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"Steve Jobs made the case to Xerox PARC execs directly that they had great [though immature] technology but that Apple knew how to make it affordable enough to change the world. This was very open. In the end, Xerox got a large block of Apple stock for sharing the technology. That's not stealing at all. Apple didn't get any stock from Microsoft. Nor was Apple dealt with openly in this area by Microsoft."

Both Xerox AND Apple can reasonably be said to have pioneered the GUI. There was a collection of people with interesting ideas who were hired by Xerox PARC, worked there for a while, then moved to Apple and continued to have good ideas. The idea of a GUI predates the work done at Xerox PARC. Xerox did a lot of good work but they didn't produce anything polished enough to be marketable to end-users. Apple did a lot of good work, some before and some after visiting Xerox, that eventually produced a marketable product.

Yes, Apple paid Xerox for access to their research. But that doesn't mean Apple did nothing new of their own. The work that led up to the Lisa and the Macintosh was extremely impressive and went quite a ways past what Xerox had done at the time of the Apple visit.

There's a fair bit of good info at MacKiDo on this subject.

• Lifting The Fog
• Mackido

That was originally an add-on for the 1990 version of the Mac OS called "Sonic Finder". It was cool at first, but got old real fast. It didn't help usability much, and in multi-machine office situations was really annoying.

Before job conditions forced him to more or less abandon his personal site, I went to it daily to see what bits of wisdom he'd cough up. Often he made sense, sometimes he was merely entertaining. Sometimes scathing (It should be pointed out before you click away that he's a staunch Mac-user; devout /.ers will probably feel the urge to vomit).

In this case, I fear he's trying to squash bugs so small as to be theological.

The fundamental question in this whole debate is, "Where does the operating system end and the user interface begin?" or "How much of the UI can you scrape off before the OS underneath becomes useless or breaks?"

Microsoft's assertion all through its monopoly trial was that anything that made changes to the operating system (or DLLs that it relied upon) BECAME part of the operating system, or as they called it, 'integration.' I can see the reasoning behind it, but I don't necessarily agree with it. (The ham sandwich is a different matter -- can InstallShield remove mayonnaise?)

I can also see the reasoning behind Every's statement, though I can't quite agree with it. An OS without any sort of interoperability ceases to be the central authority of the computer and instead becomes 'that thing what makes the disk go around.' You might as well shut off at that point, because the system isn't going to do anything but make whirry noises.

The line between OS and the cruft that makes it more like a 'computer' is somewhere in the middle, and depending on how you like your semantics, it could end up being anywhere in the middle. It could include file-copying services, file browsers, multimedia services, or not.

The question much on my mind now is, "Is this really important??" The answer I come up with is "No!" , but obviously others feel it's worth arguing. I'm a little stunned that Every said it because of the wiggly nature of the argument. But then Joe Casad just had to respond, and I expect there will be much Mac-bashing before this thread is expired.

Sigh.

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While the USB web site claims that USB 2.0 is the bee's knees, they are a bit misleading when they give performance numbers. As this article points out, the backwards compatablity of USB 2.0 eats into the speed by quite a bit. And according to this article, USB lacks a lot of features of Firewire, may add significant complexity to hubs, and require more costly cables. (And I thought that I was getting ripped off on USB cables today!)

USB is a great spec, but USB 2.0 isn't the right solution to the problems that Firewire is designed to solve.

Take a look at this little article on USB 2.0 and this one.

I can say that firewire is here and it works now, beautifully. Why should I wait for manufacturers to develop and implement USB 2.0 mobos and devices? For a measly extra 80Mb/s? I'll wait for firewire to go to 800Mb/s later this year.

What? No firewire devices besides camcorders? My favorite firewire devices are the sancube and this portable firewire raid array.

Now they (hard drive manufacturers in particular) just need to make some native firewire devices, bridges are just so... inelegant.

Take a look at this little article on USB 2.0 and this one.

I can say that firewire is here and it works now, beautifully. Why should I wait for manufacturers to develop and implement USB 2.0 mobos and devices? For a measly extra 80Mb/s? I'll wait for firewire to go to 800Mb/s later this year.

What? No firewire devices besides camcorders? My favorite firewire devices are the sancube and this portable firewire raid array.

Now they (hard drive manufacturers in particular) just need to make some native firewire devices, bridges are just so... inelegant.

Does anyone have any first hand experience with whether or not Altivec was a bad move?

Well, take a look at how much more efficient it is on Intel's own DSP benchmarks. Also check out the inimitable David Every's pretty good review of AltiVec vs. KNI.

Boils down to, you want to do DSP stuff, AltiVec kicks serious ass, especially if you go to the trouble to understand how to restructure your algorithms to take advantage of it. You don't, well, it's not of any real great use then.

For Photoshop users, video compressors, sound filterers, stuff like that, it's a pretty damned big win. Errrr ... did I just describe the industries Macs dominate? Weird. You'd think Apple was actually trying to serve the needs of their core market, or something silly like that.

First off, it's too bad that your (self declared) biggotry does not allow you to read posts for what they are - it's quite clear that the original poster is not "offended that Apple reviewers review Apple products," it's that they never say anything bad about them.

I tend to follow this stuff too, and I have yet to see any Mac reviews give anything less than 5 STARS ***** A MUST BUY. It must happen, but the vast majority that I see are sycophantic brown-nosings.

Why would anyone *want* to build an 8" cube supercomputer. I mean, sure, they look cute holding the door open but what happens when you want to add additional storage/devices/whatever? How bout the heat buildup in those things. I don't care what they say, it cannot be good to have that much hardware packed in that close. What about if something breaks? You get to pull apart this packed-ass piece of crap, spread parts everywhere and hope you don't break things putting it all back together. Or take it to the $hop. Silliness. I think I'll stick with case designs that aren't brain-dead form-precedes-function, even if it means I don't get to be cool like you. Oh and what were *you* saying? Try putting some kind of content in your posts. But thanks for trying.

Wow, this is even better than Microsoft's keyboard. See http://www.mackido.com/Humor/MSKeyboar d.html. Control-Alt-Delete -- what more do you need with Microsoft?

A lot of the elements you see in the modern GUI were designed by Apple, not Xerox. See http://www.mackido.com/Interface/u i_history.htm on the topic of stealing GUIs.

"Apple doomed the Mac. High priced hardware. Skimpy software selection. If it wasn't for all the Macs sold at budget prices to students and college staff I doubt the Mac would have sold very many machines at all. How many of US did Apple lose because of it's high prices? Apple decided to abandon us not the other way around."

Clueless. Apple owned 25% of the computer industry at one point with its "high priced" hardware, and bare in mind that the IBM PC "cheap hardware" was always around while Apple's Macintosh market share went from 0% to 25%. Users had choice, and 1 out of 4 of them chose the Mac.

And by the way, the Mac is more successful today than ever before, and yet even the cheapest Mac is twice the price of the cheapest PC. The "doomed" Mac is on more desktops today than at any time in its history. Besides - take a look at your computer, I bet you paid more for it than the cost of an iMac.

The reason why Apple continues to do well is because, unlike yourself, some people actually think a bit more intelligently - they don't look at the simple comparison of sticker price, they look at the issue of "Is this higher price justified? Does the Mac, for its higher price, offer me higher quality, more productivity, or significant value that justifies the cost?"

Even when the Mac was at its most expensive, the fact that a kid could learn it, could network it and could do more than just play games with it meant that it offered everyone a lot of value in ease of use and simplicity.

No other combination of hardware and Operating System has ever offered the complete, integrated user experience with the ease of operation as the Macintosh. THAT is why people willingly paid the high prices, THAT is why even at its lowest point Apple still had people that would never sell their Mac, and THAT is why, after Apple refocussed, they are one of the most successful computer companies today.

As for OSX, it is clear at this point that OSX will once again set a new standard for GUI design. It is brand new, so don't expect it to be flawless when it comes out. We can all spot its less-than-shining UI elements at this point, but on the other hand when we take off our platform-bias hats, we all see the elements of OSX that cause us all to drool.

Just check out the Ars Technica article about OSX Developer Preview 4.


There is no reason to knock Apple... after all, you have many significant and meaningful innovations and features found on desktop computers to thank them for.

The people that do knock Apple would do well to go over to this URL and read it thoroughly from beginning to end. If you've ever wondered why so many Mac users compare so many computers to their Mac, here is why.

Let's see if any OS will ever match this track record:

http://www.mackido.com/Innovation/

Yes this is accurate. MS Office didn't exist until much later. MS held off on several important pieces of software for the Mac OS in exchange for licensing of technology. This software includes MS Word (first for Mac), MS Excel (also first for Mac), MS File, and a entry-level visual programming language for beginners. You know, all the foundations for what would later become Office in the later days of Windows development, the early- to mid-90s.

In fact, one of the things MS also held off on Word and Excel for was the rights to be the vendor of a visual BASIC development environment for the Mac. Apple had been developing their own, but MS howled for the rights to be the sole vendor or else. Apple dropped theirs, MS never came out with theirs until much later and then dropped it due to lack of interest, and a frustrated Apple developer name Bill Atkinson came up with Hypercard as a substitute in the mean time.

The history of this and many other MS dirty dealings can be found at Mackido, under the history section. It's a fine site which has unfortunately been very infrequently updated since the author got a job writing for MacWEEK.

Here's another article that dislike rdram. http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/rdram.ht ml

Dude, I'm sitting here with a Mac on one side and a KDE 1.90 interface on the other, and the Mac menus behave exactly like the menus in every other interface in the world: if you highlight a submenu title by moving the mouse over it, the submenu pops up. It doesn't go away unless you highlight another menu item or close the menu. This is not special.

He said diagonal. If you don't thread your cursor through the right arrow that leads to the submenu, the submenu and most times the main menu goes away. So then you have to pull the menu down again and navigate to the submenu. This causes the user to slow down when selecting submenus for fear of losing the menu. On the Mac, once the submenu pops up, I can go diagonally to the item in the submenu that I want, not to the right and then down.

For an example with a screen shot, take a look here.

Don

Here's a link about the PARC - Apple relationship. Like all David Every's stuff, it's worth taking with a grain of salt but is informative and offers a new perspective.

A point I didn't see in that article is that, as I understand it, PARC didn't have overlapping windows redrawing properly. The Apple engineers didn't notice that and went back to work and developed QuickDraw -- basically reverse engineering something that didn't actually exist yet.

"You're making stuff up again. Please don't do that. That quote does not appear on the MacKiDo site, and it's not true."

Please see MacKiDo article USB Two-Point-Oh-My!. Quote from the section "What Is Intel Up To?":

"Go back and re-read the excerpt of Gelsinger's speech earlier in this article, and you'll notice something rather diplomatic. He raises the problem of 1394 royalties, but never mentions Apple Computer--the inventor of 1394 and the collector of the royalties. Although Apple has refused official comment on the issue, enough sources have told enough news outlets that the company is now seeking royalties of US$1 per 1394 port from chip and system makers incorporating 1394 into their products. According to EETimes, which has not been on Apple's side in this story (even running an editorial blasting the company for the alleged fee structure), Apple is now seeking US$3 in royalties on a 1394 chipset that sells for less than US$5.

We noted in MWJ 1999.01.23 that sourcing on these reports is anonymous, and that Apple denies anything has changed. It raised for us the possibility that some of Apple's competitors--perhaps like Intel--are being charged higher licensing fees than those cooperating with the Macintosh platform. We note now that Intel is a leading manufacturer of PC support chips, including the kinds of circuits that drive technologies like 1394 and USB. Intel has done well with USB technologies, but this week admitted that after years of advocating 1394, the company is not including 1394 in the chipsets it sells for personal computers."

...and calling him "the guy who invented overlapping windows" is ridiculous.

Correct. That honor goes to Jef Raskin, who came up with the concept in the late Sixties. Why do people insist on perpetuating the myth that the GUI was invented at XEROX PARC?

Their treatment of USB 2.0 was severely lacking. I wish Apple would drop its firewire tax (if not completely, then at least a few notches) so we could use a technology that was designed for things like this. This is the second time I've linked to this article today, but it's worth a read.

• http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/USB2.html
• http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/USB20.ht ml

_________________

Their treatment of USB 2.0 was severely lacking. I wish Apple would drop its firewire tax (if not completely, then at least a few notches) so we could use a technology that was designed for things like this. This is the second time I've linked to this article today, but it's worth a read.

• http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/USB2.html
• http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/USB20.ht ml

_________________

User interface is about much, much more than pretty widgets. This is something quite a few people have trouble understanding. Good UI design is hard, often harder than writing the code that the UI is designed to let the user interact with. It requires tons of knowledge about how humans think and the assumptions they make.

Go check out http://www.mackido.com/Interface for some basic information. You'll see that much more goes into designing a UI than you ever thought. (The site is somewhat Mac biased, but gives some good information.)

--

That's because you're a Frikking zealot.

See, the Macintosh team (at least one of them) had seen one of Xerox's systems at PARC back in the late 70s/early 80s. And had _blatantly_ ripped off the UI. In fact, if you look at the 2-color System 1-6 GUI, it's the same (and I mean _identical_) as what Xerox had put together.

Exactly none of that is true.

Apple hired engineers from Xerox PARC.

Apple's design team visited PARC and PARC's team showed them what they were doing. PARC was a research lab, and Steve Jobs pitched them the idea that Apple was the perfect company to implement their ideas and take them to the public. There was no misunderstanding on either side about this.

Apple signed an agreement with Xerox, giving them stock worth millions of dollars, to be able to use some ideas from PARC.

And Apple extended the desktop metaphor way beyond what Xerox had done. The PARC had some innovative ideas but the Macintosh was much more usable and brought the whole concept together.

If you'd like to learn more about this myth you're propagating, read MacKiDo or SteveWozniak on the subject. Or just read some thoughts of Jef Raskin:

My primary role in this matter was to create the Macintosh project. I named it for my favorite kind of eatin' apple...

My thesis in Computer Science, published in 1967, argued that computers should be all-graphic, that we should eliminate character generators and create characters graphically and in various fonts, that what you see on the screen should be what you get ...

By the way, the name of my thesis was the "Quick-Draw Graphics System", which became the name of (and part of the inspiration for) Atkinson's graphics package for the Mac.

Thus Horn is more correct than he knew when he wrote that the world has generally overestimated the influence of PARC on the Mac...

Jamie McCarthy

See, the Macintosh team (at least one of them) had seen one of Xerox's systems at PARC back in the late 70s/early 80s. And had _blatantly_ ripped off the UI. In fact, if you look at the 2-color System 1-6 GUI, it's the same (and I mean _identical_) as what Xerox had put together.

Exactly none of that is true.

Apple hired engineers from Xerox PARC.

Apple's design team visited PARC and PARC's team showed them what they were doing. PARC was a research lab, and Steve Jobs pitched them the idea that Apple was the perfect company to implement their ideas and take them to the public. There was no misunderstanding on either side about this.

Apple signed an agreement with Xerox, giving them stock worth millions of dollars, to be able to use some ideas from PARC.

And Apple extended the desktop metaphor way beyond what Xerox had done. The PARC had some innovative ideas but the Macintosh was much more usable and brought the whole concept together.

If you'd like to learn more about this myth you're propagating, read MacKiDo or SteveWozniak on the subject. Or just read some thoughts of Jef Raskin:

My primary role in this matter was to create the Macintosh project. I named it for my favorite kind of eatin' apple...

My thesis in Computer Science, published in 1967, argued that computers should be all-graphic, that we should eliminate character generators and create characters graphically and in various fonts, that what you see on the screen should be what you get ...

By the way, the name of my thesis was the "Quick-Draw Graphics System", which became the name of (and part of the inspiration for) Atkinson's graphics package for the Mac.

Thus Horn is more correct than he knew when he wrote that the world has generally overestimated the influence of PARC on the Mac...

Jamie McCarthy

The story isn't quite as you beleive. Check out http://www.mackido.com/Interface/ui_history.html and see what you think.

Few people realize that [Xerox-PARC] DID make computers at one time, and actually tried to enter the consumer market. Pirates of Silicon Valley made it well known that Xerox Parc pressed the concept of the GUI, and Apple just simply lifted and expanded on the idea, but before that it was simply "Apple invented the GUI."

However, Pirates of Silicon Valley was a movie. Movies are notorious for twisting historical facts to make a better story, and in this case they decided to take a myth (which they might have even believed themselves) and play it up for the drama. So, Pirates didn't make the "theft of the GUI" myth 'well-known', since you can't 'know' something that isn't true. They just dramatized the accusation quite well.

Who says it's a myth? Bruce Horn says so. Jef Raskin says so. These are the people who were there, at PARC and at Apple, and who know what PARC did (and did not) come up with -- but two decades later, people are claiming, "Well, I saw the TV movie, so I know better what the real history is."

Bottom line: Some of the concepts that mythology claims Apple 'stole' from Xerox PARC actually predate the existence of PARC. Other concepts that mythology claims Apple 'stole' from PARC were clearly invented at Apple.

And yes, there were some concepts (not as many as people think) that were originally implemented at Xerox PARC, which were later re-implemented in the Macintosh interface. However:

• If you believe that a concept is property, and that anyone who sees a good concept and re-implements it elsewhere with improvements in order to make a better system is scum, what are you doing reading Slashdot?
• If Xerox PARC believed that concepts were property and that anyone who saw their concepts demonstrated could 'steal' them, why on Earth did they regularly arrange demonstrations for visitors, including the heads of other computer companies?

I hate to say it. But it seems that the opportunity to see Apple as "the bad guy" is overwhelming many people's ability to think critically, or even to remember their own beliefs about whether software concepts should be patentable.

Few people realize that [Xerox-PARC] DID make computers at one time, and actually tried to enter the consumer market. Pirates of Silicon Valley made it well known that Xerox Parc pressed the concept of the GUI, and Apple just simply lifted and expanded on the idea, but before that it was simply "Apple invented the GUI."

However, Pirates of Silicon Valley was a movie. Movies are notorious for twisting historical facts to make a better story, and in this case they decided to take a myth (which they might have even believed themselves) and play it up for the drama. So, Pirates didn't make the "theft of the GUI" myth 'well-known', since you can't 'know' something that isn't true. They just dramatized the accusation quite well.

Who says it's a myth? Bruce Horn says so. Jef Raskin says so. These are the people who were there, at PARC and at Apple, and who know what PARC did (and did not) come up with -- but two decades later, people are claiming, "Well, I saw the TV movie, so I know better what the real history is."

Bottom line: Some of the concepts that mythology claims Apple 'stole' from Xerox PARC actually predate the existence of PARC. Other concepts that mythology claims Apple 'stole' from PARC were clearly invented at Apple.

And yes, there were some concepts (not as many as people think) that were originally implemented at Xerox PARC, which were later re-implemented in the Macintosh interface. However:

• If you believe that a concept is property, and that anyone who sees a good concept and re-implements it elsewhere with improvements in order to make a better system is scum, what are you doing reading Slashdot?
• If Xerox PARC believed that concepts were property and that anyone who saw their concepts demonstrated could 'steal' them, why on Earth did they regularly arrange demonstrations for visitors, including the heads of other computer companies?

I hate to say it. But it seems that the opportunity to see Apple as "the bad guy" is overwhelming many people's ability to think critically, or even to remember their own beliefs about whether software concepts should be patentable.

A user-programmer is far more likely to deliver something useful in practice rather than something primarily useful in theory.

Nothing theoretical about it.

Popup a heirarchical menu in Gnome, then try to move to an item in a submenu that is below and to the right. You have to do some intricate threading the needle to get the cursor to exit the main menu exactly at the point where the arrow points to the sub menu. With a Mac, I can select the main item, then move my mouse down diagonally directly to the subitem. Missing the subitem more than once on a non-Mac system gets old very fast. And how about some built-in hysteresis? If I move the mouse along that menu very fast, every submenu pops up. The Mac has a built-in timer so that fast cursor moves do not cause that annoying flashing.

For references on why interface is important, see MacKido, Jakob Neilsen or Tognazzi's website.

Remember, bad interface killed John Denver.

I looked at this site...seems pretty hokey to me, check out this page. I'll quote from it:

Windows and Unix still have the Command Line Interface hiding behind their very thin veneers of a GUI, and so they want to pretend that Mac computers are less powerful because they don't have the same thing. The flaw in their logic is that Macs do, they just don't know it.

The primary CLI function is to find files based on typed in parameters - files with "x" in the name, created after a certain date, of a certain type. The Mac's find dialog has this behavior (and more), is easier to work with than a CLI, and in many ways much more powerful. So I consider the find function the primary CLI.

so aparently, the Mac has a CLI because it has a find dialog!?

I'm sorry, I realize the Mac isn't a bad machine. It's quite good for certain purposes (the PPC is a good chip!). But that is the silliest thing I've ever heard. Since when has the primary function of a command line interface been to find files? (shaking my head). That pretty much blows the credibility of that site out of the water.


--GnrcMan--

3. Xerox's invention of the desktop metaphor, which was later used by Apple, Microsoft and of coursse X Windows.

Sorry about the venting, but I get annoyed at seeing all of these myths about Apple stealing the GUI PARC being perpetuated. Pirates of Silicon Valley was about as factual as a Popeye comic...

The desktop metaphor, in which icons on the screen represent objects such as files, folders, etc., was invented at Apple for the Macintosh and Lisa projects. The SmallTalk-based windowing systems developed at Xerox used icons to represent ACTIONS (verbs). Apple also was the first to implement pull-down menus, and the ability to resize and move windows with the mouse.

The actual origins of the GUI date back to Jef Raskin's 1969 dissertation on Quick-Draw. Raskin arranged for Jobs to visit PARC in order to convince him to give the go-ahead for a GUI for Mac and Lisa.

For a more in-depth exploration of the origins of the GUI, complete with email from some of the original Mac team members (originally posted in a discussion on the Semper.Fi mailing list), take a look here.

Before anyone else brings it up, yes, the inventor of the mouse demonstrated using the mouse to cut, copy, and paste in a word processing environment in the mid '60s, but it was still a text-based system.

...reading geeky humor :)
My personal favorite is the obscure MPW compiler messages: note the secret The WHO reference! http://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/PR- MPW.html
"a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program"
"This array has no size, and that's bad"
"Call me paranoid but finding `/*' inside this comment makes me suspicious"
"Huh ?"
(and many more)

Here's another example of Microsoft "innovation" I hadn't heard about before.

AltiVect is a SIMD unit connected to the PPC it is more like a separate processor
for more information about AltiVec read http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/A ltiVecVsKNI.html

http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/PIIRIS C.html
http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/A ltiVecVsMMX.html

http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/PIIRIS C.html
http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/A ltiVecVsMMX.html

I read somewhere that a couple of drunk Apple engineers actually did connect 127 USB devices to an iMac. This is serious by the way.

Also if nobody's linked to it already, http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/USB20.html is a great reference about this issue.

MacKiDo (reprinting a Mac Weekly Journal article) had an article weighing USB vs. Firewire last March that lists the advantages of 1394 over USB 2.0.

MacKiDo (reprinting a Mac Weekly Journal article) had an article weighing USB vs. Firewire last March that lists the advantages of 1394 over USB 2.0.

OS News Ran this in early September, with a good link to Mackido's site. Here is is Mackidos take on it. The basics: USB 2.0 is no where near what FireWire offers now! When USB 2.0 hits the streets, FireWire will be even faster. Plus USB 2.0 was designed for low end devices, Mackido discusses why it would be a nightmare for anything else.

OS News Ran this in early September, with a good link to Mackido's site. Here is is Mackidos take on it. The basics: USB 2.0 is no where near what FireWire offers now! When USB 2.0 hits the streets, FireWire will be even faster. Plus USB 2.0 was designed for low end devices, Mackido discusses why it would be a nightmare for anything else.

What planet are you from? So you're telling me that that overclocked 700mhz Celeron is going to stomp a 500mhz K7 in 3D? No, it will choke, because of Cache and FP performance defecits.

Mhz is a measure of processor performance, but not the only one. If you know anything about hardware, you'd know that instruction set efficiency is as important as anything else, and the PPC instruction set is far more efficient than that of the x86 series, thus allowing it to perform the same number or more tasks as the x86 at lower clock speeds.

Yes, the K7 may narrowly beat the G4 SpecInt and SpecFP, but once altivec is taken into account, forget it -- the K7 is toast. Besides, I don't think we're going to see PIII or K7 notebooks any day soon...

Here's the link:

http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/AltiVecVsKNI.html

Enjoy.

MacKiDo has this article about USB 2.0 and Firewire. It's on the long side and tends to look at things from a Mac perspective, but is a really good read nonetheless.

MacKiDo has this article about USB 2.0 and Firewire. It's on the long side and tends to look at things from a Mac perspective, but is a really good read nonetheless.

This article talks in-depth about how badly USB 2.0 will handle heavy traffic.

Here is a particularly interesting note:
There is another issue there as well. If you are going to keep backwards compatibility, then all your older or slow speed devices (like Printers and Keyboards) will slow down the bus. If you have a on slow device (say a printer) that is talking at 12Mbps and taking 50% of the total bandwidth and another device (say a Disk Drive) trying to talk at 240Mbps and they split the bus (each gets 50% of the time) -- then the fast device can really only get about 120Mbps (or less). The slow device is actually stealing 120Mb of potential bandwidth (50% of the time) even if it is only sending 6Mb of data in that time. Now imagine that you have 15 slow devices and one fast one (a not so uncommon scenario)

the only reason firewire hard drives are so expensive and slow is that they have to switch from an ATA interface to a firewire interface. Since apple is including internal firewire ports on the G4, I hope drive makers will be encouraged to make a direct interface drive. Anyway, the connectors on USB suck for high-speed signaling; USB was never designed for this, and it is good for what it does ( I saw this on MacKido) and they have to support older devices. Why does Intel stretch bad standards? Because Apple is charging too much for their interface. ...Anyway, the mackido article is interesting.

Firewire is a lot better than USB and is being adopted outside of the computer industry much faster. Firewire does not need to be hooked up to a computer so it can connect a digital VCR to one of the many Digital TV standards. Intel has chosen to try to push their format instead of embracing Firewire as they once claimed. The problem with USB 2.0 is that it will be significantly slower than FW even at it's maximum speed and it's going to be slow. More companies are beginning to support FW and that will likely to continue. Intel might be an industry giant but there's more to the industry than just them. Of course FW probably doesn't matter much to most Linux/BSD people since it won't be supported on those OS's for a while. Also there's one thing that I heard a lot of here. Apple charges a 25 cent licensing fee per FW port -- not exactly enough to bankrupt a company or a product. If you want to know why so many FW peripherals are much more expensive it's due to the fact that FW isn't natively supported by the hardware. The FW drives that so many called outrageously expensive don't really use FW they are IDE drives with an IDE to firewire connector. FW can also be used internally as a faster solution for internal drives and a replacement for SCSI. FW is also the basis of the high-end peripheral system "device bay" which allows for plug and play drives that are easily swappable. Device bay if it ever gets around will need the bandwidth of Firewire. Anyone wanting a good comparison of USB 2.0 vs Firewire should read http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/USB20.html the article was written before Intel's latest announcements regarding USB 2.0 but most of the information is still very accurate.