Also many of the WiFi drivers have such crazy firmware because they're actually (at least partly) software defined radios and thus each country needs a slightly different flavor and that's related to regulations and testing.
Everything would be much easier if we could just have some part of the UN that every country agrees to follow manage a universal spectrum allocation and anyone that disagrees should just expect all of the electronics to break.
Software is great exactly because it allows for infinite flexibility, so you don't need to involve the UN when allocating wifi spectrum.
Not sure it would be. As I understood that's more or less how it works today bar the UN bit. Key industry players chatter and come up with standards that all are reasonably happy with. But then throw in a few countries that want to do things differently just for the sake of it, prior spectrum allocation, and protectionist moves, and you end up where we are today...
Sad thing is that is is USA that is the problem child in all this. Being largely isolated from Eurasia, and having just a few big neighbors that are easy to convince to play along, they can basically define the spectrum within their broadcast reach as they see fit.
It is basically the same reasoning behind it as why metric is still not the default over there.
Well, and that works in our situation.
> It is basically the same reasoning behind it as why metric is still not the default over there.
There's also the simple fact that the 'metric' system is just different, not superior in general (i.e., it's better at some things and worse in others). Why impose a bunch of costs for no net benefit? If every other country jumped off a bridge, ought we?
Three, I'll give you.
Useful amounts of precision is a nothing, if you ask me. We start teaching decimals in third grade, and the only real issue with decimals is weather, for which the difference is saying "80F vs 81F", or "26.7 versus 27.2", whose utility is ... limited.
For distance, the metric system has finer grained units for precision (come on, break down inches: 1/16, 1/8, 3/16, 1/4, 5/16, 3/8, 1/2, etc... are you going to argue that is better than 25.7cm or 257mm?).
I'm not really buying it, as someone who has lived in both worlds.
You can say 1.5 cups instead of 375 mL.
Just like who hexadecimal is very natural in 8/16/32/64 bit computing, the "real life" usage of measures would be much easier if it was in Base-12.
BTW, does anyone know if Canonical still pay licensing fees to cover Ubuntu for this sort of thing? I believe they used to.
Likely Dell leave that up to the user to install after unboxing.
And that is one reason that Mint got popular, because they took Ubuntu and bundled that stuff right on the ISO.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/blackberry-sues-...
The source for that blob is available, but legally the binary must be distributed by someone, who is paying the fees.