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Go Fast With Wireless 1394
Midnight Thunder writes: "According to an article at Firewireworld NEC has developed the first wireless form of Firewire (aka IEEE 1394). Just imagine no cables between your computer and your external hard drive." Or more fun, an ultra-fast AAN (Apartment-Area Network), so you can just trade hard drive contents all day.
For many machine-rooms, 12 metres would be fully sufficient. Just imagine getting away from some of the cables in the storage-arrays (hooray!)
Oh, and FireWire is mostly used for digital videocameras, cd-recorders and other stuff that you don't need to have connected to your computer most of the time. Not having to go look for some connector you put somewhere everytime you want to transfer something from your digicam to your computer will likely be regarded as something wonderful by most people.
About the size: as long as people are perfectly happy with buying FireWire as add-ons to their computers, I can't see why it'd matter much. And there are (to my knowledge) no FireWire-capable palmtops yet. But I'm pretty convinced that smaller chipsets will developed pretty fast if needed. If for no other reason, Apple will probably want such for their next generation of PowerBooks.
Wasn't all the rage 5 months ago stories about how cell phones might cause cancer, tumors etc?
And one month ago, all the rage was stories about reducing the electrical power consumption?
As always, prifacy is a hot-button topic.
So, here we have a technology that increases the EM you are in, uses more power ( a waveguide (ie copper or glass) is always the prefered way to transmit information), AND broadcasts to every tom, dick and larry. And this is a GOOD thing because you have one less wire to manage?
Wow....you must all have very busy lifes that you can't fit wire placement into it, yet find time to worry about privacy/energy use/health concerns about EM.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
The company has achecived full FireWire/1394 speeds of 400 Mpbs up to 12 meters away with line of site connectivity, and 100 Mbs through 7 meters of interior walls.
Q. Can you find the two spelling mistakes (answers below)
A. Achecived and 'line of site'
Just imagine no cables between your computer and your external hard drive
Just imagined it. Wasn't too thrilling though.
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The success of a bus technology depends on much more than the ability to move bits from point A to point B at a certain bitrate, either wirelessly or not.
It depends on the pricing, simplicity, application support model, ease of use, drivers, targeted applications, competition versus cooperations and other company interests, clever marketing and gathering industry momentum. Anyone here on slashdot can probably recite a list of cases where an inferior technology caught on while the better technology didn't make it.
Bluetooth is also coming from an industry with a VASTLY different corporate culture than the industry 1394 is coming from. Never underestimate the effects of corporate culture. Just think of what's happening between the Linux vs. the BSD camps - and they are much closer to each other than the cellular industry centered mostly in northern europe and the consumer electronics centered mostly in Japan.
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
first of all, the FBI'd have to be pretty damn close to monitor these things given the distances involved. but more to the point, this is just transport medium. what you put over it is up to you. as, for that mater, is whether to even use it or not. if you're uncomfortable with having your hard drive contents travel raw over the air, encrypt them. if the latency increase bothers you (which would likely be quite small, given good techniques), than just don't use the technology. the availability of this technology doesn't automatically make things less secure for you.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
The advantage Bluetooth has is that the chipset is extremely small, already here and extremely cheap. I doubt that the FireWire-chipset will be as cheap. But I'd be happy if it was, of course.
Okay, so they made 'firewire'-wireless© Wouldn't that mean they have just developed 'fire' ? Inquiring minds want to know!
If I wanted your data and I was only 7m away, I would pick up your machine and take it away.
And then when I walked in and found some hanging cables where my desktop box used to be, I would know that my data had been compromised.
If you simply sit in the next room and tap, then I'll never know that you've got my illegal collection of Dutch Apple Pie recipies.
(But yes, I too would expect that the security would improve in time. But I expect it to happen only after the first major corporate data heist happens due to an incompetent implementation of Microsoft Active Remote Drive Wireless X Explorer Internet Protocol. (Did I leave out any buzzwords there? :-) Call me a pessimist.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
bruno. too much is not enough.
Is your company running tools written by ma
The company has achecived full FireWire/1394 speeds of 400 Mpbs up to 12 meters away with line of site connectivity, and 100 Mbs through 7 meters of interior walls.
For those of you who are metric-deficient, 12 meters is about 40', and 7 is about 23', neither of which are great distances.
We won't really be able to tell how useful this is until we get a better idea of the size... if you could fit it in a palm pilot that'd be cool but if it takes a full PCI card that's less useful.
...to making truely wearable computers a reality. Just think, no messy wires to get snagged on stuff when you're walking down the street. Sweet!
Now I just need a mobile broadband satelite uplink.
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
With this, I should be able to just put my camera on the table next to my PC, and copy the video over. Or, with a digital video system in my living room, just sit the camera near the VCR/DVD recorder/HDTV/etc, and play/duplicate/etc. the footage.
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I am. And I'm imagining how much fun it could be to eavesdrop on disk reads through "7 meters of internal walls."
You may mod me down now.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Whjat does this mean for Bluetooth? I would think that having wireless FireWire would eliminate the need for bluetooth. But then Bluetooth has some serious backing, like Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, etc. But then Sony, Apple, etc are supporting FireWire....I just hope this doesn't lead to another VHS vs BetaMax war.
If they can actually ship some products using the technology then I can see this replacing Bluetooth before it even got started. I think I've seen a totally of three Bluetooth products, none of which were particulary appealing, for example I can move that radiation spewing phone from next to my head and replace it with a radiation spewing headset and this will only cost me more than the phone originally cost ? Excuse me if I don't queue up for it. I'd like to see Wireless Firewire replace all cables in the computer industry, no more cables in the case, in fact why even bother with a case anymore ?
These guys have it all wrong. Wireless hard drives may be cool and all, but I think that this has greater implications for wireless ethernet as well as FireWire/USB-like devices. Imagine being able to take your laptop into your room and suddenly have a 400Mb/sec connection to the rest of your LAN (assuming you have gigabit, but even if you only have 100BT, it's still better than 11Mb/sec IEEE 802.11). Or, with the external devices, imagine setting your digial camera down on your desk and starting the image transfer without having to mess around with a cable. This would significantly reduce the amount of wire mess around your computers as well as significantly improve "ease of use".
I hadn't heard this news before, so I'm not complaining that it's stale. I am, however, wondering what's happened since.
The article says NEC expected to ship product by the end of 2000. Did that happen???
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
Is this going to be another WEP that we can all rush to deploy and then get caught with our pants down around our ankles?
While having a 400 Mbps wireless bus available to every device in my home would be nice, I'll wait for the evaluation from the security community before I brand wireless FireWire the Next Big Thing.
As I recall the whole idea behind FireWire is the ability for the end user to easily integrate greatly-varied appliances in a seamless network. The video recorder knows its a video recorded, and when hooked by IEE 1394 to an audio amplifier says "hey I can send audio data to you, I'm a video recorder." The amplifier replies "I am an audio amplifier. Only send me this kind of audio data, not video." No more multiple s-vhs/RCA/component/right/left/middle/VGA cables intertwined behind the entertainment center. Everything's in one thin cable, and any enabled device that is hooked into this network identifies itself and integrates seamlessly.
Do I really want Windows XP via wireless FireWire to serve out my recorded HDTV programming, music files, and Office XP spreadsheets to my neighbor, who lives less than ten meters to the north of my PC?
Uh ... No ...
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Good ideas here:
* Wireless Firewire - can mean wireless SCSI, networking, hard drive interfaces, scanners, printers, terminals, hi-fi speakers, personal electronic devices, etc. The key is that it'll support a lot of stuff altogether, and it can be the unifying wireless standard for any kind of data transfer.
* Blazing fast transfers without stuffing Ethernet cords under doorways and around ceilings.
* Wireless Hot Plug-n-play. Now Grandma will be teaching YOU how to install a hard drive.
* Goes through walls. I can see it now... a small, hidden camera mounted on an office wall, and on the other side of the wall, a huge 7 foot tall plasma display showing what's going on in the room next door. One-sided mirrors are obsolete.
* Now you don't have to get up to walk down the hall to get your co-worker's new Linux distro CD - it's faster to just hit a button.
* Church will teach that two things are omnipresent: God, and Napster.
* In 50 years, the Re-Commuting revolution: people get sick and tired of working in their pajamas at home with the kids, so they demand to go back to the office, wait in traffic every morning, dress in suits every day, and stare the boss in the eye when he says something like "This Firewire router isn't wireless... I have to plug in this power cord!"
* Sneaky hackers send pirate Firewire signals to Bill Gates' toaster, making him start off every day on the wrong foot when he burns his toaster strudel.
* Combine Wireless Firewire, IPV6 Multicasting, and Jenna Jameson. You may never leave your bedroom again.
Bad things:
* If you think too many of us are lazy, nerdy, and obese NOW...
* Movie theaters, restaurants, and other public places become highly annoying when all you hear is "File's Done!" from everyone's Palm Pilots.
* Privacy becomes a non-option. Hackers know everything you type, everything you download, and every web site you visit. Blackmail becomes the world's most profitable organized crime business - people get frustrated to the point where they'd rather be murdered.
* Randomly inserted 30-second commercials in EVERYTHING. That digital picture frame of Aunt Mabel on your desk becomes a Preparation-H advertisement 3 times a day.
* Doctors increase the average lifespan from 40 to 70 magically with new subcutaneous electromagnetic shielding. But then your cellular head-implant telepathic device stops working when you turn your head a certain way.
* Cmdr Taco enjoys your porn folder so much that it becomes Link-of-The-Day. Your hard drive burns your house down, kills your two dogs, and half the Tri-State region is Slashdotted. You cry on the curb about your lost porn folder.
* Larry Ellison's Network Computer predictions come true. But he still won't shut up.
* You know those annoying songs that you can't get out of your head? The RIAA does that quite literally down the line.
* The next World War foregoes traditional weapons for psychological warfare - Allied forces clog the spectrum with Vanilla Ice songs, and Axis powers transmit episodes of "Full House".
* Finally, you can't get into the hot New York clubs with overclocked pants anymore. It's their way of weeding out the undesirables.
Hey guys, here I am, posting back at the Dot. I hate to always have to be the boring guy, but somone has to steer the conversation back to the bottom line. With all this fancy technology, someone has to keep the thread focused. Someone has to stop and take a good hard look at new technologies like these and see what they really offer.
Sure, we all want faster connections. We all want to be able to stay in touch with our co-workers, we all want to make e-business ran faster and more smoothly. You and I both wish we had unlimited bandwidth available to wistfully wile away the hours sending faxes and Excel spreadsheets. I know how addictive hard work can be. I too remember that first time I sent a memo through my corporate network, the giddy high it left me with. I remember the hot rush of blood in my face and the tingle in the hairs on the back of my neck as as I did something sinful, something dirty. I too am guilty. But we've got to ask ourselves, will this new technology really deliver? When it comes down to it, the question begs to be asked:
Will this new technology revolutionize how I download pornography?
I'm sorry to have to be the one to bring up the hard questions, but as we know, Slashdot is about the facts. It's about responsible journalism. This is not the time to loose sight of that mission. If we all work together, even the really tough topics, like porn, video games, and pirated music can be discussed in an environment conducive to interesting, insightful, and informative discussion.
Good luck, and be strong. We can make a difference.