>> embedded setting and I do not want to not use this 30 Mhz CPU because
>> my host CPU has only 200 Mhz and should run application code and not
>> hardware emulation code.
>
> Unless you can offload expensive operations like encryption, the
> difference will be close to zero.

First, you are using the verb 'offload' in the wrong way --
non-crippled hardware usually implements its functionality while
crippled hardware offloads this to the host CPU (which is supposedly
owned by some idiot running Windows who doesn't deserve all those
cycles, anyway). Second, the only meaninful information the phrase
'the number is close to zero' conveys is that this number is larger
than zero and that you can imagine another number that is large than
the first one, which you (supposedly) would not describe with 'close
to zero' anymore. So what precise numbers are we talking about?