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Firewire Receives An Emmy
AxsDeny writes: "The makers of the ever-so-popular FireWire, Apple Computer, are being given an Emmy by the television industry. Apple will receive the primetime Emmy, which is given by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, in a ceremony later Wednesday at the Goldenson Theatre in Hollywood. " So, maybe we can start giving Pulitzers for better keyboards and Oscars for a printer that really prints scripts well. Heh.
In a similar stance, the Coca-Cola Company has been given the lifetime achievement award by the ACM for keeping programmers coding
moderators: -1 to this story for woo-f*ing-hoo
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
...for DMCA.
Freaking industry whores.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Actually, Apple came up with it.
It was Firewire first, then it was IEEE-1394.
Apple came up with the technology entirely independent of anyone. It's then handed to the IEEE for standards-recognition. Apple controls the technology, IEEE controls things about branding and reviewing the technology itself, etc.
So you're wrong, it IS Apple's.
FireWire = IEEE 1394 = Sony i.LINK
As of right now, FireWire is the #1 recognized brand of IEEE 1394.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Gandhi's a plagiarist. That quote originally came from Oscar Wilde.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
As television is s technical medium, advances in video arts and sciences have always been the subject of Emmy awards! When I was at Zenith, while it was a real corporation and not just a brand name, we had two Emmy's that were proudly displayed in our lobby. One was for the invention of TV Stereo, and I believe the other was something to do with digital TV.
Dog is my co-pilot.
You OSS people are all just jealous because Linux didn't get one.
Why are you comparing Software to hardware?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
For what..."Best comedy?"
I mean, the DMCA...it's a joke, right? I mean, all this stuff with Sklyarov, Felten, and that Norwegian kid...it's not really happening, right? I keep waiting for someone to say, "Ha ha, jokes on you!" and suddenly I wake up from the bad dream and the DMCA (Devil's Media Coercion Act) is history...
Publicity stunt? What did Apple have to do with it from a marketing standpoint? They regularly give an Emmy for this sort of thing - technological advances in TV and film.
Macintosh humor! MacComedy.com
There's an award for "A Sleazier Piece of Crap Than Temptation Island?"
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Again, yes...Apple did create Firewire-IEEE 1394-iLink.
Actually iLink is a little different. It uses a 4 pin interface instead of the 6 pin that the rest of Firewire uses, the two pins missing are the power pins.
IIRC, They give out special Technical Oscars.
They aren't awarded at the show, but in a special ceremony before hand.
My former employer, AVID won one, and had it displayed in the lobby for quite some time.
The Mac really has done quite a bit of work in making video editing on a professional level possible. I think that their recognition is a "Good Thing" (tm)
Colin Davis
Colin Davis
It's Apple's technology.
It's an IEEE standard! You can get FireWire PCI cards! How is that proprietary?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
On the other hand, this is not news for nerds, and I don't really care much about anyone who wins an Emmy, so I'm a little disappointed to see it on
Why Apple for it's FireWire and not IEEE for it's same 1394-1995 spec or Sony for it's i.Link (again the same)? Because Apple is the one that did the development and the popularizing of the technology thus their holding the majority of the patents & controlling the licensing.)
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
This isn't too surprising. The 5C coalition (includes all major video equipment manufacturers and many content producers) are about to eliminate your ability to record any form of audiovisual entertainment without their prior consent.
How? HDCP/DTCP (see http://www.digital-cp.com/). They will require all audiovisual equipment (your receiver, DVD player, cable box, speakers, TV, STB, VCR, etc.) to connect to each other via firewire, to ensure end-to-end digital transmission.
Why end-to-end digital transmission? Two reasons:
1) They don't want you recording anything without their permission. Content will have a set of bits that define if and how many times it may be copied, and at what resolutions. There's a possibility this new equipment will also incorporate the ability to restrict the number of times it may be viewed as well. The entire bitstream will be encrypted. No "approved" device, no content. Period. And they reserve the right to remotely disable any device at any time.
2) They want to control the AV quality of what you watch. Want to watch Pay-per-view? Great. Want to cough up an extra $5 to watch it in 1080i or 720p? You don't? Too bad. 480i for you. Want to watch the Superbowl in anything other than 480i? Are you ready to pay for the privilege? You'd better be. Want to watch HD content? Better be 5C compliant; they won't allow that over analog connectors at all.
Some people already aware of these issues say "Don't worry; it'll be years before even the first pieces of 5C equipment are available at the high-end, and more years before it's achieved enough penetration to matter."
Perhaps. But the penetration has begun. Sony is now selling the KDP-34XBR2, the first in a series of 5C-compliant sets. It's in stores. Sony's cut a deal with Cablevision to roll out 5C-compliant cable boxes (Sony is a member of the 5C coalition).
It's not a matter of if, but when. A matter of months rather than years.
Yes, the movie industry is all aflutter about IEEE 1394 (aka FireWire). And that's because it's the delivery vehicle for their final and total control over what you see, how you see it, and how much you're going to pay for it.
.@.
Um, you mean an Oscar, right? Emmys are given for television where Oscars are given for films...
And everything you just named is a film...
GPL Deconstructed
``ever-so-popular FireWire''
Heh, right. I wish it was more popular -- it seems like great technology, but from what I've seen, so much has been encumbered by proprietary technology and software interfaces. (or, at least, that seems to be why it isn't supported all that well in Linux yet).
Of course, I could be completely wrong..
You've got several good replies, but in bits and pieces...
Apple did...
They created FireWire
They gave it a snazzy name
They got it IEEE ratifed as IEEE-1394
They created workstations and laptops with Firewire integration
They created software (iMovie, iMovie2, and FinalCutPro) to integrate said workstations with FireWire camcorders
Gigabit ethernet, for streaming of large digital files to and fro
What Apple didn't do...
Create digital camcorders
Create FireWire camcorders
Create FireWire hard drives
Create FireWire CDRWs
Those are key components of this award, however =)
GPL Deconstructed
I guess you have been misinformed, at least a little bit.
Macs do all of the above, now, what with iMovie and iMovie2, straight out of the box, without dealing with buying a video card and software, etc.
Grab a digital video camera, an iBook, and you have yourself a portable digital video workstation. Not terribly powerful, mind you, but very convenient.
Working over USB? How the heck do you capture film, then? From a video source to a box to be compressed before sending it over the meager USB line? Last I checked, the video quality over most USB video boxes was 320x240 motion jpeg at a fairly low framerate... as opposed to the DV standard of 720x480 DV compression at 29.xx fps...
Similarly via the ATI AiW card, though they probably get better framerates and resolutions... on the other hand, that's entirely dependent upon the CPU speed and the ability of the AGP bus/drivers to stream the data to the CPU to compress on the fly.
The whole point of the award and the contribution Apple made, with FireWire and their Macs, is that *any* two bit (well, I guess most television studios would prefer a more impressive title) hack director can make movies and films for a measly $2k investment. Television studios can now use FireWire CDRWs, DVD-Rs, HDs, camcorders, Macs, and software to keep the entire production chain digital and seemless.
So that's why Apple gets the award for FireWire =)
FireWire gave them the technical advantage.
GPL Deconstructed
It looks like Linux supports camcorders, storage devices, and even FireWire networking. (Apple invented FireWire, yet they don't even support FireWire networking!) I'm sure there are bugs, but in general I can't think of anything missing.
Is it really that bad?
Anyway, it seems to me that paying per quality of broadcast is reasonable.
On the other hand, being told what I can or can't do with something I've paid for doesn't seem reasonable at all!
GPL Deconstructed
You forgot reason #3, converting between analog and digital adds a process and the risk off loss. While it is theoretically possible with perfect waves to do these conversions loss free, realty results in loss. Additionally, analog signals are more likely to degrade. As long as the bits (1s and 0s) are still detectable, digital signals are "perfect" (as in, they remain identical to the original, which is an imperfect representation of the analog world, of course). Run analog wires by electric fields and you get distortion!
Have you set up a modern AV system? You need component video for digital clarity and HDTV, you run digital outputs for DTS or Dolby Digital discrete codings. You need an intelligent receiver to decode these signals, otherwise each of your devices needs to run 6-8 (5.1 - 7.1) analog outputs into the receiver.
It's a nightmare.
Then for more fun, hook in devices that don't support the latest standards and you run RCA cables or S-Video. Conversion between standards is messy, so either you pick one for your entire system of you have your Television swap around.
Philips has a line of programmable remotes that tops out at $1000 to deal with this situation!
Firewire would eliminate this all. In addition to a digital signal (which we have with digital audio and component video), you have its networking ability. That means no more confusing wiring!
Want to record from the Tivo/Replay to the VCR? Make sure you set up the VCR as an input AND output to the receiver, then set the input to the Replay and the output to the VCR. Receiver can't handle two separate input/output combos? No watching TV while you record.
Contrast this to the potential for a Firewire System. Run a long series of Daisy chains (or connections to the receiver, irrelevant) together and hook it into a MUCH simpler receiver.
Want to record from the Tivo to the VCR? No problem, hit a button, and the Tivo sends the signal straight to the VCR, without involving the receiver.
Want to record a CD mix onto the CD-Recorder while watching a DVD? No problem, the CD-jukebox and CD-R deal with each other without involving the receiver.
An all digital signal produces a better sound and video experience. Hell, some of the speakers do their own amplification so you can keep it digital to the speakers.
Firewire takes this to the next level and empowers the devices to do more.
Will this happen immediately? Of course not.
Will the RIAA and MPAA like it, maybe not.
Will someone produce this tech and take the A/V world by storm? Absolutely.
Firewire makes it possible to do things people don't realize are possible in the A/V world.
Get out of your Slashdot paranoia. Realize that improvements in technology can actually be GOOD for consumers.
Didn't those Jeff Goldbloom ads win an emmy too?
If not those then it was some other Apple ad. In any case, the threat of Jeff Goldblum probably doesn't frighten the emmy people much.
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
Yes, I believe that was called "Who wants to marry a millionare." Another wonderful show brought to you by Fox Networks.
It's not like they convinced NASA to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars (what's the going $/kg-to-LEO again?) to ship up a cardboard cutout of Steve Martin as part of a lame publicity stunt that doesn't do much more than demonstrate of governmental support of...
Oh, wait, the MPAA already did that with the Oscars, didn't they?
Publicity stunt? What did Apple have to do with it from a marketing standpoint? They regularly give an Emmy for this sort of thing - technological advances in TV and film.
/. readers, Apple can magically choose to be given an award.
;-)
I think from the POV of some
I wonder if these same people think the actors can decide "I think I'll win one this year" as a publicity stunt.
Maybe their agent recomended it?
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
Sidenote - Last I checked, FireWire = IEEE1394, which is a standard. Apple didn't invent it.
Who do you think submitted it as a standard? Apple's highspeed video transer system wouldn't go very far if camera manufacturers couldn't use it. So, like many things, they proposed it as a standard. Apple owns the trademark on the name FireWire though, which is why other people either call it 1394 or think up clever names like iLink.
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
...Apple did create Firewire-IEEE 1394-iLink...
As far as I know and many people in this thread seem to agreee, iLink is Sony's implemntation of Firewire.
Maybe that's scheduled for next week.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Standardization in the communications industry works like this:
1) Someone thinks up a cool technology (tokenring)
2) Someone usually thinks up a cool technology like 1) but not quite compatable (ethernet)
3) both (all) competing companies and anybody else who is interested goes to the standards commitiee (ISO, IEEE, etc) where they try and come up with a standard that is a good comprimise
4) sometimes same but incompatable standards are produced and their left to fight it out
In this case Apple invented the technology, but when they put it to the standards commitiee, they loose absolute control over where the technology goes, but they still have a major influence
Future DVD players will be able to have FireWire outputs as long as they use DTCP.
I can only get an Onyx or O2 from SGI. Grow up.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
you make and ass out of u and me... and I am no ass.
Check your facts. "Open Firmware is the name given to the IEEE-1275 Standard for Boot (Initialization Configuration) Firmware: Core Requirements and Practices." http://www.openfirmware.org/
No thats not very open nor is it standard!
I first heard about engineering Emmy awards, when I noticed that my boss had one. He got it for developing the closed-captioning system when he was working for PBS.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Uhuh... How does FireWire work?
You plug one end of the FireWire cable into your Mac
You plug one end of the FireWire cable into your digital camcorder (sorry, you need a FireWire capable digital camcorder for this to work!)
Make sure the camcorder has been rewound (silly, but important)
Open iMovie, Premiere, Final Cut Pro, whatever.
Using the appropriate dialog box... hit import. Stop when all the film has been captured.
A few minutes later, and perhaps 20gb later, you've just transferred all the video at 720x480 at 29.xx fps onto your Mac.
Using the appropriate software, edit movie. Then, if you have PowerBook or iBook, show it to people on a TV, or tape it to VCR, or burn it to a CD, or something.
Worst case, you can dump it back to your digital camcorder via FireWire, and bring that around to show people.
FireWire is a transmission protocol... sorta like ethernet and TCP/IP, sorta like SCSI, sorta like IDE and ATAPI, sorta like USB. It just happens to be simple, like USB, cheap, like IDE, smart, like SCSI, and flexible, like TCP/IP.
The only other PC solution, but the way, even similar to Apple's machines, is Sony, I think.
GPL Deconstructed
I wonder if these same people think the actors can decide "I think I'll win one this year" as a publicity stunt.
Maybe their agent recomended it?
Care to back that up with any sort of factual information or logical reasoning at all? or are we supposed to take for granted that you're some sort of genius that can see past the shallow institutions that we mere mortals operate under?
in other words, i cry BUNK.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
It's an IEEE standard! You can get FireWire PCI cards! How is that proprietary?
because they chose to license it, and later they chose to let an independent org (which they have a big stake in) control the licensing.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
I sort of see this coming from both sides. On the one hand, FireWire can be a big deal for video processing -- makes the editor's job a lot easier. On the other hand, Steve Jobs, CEO of Pixar, is an insider if I ever saw one...
I take the middle road on this one. FireWire is deserving, in a nuts'n'bolts sort of way, but I suspect that if it had been Intel that invented it and not long-time industry darling Apple (or, perhaps, equally-and-then-some-connected Sony) I don't know if it would have gotten the award.
I say congratulations*.
/Brian
Is it really that bad?
Well, that depends on your point of view.
I look at it this way:
1. It is assumed that I will infringe on the copyright holders intellectual property rights. Thus, I am being treated as a criminal. A rather disrepctful way to treat your customers.
2. My fair use rights are ignored and eliminated.
3. I am expected to pay and pay and pay. I find this outright greed offensive.
4. The ability to timeshift, which in the US was held by the supreme court to be legal, is being taken away. This sucks.
5. Further disrespect for your customers by crippling technology. This can be seen in the DVD region encoding system and in CD watermarking today. And in the future by not providing the best format (i.e. 480i vs 720p) or not allowing comercial skipping (available today via ReplayTV's 30 second skip button or via fast forward on Tivo and VCRs). I find this offensive as well.
My overall sense of the situation is that the 'content' companies care not for their customers but only for their bottom lines. Ignoring the fact that if you take care of the customer the bottom line will take care of itself.
And thus, because the content companies want to squeeze every last penny out of their users (think addicts) HDTV, high definition audio (SACD and DVD Audio), digital music (MP3 et al), TV via the web (think of a sporting event in hidef with hyperlinks to stats, player profiles, etc. Broad band's killer app?) have all been delayed.
So is it really that bad? I think so. The technology is there. Yet as with the VCR, (which became a cash cow for the movie industry), instead of embracing new technology and the new revenue streams it would create, they are fighting it every step of the way.
And I think that sucks big time.
Steve M
I think copy protection sucks.
I also think that the rats nest of wires connecting my A/V equipment sucks.
My current system has a digital cable signal coming in with analog out going to a ReplayTV which digitizes the signal to store on the hard drive and reconverts it to analog to send to the TV which has an internal line doubler which redigitizes it. (Along with a DVD player, a VCR, a CD changer, a cassette deck, a turntable, a receiver, a second receiver, eleven speakers, a CD player, a computer, a phone connection, and a power conditioner. And lots of cables.)
So I too look forward to a firewire type single cable system that keeps everything in the digital domain.
A firewire system of this type was demoed at the Consumer Electronics Show a couple of years ago. Only the greed and disrespect for their customers of the content companies has prevented it from showing up in your favorite electronics store.
But an all digital system need not have any copy protection.
If only there was an electronics company that had the balls to tell the content companies to stuff it.
Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon.
And that sucks.
Steve M
CNN is replacing their analog edit suites and betacams with PowerBooks, Final Cut Pro, and DV camcorders. Instead of $300,000 of equipment in a dedicated room with 10 people running it, they send out two people in a car with a camcorder and a PowerBook and they get back a finished report (fully edited) before the car gets back to the office. FireWire makes this possible. All of the methods that were used to make TV five years ago are now being replaced with FireWire-based solutions. It's the standard for moving digital video around.
Emmy's are given by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (who are less than a block from my studio in North Hollywood) and are not publicity stunts. They take this as seriously as anybody takes their own core business. FireWire is a revolution in TV, and they're just thanking Apple for inventing it, having the foresight to do it right, too.
Yamaha's mLAN, which is the leading candidate for replacing MIDI and also moving multitrack audio around, also runs over FireWire, so the music industry is ready to go down the same road as the TV people. mLAN support is in Mac OS X 10.1, so this September will be the start of that process.
If you haven't used FireWire yet, go out and get yourself an adapter for your computer and get into it. Even just adding a hard drive with no drivers and no rebooting is pretty cool. Or 20 hard drives.
> How proprietory are the roms? Very.
The Mac doesn't use ROM's anymore, not for years. In fact, machines that have ROM's can't boot Mac OS X at all, you have to have a machine that uses Open Firmware, which is an IEEE standard "BIOS" that Sun and others also use.
Today's Macs are one of the most standard machines you can find. Almost every component is either a true or de facto standard, including both hardware and software. Mac OS X is even POSIX compatible.
I think what the original poster here meant was that it takes a certain level of system integration to do some of the heavy multimedia lifting. A good example is making DVD video discs. If you buy any PowerMac except the basic one, you get everything you need included to do a DVD video disc right. Some parts are hardware, some parts are software, and a major part is tuning the software and hardware to work together. Other manufacturers just don't do that level of system integration. Apple even sells DVD-R's cheaper than anybody else, which is another component of selling DVD-making solutions.
> They didn't create "FireWire"
... snazzy name
... fine
Yes, they did. It's in the article. That is why they are receiving this Emmy.
> as far as I know, they don't make digital video
> editing software.
The most popular consumer DV editing software is Apple's iMovie. The most popular professional DV editing software is Apple's Final Cut Pro.
> they don't make cameras
They don't make them, but every digital video camcorder has a FireWire port on it, and this makes them much more useful. Unedited video is like watching paint dry. If not for FireWire, I'd have a camcorder and a whack of boring videos stored on cassettes. Instead, I run through the same handful of cassettes over and over as I capture video, and then transfer to the computer and edit right away and then reuse the tape. The edited versions are stored on DVD video discs, which are easy to make and look great thanks to Apple's iDVD.
> "FireWire"
The snazzy name is not just marketing. Technically unsophisticated Mac users can quite commonly tell you all about how to use FireWire and AirPort, but will give you a blank stare if you so much as whisper "IEEE 1394" or "IEEE 802.11b" at them. The names are descriptive, and Apple's implementations are complete, straightforward, and easy to use. The world is not made up entirely of geeks. However, the fact that both FireWire and AirPort are compatible with IEEE 1394 and IEEE 802.11b respectively makes them geek-compatible as well. That's something Apple didn't used to do, but has been very good at for the past few years, culminating with Mac OS X.
> If they are given an Emmy for having nice-looking
> monitors
This award is not really about how good the technology is, it's about the fact that for years people in TV have been saying "how will we go digital?". What is going to replace the venerable analog connections that wire up a TV studio? How is a TV director or editor going to work on a notebook computer, the way that a writer has been able to for a while? FireWire is the answer to all of this. If you were a TV director who was used to booking $2000/hr editing time in a room full of TV's and VCR's and rushing through a project, a $5000 package of PowerBook G4, Final Cut Pro software, and a good DV camcorder that can do all that and more (you have a camera, too) without watching the clock is _creatively liberating_. It's enabling not just more work to be done cheaper, but better work as well. For example, a director can make basically unlimited rough cuts that lead to a final cut that is really true to the creative vision. That's why Apple is getting an Emmy.
FireWire is not a computer technology. FireWire ports are on some HDTV's, all digital VCR's, all digital camcorders, some set-top boxes (TiVo is one), storage devices of every description (hard disks, DVD-RW/CD-RW, CD-RW, tape drives, etc.), printers, scanners, pro audio hardware, and on concept stereos if not on shipping ones (replacing all of the analog connections, including the ones between amp and speakers). Yes, and they're on all Macs built in the last year or two and also on about 40% of new Wintel machines, too (via add-on cards).
... nice value point that my 1999 Macs have the same I/O as a 2002 PC).
The key here is that you don't have to include a computer in a FireWire bus for it to work (unlike USB). A computer is just another device on the bus, which can hold 63 devices. You can plug a digital VCR and camcorder together and share information. You can plug amp and speakers and display onto that same bus and now you have a home entertainment center. You can plug a decoder of some sort onto a VCR and they will work together. You can plug a hard disk onto a TiVo. What makes it so easy is that it is entirely hot-plug and self-configuring, and to add a device, you just plug it onto the last device on your chain. Setting up a future digital home entertainment center will just involve hooking up the components with FireWire cables, one into the next, in any order, as long as you don't make a loop. Almost anybody can do that.
Anywhere you need to move a bunch of digital media around, it is being done today with FireWire, and for the foreseeable future, too. If you're not using it now, you probably will be soon. You'll buy a TiVo and it will be on there, or a new computer and it will be on there (Intel is going to put it on their mobos from now on, too
The reason Apple is getting this Emmy is because in the last two years, the TV industry has seen FireWire ports appear on all of the devices that they use, from camera to TV and everything in between. Hard not to ask "who invented this magical technology that has enabled us to move digital video around over wires instead of analog video on huge 1/2 inch video cassettes?" It's a very big deal to replace an analog editing suite with a PowerBook and a camcorder and a Final Cut Pro and get better results at a small fraction of the price, too.
DTCP has nothing to do with FireWire. Windows Product Authorization runs over the Internet, does that mean the inventor of the Internet is responsible for Windows Product Authoriaztion?
What you're missing is that DTCP and similar show up whenever you go from analog to digital. It's like a buffer. Companies pay millions of dollars to fuck around with these little schemes until such time as they realize that digital actually has benefits and embrace digital, and the sky didn't fall in, and it cut costs as well, and yada, yada, yada. Even with CD's, which don't have a copy protection scheme built-in (at least until recently), the high financial and technical cost of making CD's in the early 1980's was seen as a form of copy protection. Nobody thought of protecting the bits since they were so fucking hard to get onto the disc in the first place. Now, we see making a CD as trivial, but that only started many years later.
Some people here seem eager to knock Apple down, or paint them as some kind of evil and/or stupid company. I submit that this is a legacy of all the FUD we were fed along with our Wintel PC's in the 1990's. If you want to fight FUD, go to apple.com and see for yourself if Bill Gates was right all those years ago. Personally, I think post-NeXT Apple is the very definition of doing-it-right, right here, right now. They are smart, and their products are excellent, and unreasonably compatible while Microsoft's get less compatible. When the XBox becomes the Microsoft PC and three of the six big Wintel vendors fold and the other three survive by building XBoxes, all the former Apple FUD-meisters are going to look so idiotic with their "proprietary hardware" rants.
Think about this for a second: Microsoft's response to the digital music revolution was to replace the MP3 codec in Windows with one that tops out at 64kbs, and offer customers their own Windows Media Audio instead; Apple's response was to hire the developer of the leading Mac Shareware MP3 player, bring the product in-house, make the product easier to use, put it on every Mac they ship as well as offer it free on their Web site, release a series of iMacs with funky patterns inspired by MP3 visualization, and put out commercials featuring Barry White, Lil Kim, Smashmouth and many others with the tag line "It's your music. Rip. Mix. Burn."
So which of these companies just doesn't get it on copy protection?
FireWire makes connecting any 2 to 63 digital media devices together easy and cheap. Someone will find a way to abuse the resulting power; I think even more will eventually find much more interesting ways to enjoy it. So abuse it or enjoy it already. Either way, we have no choice but to go from analog to digital, because there are just way, way too many advantages to digital.
FireWire and 1394 are the same thing, and use a 6-pin connector and are powered. iLink is unpowered and has a 4-pin connector. A 4-to-6 pin cable is all you need to go between the two, and they are cheap. All FireWire cables are cheap, because they're serial, not parallel (only one wire, not many).
Component video is analog.