There's an alternative to multi-threading. Will we see MPI used in more than just supercomputing applications? The message-passing vs. shared memory arguments are as old as the hills in high-end computing, with most (but not all) applications using message passing. As the memory hierarchy on personal computers looks more and more like NUMA, message passing starts to look really attractive, even when the parallelism is across a single node.

The chip used in the broadcom kit is used in some military applications. As such even if Broadcom wanted to open up spec's they wouldnt be allowed to as the powers that be would deem it a threat to national security (probably something to do with the encryption side of it).

Care to substantiate that claim?

When my employer was picking a wireless chip for an embedded system, Broadcom was unwilling to give us anything other than binaries even though we were willing to do whatever NDA stuff was required. I don't know the reason behind it, and always assumed it was because they're like most other wireless hardware vendors. Since source is an absolute requirement (we have a strange Linux system and a few architectures to support), we ended up with an Intersil chip.

AFAIK, ndiswrapper won't work, the windows driver is an x86 binary.