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Apple Releases Free, OS-Independent, FireWire SDK
mcwop writes "Apple announced the release of a free FireWire SDK for embedded devices. The kit is not OS-dependent. Is this a response to the release of USB 2.0 or is Apple simply trying to keep a steady stream of FireWire devices coming? What effect will this have on FireWire b? What are the effects on the Open Source community developing FireWire interfaces? Time will tell. Nonetheless this is an interesting development."
...dont we see more .mac?
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Good god, doesn't Smokey the Bear have enough problems without Apple putting FireWire into the hands of everyone ?!
Does this mean firewire support will finally be coming to Virtual Dub? I think vdub is a kick ass program but now that the guy I do capture for has a Sony PCR-DC1 I gotta use premier,
which is sort of fat and bloated (sorry adobe)
This is looking good... Also, the platform-agnostic approach is a good one. What's next, Aqua on Intel? ;)
Then reading the body: [...] The kit is not OS-dependent. [...]
Still, it's definitely good news. With Apple providing royalty free licensing of the trademark, and free SDKs, they have substantially reduced the barriers to other people developing FireWire devices.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/0 7/1328207&mode=nested&tid=129
Also mentioned is a proposal being considered by the FCC that would allow cable companies to 'turn off' the firewire port, which DVR's will use to connect to digital televisions, so that some broadcasts can't be recorded.
(singing on Doors music)
Come one Apple, light my wire...
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
I read the EVALUATION LICENSE, which states for example:
"This Evaluation License does not grant a license to incorporate the FireWire Reference Platform, any portion of it, or any Modification into any board, module, integrated circuit, macrocell, core or other assemble or device. To obtain a license to develop or distribute assemblies incorporating the FireWire Reference Platform or Modifications, visit http://www.developer.applce.com/mkt/swl""
So, it seems that this is strictly for evaluation, or did I miss something?
I have two FireWire ports on my G4, and a nice FireWire cable that came with it. I've never used any of them for a damn thing. My printer connects via USB, my ZIP drive connects via USB, my webcam connects via USB, and of course the Apple keyboard and mouse connect via USB.
It would be nice to see more devices (printers, external HDs) supporting FireWire.
Wow, maybe now will somebody come up with a solution to use digicams as a external storage.
I everytime thought this shouldn't be to difficult.
>> Had I been going to bed earlier every night? Have I been sleeping later? Has Tyler been in charge longer and l
that's right.
Free? Not really, unless you count "evaluation" as free. Or perhaps I'm looking at the wrong thing, hard to tell.
/. that the person and reviewer both actually *read* the information before commenting on it.
Platform Independent? FireWire is, Apple's SDK is not (last I checked).
FireWire SDK. Yes, defiantly.
Well, I guess it *is* too much to ask on
I guess it would also be too much to ask for a link to the actual press release.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Ciryon
As a note to anyone who believes him, he says, "The 1394 drivers somehow interferred with my current DVDROM so that it wouldn't even be seen from DOS or the system BIOS." DOS or the BIOS aren't going to know about what drivers you have installed in Windows; it isn't possible for a Windows driver to cause the BIOS to not see your DVD-ROM drive.
It comes with a USB cable. Look in the box, troll.
heh for real. even if it did mess something up, i dont think you should give up on it, just pee on the company that made that specific product...
Dood. Your problem isn't with FIREWIRE. Your problem is with HP'S SHITTY IMPLEMENTATION of firewire. If yer gonna waste our bandwidth bitching about something off topic, at least get who yer hating RIGHT.
So you bought a crappy interface card with crappy drivers for your crappy OS.. yep, clearly Firewire is to blame here.
-- V
They want some money out of ya. They release the upgrade for the kit in 2 months time as a beta and want $50 for it.
I predict that they will release a firewire mouse with only one button.
I also foresee that Apple will go bust.
As far as the keyboard and mouse...well, let's not push it!
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
funny to see ads for microsoft's products on /.
Anybody know what the status of Apple's firewire patents are? Particularly, expiry dates?
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Way ahead of your: http://dvbackup.sourceforge.net/
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
cause I can't find other dev kits than for mac!
*or have I simply gone blind?*
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
Not sure how much you truly know about that rant, but I know one thing. I have booted from a firewire device - my iPod. The first thing I did after loading it up with songs was install OS X.1 on the thing. Then set the startup disk for my Pismo to the iPod (external firewire drive), rebooted, and there it was booting off the iPod.
Firewire works in a beautiful way. USB sometimes still hangs machines.
Wow, this is really uncharacteristic for Apple. With an SDK out for any OS, we'll probably be getting FireWire support on Linux! It'll be interesting to see how Apple responds when people start buying iPods and using them with their Linux boxen, and when major Hollywood studios start doing their digital video editting on Linux and throw out their Macs. Steve Jobs might not be happy, but Linux users are rejoicing.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
wrog software flame bait. You were supposed to download the 23.7 megabyte tar image called "FirewireRefPlatform.tar" and it is UNRELATED to FireWire Software Development Kit.
Its for firmware designers... the whole point of the story! Not that other thing you must have accidentally located and downlaoded for os driver writers.
Silly!
I know firewire is crappy and slow compared to Fibre or SCSI320, SCSI360, but Sheesh... at least apple did legitimately let people get copies of the Zayante TNF firewire firmware sources that they paid big bucks for. (apple has no good low level coders anymore so they aquire firms and hire lots of consultants).
ypou are free to embed the Zayante TNF firewire firmware sources in devices they can reverse engineer and read out... you may not embed the firmware source in custom ASICS, PALS, custome circuits, or hardware....
DUH!!!!
Its free... but only for firmware stored in roms, eeproms, flashram, etc.
You may not hide your enhancements and bug fixes in silicon that can only be studies using electron microscopes!
Sheesh.
The article is not about the damned SDK (for software drivers for OSses) its for the newly acquired Zayante TNF firewire firmware source.
Its a 23.7 MB download tar file called FirewireRefPlatform.tar and has NOTHING to do with the SDK and is crossplatform.
You are wrong about everything else: the liscense says you may not embed the firmware source in custom ASICS, PALS, custome circuits, or hardware....but only for firmware stored in roms, eeproms, flashram, etc. You may not hide your enhancements and bug fixes in silicon that can only be studied using electron microscopes!
Technally it di not spell out those restrictions so clearly, but its the point of the true "eval" words they meant.
Sheesh.
you are trying to flame troll and I would have ignored you entirely, but I think your +4 modded post was only modded up by other trollers and apple haters.
Did you even stufy the priceless goodies in FirewireRefPlatform.tar?
Did you even read the article?
Do you know what the hell you are talking about?
Quit making assumptions and follow the clearly labelled link in the article and download the FirewireRefPlatform.tar and read its liscence...
It is FREE and the eval part is that you are not allowed to hide the object code and not allowed to keep secret bugs you fix in distributed products without giving back.
Firewire on Mac-O-Sux may be polled slow crap compared to SCSI and Fibre but at least apples press releases are honest...... even if your +4 modded message is not.
Ah people read the license, http://developer.apple.com/firewire/FireWire_RefPl at_Eval_Lic.pdf
Its not Free as in Beer or as in Free to reuse cod entirely..
I hoping Jbos wises up an offers it as open source both the sdk and the ref platform.. but I will not hold my breath
Don't Tread on OpenSource
LOOK HARDER! The article is not about the damned SDK (for software drivers for OSses) its for the newly acquired Zayante TNF firewire firmware source.
Its a 23.7 MB download tar file called FirewireRefPlatform.tar and has NOTHING to do with the SDK and it is crossplatform. (its for firmware programming in embedded controller designs).
Did you even follow the article links?
Firewire on Mac-O-Sux may be polled slow crap compared to SCSI320 , SCSI160 and Fibre but at least this source code is "free" and is os agnostic.
get the tar.
You may not hide your changes to the free source apple bought from Zayante in silicon that cannot be "dumped and reverse engineered.
Zayante TNF firewire firmware sources are truly free, just not for hiding your work in ASICS, PALS, and custom silicon. YOu amy use the FREE source in seeproms, sram, flashram, roms, etc.
The works you create from this "semi-GPL" source apple is spreading is only restricted in that it is for FIRMWARE not circuitry.
DUHHHHH!!! Whay are you mad?
Are you a fab plant? Do you work at Oxford Semiconductor? or LSI? Why are you bitching?
I know firewire is sloww polled non-peer-to-peer under Mac-O-Sux but these priceless goodies make a USB 2.0 cypress ref platform offering look like a sick peice of junk.
Hurray for apple for sharing the Zayante source code they bought.
They never shared lots of other source they bought (AUX--16 million, NeXTStep -- 410 million, etc, and sometimes they only buy object code (OpneBoot FCode interpreter, MacinTalk 1984 human speech engine), but here apple buys some JUICY and PRICELESS firmware source code and lets you have access to it and you do not even bother to accept the fact that its pretty damned near free!!!!
I know MacOSX ( Mac-O-Sux) is polled slow buggy compared to OS 8.6 but at least it offers a few goodies that are decent, even if its firewire is slow and high latency.
Although USB 2.0 may be 480 vs FireWires 400 MB/sec, there are other beneifts to FireWire (other than FireWire 2, at 800 MB/sec, should be out and about this year) like: 1. You don't need a computer to use FireWire. One FireWire device can connect directly to another FireWire device without a workstation. Although we don't see much implementation of this - it would be conventient. How about a FireWire port on my car stereo to connect my iPod? 2. FireWire can carry POWER as well as data. WHen you plug an iPod in with it's FireWire cable, it charges as well as trasmits data through the same cable. In fact, if you should need to recharge away from your computer, the usual AC plug for recharging is a FireWire cable. I do think that Apple fucked up when they made licensing the name so expensive. Instead of one name "FireWire" everywhere you go, you see FireWire on Apple's, iLink on Sony computers and cameras,...etc. With all these different names, nobody realizes how pervasive it is. SOme PC users don't even know they have FireWire, and most Mac users don't know they have "1394".
Uhm,
Shitty HP drive + shitty HP drivers + Shitty HP implementation = shit
Now, where in this equation do you see Firewire ???
BTW,
FW is FASTER than USB 2.0 (max throughput vs. sustained, as mentioned before). Before posting, why not get a clue ?
I'm getting a bit tired of programming a brand new instrument with a 20 year old protocol. I think Firewire would be ideal for that (better than USB).
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
- the firewire stack (the bit this article is intended to refer to, given the release date) is cross-platform but only free for evaluation purposes
- the firewire SDK is not cross-platform
Given the story's so misleading, perhaps an editor could fix it?
They are tons of firewire HDs and CDRW s. Let alone the iPod, scanners and printers.
"you are trying to flame troll..."
"...Mac-O-Sux..."
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
What's the latency on a Firewire message?
I'm working on an instrument with a high data rate (100k samples/sec) and a need for low latency. USB 2.0 high speed would be nice, with its 125 usec frame cycle.
Another issue is electrical isolation. How do you protect your box from another vendor's box that the customer has grounded to the Wrong Place?
Why is that square world icon now the icon for Apple items? What happened to the silver apple?
-- DuckWing
Dude! Grab a cheap miniDV cam, get the Vitrix Echo Transitions to add transporter effects to your home video, Bravo Effects to add the laser blasts, and make "Attack of the Clones" the way it should have been made!
Well, maybe not quite but you can still do a hell of a lot with iMovie and some cheap plug-ins.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
The patents are already included in the price of the chipsets as they are bought by the manufacturer. Currently set on a standard price per product.
I don't know first-hand about FireWire printers, but the FireWire ports seem to be used more for somewhat "specialty" items that need the grunt FW gives. There are plenty of audio and video devices that utilize and depend on FireWire.
At the very least, many musicians use external FW drives to stream digitial audio to, making it very easy to take that raw data to another machine for mix-down, collaboration with other artists, &etc. I'm guessing the video production folks do the same thing.
Don't forget about the various digital media players out there. Very few of these are going to be USB in the future.
-- clvrmnky
Could you clarify the bit about "polled" and "non peer-to-peer"? As far as I know, the FireWire stack on Mac OS X is neither of the above.
External HDs? There are lots of external firewire HDs. I have one sitting on my desk. It even has a pretty blue light. Works peachy. I also have a portable firewire CD-RW drive. Not as pretty, but works keen and requires no separate power cord - gets all the power it needs from the firewire cable. Nice. One of these days (when I actually have money) I'm going to get an iPod which has, of course, a firewire connection. I would gladly give up one of the USB ports on my Powerbook in favor of another firewire port.
--- What?
so, it allows for device independence. this is not the case with usb, whose purpose is to support keyboards and such. sony/apple/panasonic are interested in 1394 since a home network is created through chained connections, as opposed to needing a home switch/hub. there is also wireless 1394...
IEEE-1394b allows for many things, including an optical cable that should solve the electrical isolation problems.
I am not well enough versed on the technical details to glean this info from the technical docs. Can anybody speak to the possibility of me buying an x86 style board someday that can boot from firewire?
Is this a response to the release of USB 2.0 or is Apple simply trying to keep a steady stream of FireWire devices coming?
Why can't it be both?
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
Some higher end TVs are quite "malleable." The Sony Wega series, for instance, has a service mode that allows for manipulating the image like a computer monitor. They also have a set of ID codes which control what features are activated or deactivated. I'd recommend not changing the ID codes unless you know exactly what does what, because you might turn your 36 inch Triniton display with component input into a 27 inch with RCA inputs. Of course, if you actually know what you're doing, you could activate hidden features, such as re-enabling the firewire port even after its been deactivated due to regulations and restrictions.
Firewire is not just a high speed connection for copying files to your iPod or from your camera, it has capabilities that go far beyond. A very good application for firewire is as a cluster computing interconnect.
Among other notable features Firewire has ability to do direct memory access without CPU intervention. It is a very low latency interface. This is a critical factor in tightly coupled clusters using things like MPI (message passing interface).
Apple would like to see people develop firewire as a topology for MPI. I'm not saying this is THE reason for this sdk release, but it certainly is A reason.
What a LaMeR. You give Mac users a bad name. Your ZIP drive is *possibly* one of the only things you mention that should have FireWire, unless that's a nice high-res, high-framerate webcam you're talking about ( it's not )... probably even the ZIP drive is too damn slow to need FireWire.
Get a device worthy of FireWire throughput, and it'll likely have a FireWire connection...
and Sony, Philips, and the others were also getting the royalties.
...and they pretty much set the pace.
My iMac DV is older than your G4, and my two FireWire ports never got a bit of use until I bought my iPod in June. Now, I just use one of them to sync it to iTunes; I recharge from the wall adapter so I don't clutter up my desk too much.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
Your post is redundant (the 6th or 7th at the time you posted). if you browsed at +0 you would know that this was already mentioned buy me 6 times at +0 before your crappy +4 post to a +4 flame bait teaser. At least when I rant I make 100% factually correct and true data packed posts, not inuendos, lies, and fanboy propaganda.
/ IOKit/DeviceInterfaces/WorkingWFireWireDI/FWDevInt erfaces/FireWire_on_Mac_OS_X.html
P ortHubReview.html
As an unrelated note, for example I posted the following that the editor slammed -1 flame because he is an apple appologist, and you probably never saw this unrelated post either, especially if at 10:34AM you redundantly reply to something I addressed at least 5 times already including in the thread above you! (the source being open patform not platform dependant).
. x . x . x . x . x . x
Its POLLED on Mac. No PEER-to-PEER even in OS!
Apple has crippled Firewire capabilities though this firmware source they just aquired is semi good.
If you copy from firewire (IEEE 1394) hard disk to another hard disk the speed is cut in HALF on the mac if not using a second firewire controller card.
Example data comes in from one drive then has to share bus to get recopied bac from mac to destination drive.
Thats seems logical but firewire has PEER-to-PEER block copying that safely works but apple does not bother supporting it in OS X.
Worse... what pathetic support for firewire they do have is usually defective or slow... examples?
Firewire WRITING on a Blue and White G3 tower using default apple ports is limited to HALF SPEED!!!! reading is full speed (38MB sec if the drives such as IBM can handle it).
Firewire is buggy on apples... on occasion particular bit patterns seem prone to causing lockups or hanging on some models.
Apple does not know how to use INTERRUPTS... they poll the firewire. POLL!!!! That does not seem so alarming but in SCSI and ATA on macs you can issue ios during a completion of an io interrupt and that new io can truly start running immediately (after too many recursive completions to prevent stack problems, a defferred completion will unfortunately kick in in some SIMs) but firewire is slow slow slow for transactions per second.
A SCSI320 controller with ONE channel can issue and complete a complete IO in slightly less than 20 mictoseconds round trip.
A 2Gigabit Fibre Channel card on a mac can HONESTLY issue and complete a SCSI command packet in slighlty longer (80 microseconds).
A Firewire packet ???..... HA!!!! don;t make me laugh and spit up the food in my mouth even joking about how slow the mac OS X handles small firewire packets.
some transfer in USER space as a feature (drivers in IOkit must not use that feature to be a valid Darwin boot device though)
speaking of valid "boot devices"..... you CANNOT with any version of mac firmware.... boot a Blue&White G3 tower mac from its firewire ports!!! And other newer macs cannot boot RAID-ed firewire.
Firewire is such a limited slow, buggy, crappy subset of SCSI and ATAPI in many ways that I feel its only suited for video cameras and little toy dongles.
Imagine! Its 2002 and Firewire can only transfer data IN THEORY at a max of about 40 megabytes per second sustained using device chips such as a good Oxford 911 chip.
Meanwhile SCSI160 is 160 megabytes per second (millions-of-bytes per second technically, not MB) and SCSI320 drives are available on price watch for dirt cheap that can transfer data to or from their internal caches at 320 megabytes per second.
Fibre is going to 10 Gigabit tranceivers in 7 months for most of the top 5 vendors for the mac and the cards are laready all PCI-X >500 Megabyte per second pci cards....
while firewire pokes along.
Cypress and 4 other companies make CHEAP usb chips for usb 2.0 which technically are FASTER than firewire.... regretably these usb 2.0 chips usually use a slow crappy 8051 microcontroller, but some of the late-2002 chips can pump 96 MB sec between usb2.0 chip and dma ports. but these things are one FIFTH to one SEVENTH the price of the cheapest firewire chips.
USB is technically a crappy protocol (based on serial chips in many pathetic ways), but I have written low level code for all technologies : SCSI, ATA, ATAPI, USB hihghspeed, Fibre, Firewire, iRDA and I have one thing to say.....
install avirgin copy of OSX 10.1.3 on a dual cpu mac... then attach 6 or 7 firewire drives but make one path go through a high eng belkin 6 port consumer firewire hub.... then copy 40 to 70 gigabytes of mp3s, KABOOM low level user interface freeze repeatable after a few minutes of copying.....
sure repeater power hubs are cool, sure firewire guranteed delivery video streams are cool, sure daisy chaining 6 or more drives into a 63 device tree is cool, sure it all is cool in principle.... BUT IT ALL CRASHES AND IT BUGGY POLLED SLOW JUNK!!!!
I can get a usb controller with 8051 core for one dollar and 15 cents... it might not be as fast as firewire, or USB 2.0, but its a dollar 15 and does not hang a modern unix OS copying mp3s.
Apples web site has the AUDACITY to even MENTION the words PEER-to-PEER SBP-2 as a buzzword on it. really : http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Darwin
and the "cool" high-quality powerred firewire hub that helps the crappy mac OS sieze up is : http://www.macreview.com/Hardware/Hubs/Belkin/FW6
Newest osx10.2 for August build 10.2 6C15 (6C115?) does not seize the user interface anymore by the way, but all versions of Mac-O-Sux (os x) are very very slow for IO latency due to heavy driver model and class-happy insanity (though Objective C is amazingly fast compared to C++).
To reiterate : Apples implementation in OS is POLLED crap. No PEER-to-PEER data! But at least that shrouded new open-platform firmware C code they now have is valuable (because they did not write it).
I posted this again because it got modded to -1 by an apple appologist fanboy.
Your post is an illinformed flame (the 6th or 7th at the time you posted). if you browsed at +0 you would know that this was already addressed buy me 6 times at +0 before your crappy redundant (5th fake flame bait) post based on misinformation.
/ IOKit/DeviceInterfaces/WorkingWFireWireDI/FWDevInt erfaces/FireWire_on_Mac_OS_X.html
P ortHubReview.html
I told people here before you wrote that many many times to LOOK HARDER!
The article is not about the damned SDK (for software drivers for OSses) its for the newly acquired Zayante TNF firewire firmware source.
Its a 23.7 MB download tar file called FirewireRefPlatform.tar and has NOTHING to do with the SDK and it iscrossplatform. (its for firmware programming in embedded controller designs).
Did you even follow the article links?
Firewire on Mac-O-Sux may be polled slow crap compared to SCSI320 , SCSI160 and Fibre but at least this source codeis "free" and is os agnostic. Its jsut as the article factually stated.
get the tar.
As an unrelated note, for example I posted the following that the editor slammed -1 flame because he is an apple appologist, and you probably never saw this unrelated post either, especially if at 10:34AM you redundantly reply to something I addressed at least 5 times already including in the thread above you! (the source being open patform not platform dependant).
. x . x . x . x . x . x
Its POLLED on Mac. No PEER-to-PEER even in OS!
Apple has crippled Firewire capabilities though this firmware source they just aquired is semi good.
If you copy from firewire (IEEE 1394) hard disk to another hard disk the speed is cut in HALF on the mac if not using a second firewire controller card.
Example data comes in from one drive then has to share bus to get recopied bac from mac to destination drive.
Thats seems logical but firewire has PEER-to-PEER block copying that safely works but apple does not bother supporting it in OS X.
Worse... what pathetic support for firewire they do have is usually defective or slow... examples?
Firewire WRITING on a Blue and White G3 tower using default apple ports is limited to HALF SPEED!!!! reading is full speed (38MB sec if the drives such as IBM can handle it).
Firewire is buggy on apples... on occasion particular bit patterns seem prone to causing lockups or hanging on some models.
Apple does not know how to use INTERRUPTS... they poll the firewire. POLL!!!! That does not seem so alarming but in SCSI and ATA on macs you can issue ios during a completion of an io interrupt and that new io can truly start running immediately (after too many recursive completions to prevent stack problems, a defferred completion will unfortunately kick in in some SIMs) but firewire is slow slow slow for transactions per second.
A SCSI320 controller with ONE channel can issue and complete a complete IO in slightly less than 20 mictoseconds round trip.
A 2Gigabit Fibre Channel card on a mac can HONESTLY issue and complete a SCSI command packet in slighlty longer (80 microseconds).
A Firewire packet ???..... HA!!!! don;t make me laugh and spit up the food in my mouth even joking about how slow the mac OS X handles small firewire packets.
some transfer in USER space as a feature (drivers in IOkit must not use that feature to be a valid Darwin boot device though)
speaking of valid "boot devices"..... you CANNOT with any version of mac firmware.... boot a Blue&White G3 tower mac from its firewire ports!!! And other newer macs cannot boot RAID-ed firewire.
Firewire is such a limited slow, buggy, crappy subset of SCSI and ATAPI in many ways that I feel its only suited for video cameras and little toy dongles.
Imagine! Its 2002 and Firewire can only transfer data IN THEORY at a max of about 40 megabytes per second sustained using device chips such as a good Oxford 911 chip.
Meanwhile SCSI160 is 160 megabytes per second (millions-of-bytes per second technically, not MB) and SCSI320 drives are available on price watch for dirt cheap that can transfer data to or from their internal caches at 320 megabytes per second.
Fibre is going to 10 Gigabit tranceivers in 7 months for most of the top 5 vendors for the mac and the cards are laready all PCI-X >500 Megabyte per second pci cards....
while firewire pokes along.
Cypress and 4 other companies make CHEAP usb chips for usb 2.0 which technically are FASTER than firewire.... regretably these usb 2.0 chips usually use a slow crappy 8051 microcontroller, but some of the late-2002 chips can pump 96 MB sec between usb2.0 chip and dma ports. but these things are one FIFTH to one SEVENTH the price of the cheapest firewire chips.
USB is technically a crappy protocol (based on serial chips in many pathetic ways), but I have written low level code for all technologies : SCSI, ATA, ATAPI, USB hihghspeed, Fibre, Firewire, iRDA and I have one thing to say.....
install avirgin copy of OSX 10.1.3 on a dual cpu mac... then attach 6 or 7 firewire drives but make one path go through a high eng belkin 6 port consumer firewire hub.... then copy 40 to 70 gigabytes of mp3s, KABOOM low level user interface freeze repeatable after a few minutes of copying.....
sure repeater power hubs are cool, sure firewire guranteed delivery video streams are cool, sure daisy chaining 6 or more drives into a 63 device tree is cool, sure it all is cool in principle.... BUT IT ALL CRASHES AND IT BUGGY POLLED SLOW JUNK!!!!
I can get a usb controller with 8051 core for one dollar and 15 cents... it might not be as fast as firewire, or USB 2.0, but its a dollar 15 and does not hang a modern unix OS copying mp3s.
Apples web site has the AUDACITY to even MENTION the words PEER-to-PEER SBP-2 as a buzzword on it. really : http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Darwin
and the "cool" high-quality powerred firewire hub that helps the crappy mac OS sieze up is : http://www.macreview.com/Hardware/Hubs/Belkin/FW6
Newest osx10.2 for August build 10.2 6C15 (6C115?) does not seize the user interface anymore by the way, but all versions of Mac-O-Sux (os x) are very very slow for IO latency due to heavy driver model and class-happy insanity (though Objective C is amazingly fast compared to C++).
To reiterate : Apples implementation in OS is POLLED crap. No PEER-to-PEER data! But at least that shrouded new open-platform firmware C code they now have is valuable (because they did not write it).
I posted this again because it got modded to -1 by an apple appologist fanboy.
Do you now see the master plan?
You have to get the ports out there, on most of the installed base-- that means shipping them a couple years.
And THEN you can release a groundbreaking product that uses them, like the iPod.
You would have hated the iPod if you relied on that iMac and didn't have firewire, right?
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
what kind of apple CRAP is that!
Apples such a CRAPPY and GAY company. I'm gona cry now.
True. On the other hand, the FireWire ports and DVD drive were the reason I went with it, instead of spending an additional grand for a G3 tower with external monitor and the same features. I figured that PCI slots for upgradable video were not worth a thousand bucks.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
>>Firewire is already embedded in the market
Sure, 1394 has occupied a certain market share, as you say, primarily on digital video (since the DV format is built around it) and anywhere high speed external storage is required (laptops, macs in general*), and where 1394 ports are included (e.g. Macs, most Sony PCs).
There's also a bit of a market for systems where neither USB 2 or 1394 ports are available and where a new controller card will be necessary either way (e.g. the other 95% of the PC market). Here, the longer history of 1394 means that more devices are available; but it still has to compete with USB 2 in other areas...
>>and while USB 2.0 might become a competitor because of it's name,
ROFL!!! USB 2 is a serious competitor for firewire... But it's primarily because of its backwards compatibility. I can't see the name recognition alone being a big deal.
USB 1.x devices will work fine on USB 2 ports, and most USB 2 devices will work (although at reduced speed) on USB 1.x ports. The manufacturer can replace a USB 1.x chipset with a USB 2 chipset, without affecting compatibility with your existing USB devices at all. It really doesn't cost that much more to build systems with USB 2.
On the other hand, at best, firewire has to coexist with a cheaper low data rate standard of some kind -- it's cost prohibitive to build a firewire mouse. And USB 1.x is already widespread in both the Mac and PC worlds. So, for most PCs, adding firewire support would mean integrating it in alongside continued USB 1.x functionality. More expensive.
Of course, it's important to point out: Less port types for more devices = less confusing; that's "mac-like" for the same reasons as ADB and USB 1.
So, given this, the Mac community's general support of firewire over USB 2 is kind of ironic... But just because they eat the cake doesn't mean they would know how to bake one.
There are lots of spurious comments about the inferiority of USB 2 coming from macheads. As far as I can tell, the trashing that USB 2 is getting is mostly your typical not-early-adopted-here rhetoric, and includes listing of unimportant technical merits (e.g. peer-to-peer -- great for connecting two computers or DV cameras, but needlessly driving up costs for the remaining 95% of stuff you connect to your computer), and pointing at the USB standard's association with Intel (Okay, so what?)
Now, it's valid to point out that the established base of 1394 devices in the Mac world means that Apple is tied to 1394 for the time being, and so their standard USB 1.x + 1394 combination will save money over going to USB 2.x + 1394.
[I could then argue that making users pay for more functionality on every system, even though only a handful of them will actually take advantage of it, is more "mac-like" too. But that would just be me speaking as a cynical PC user. =) ]
>>I think IEEE 1394 will stay on the PC, although mainly used in video.
Oh, of course, I think that 1394 cards will continue to be available. But I don't think 1394 will ever be standard in the PC world in the same way that USB 1.x is and USB 2 will be.
* I don't mean to insult mac users' technical knowledge, but for every machead who's willing to crack open their G4 tower to drop in another HD, there's one who either:
- doesn't know how
- is willing to drop extra $ to avoid dealing with scary computer innards
- owns an imac or a cube and doesn't have that option
- is out of drive bays (or IDE channels and PCI slots for another IDE controller) -- you can't exactly migrate your mac to a full-size tower case with ease, or buy a mobo with more pci slots, you know what I mean? =)
It was a joke about a technology called Firewire.
Light his wire.
Fire his wire.
You are just being a fucking, fucking moron.
unless it took IRQ 15 :) Not that ANY card should ever do that, unless maybe it was half-seated or something... Maybe the DVD-ROM cable came unplugged.?
It's completely inaccurate. The collective ignorance of slashdot must be high for it to have gotten up to 4 in the first place.
"Apple announced the release of a free FireWire _SDK_ for embedded devices. The kit is not OS-dependent.", it didn't say nothing about
" Firewire Reference Platform " so I backed back when I pasted by and saw no SDK.
SCSI320: :)
SCSI at all is to expensive (IMHO), not the less, SCSI320 will force you to rob a small bank in order to afford it
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
Apple will end up putting both ports on upcoming Macs models. Why wouldn't they want to maximize choice? It's not as if the two standards are mutually exclusive.
-- thinkyhead software and media
To the rational mind there can be no offense, no obscenity, no blasphemy- only information of greater or lesser value
Just curious...what standard does the rational mind use to make judgements about the relative value of information? Can that standard be objectively defended using reason alone?
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Hey, I use Macs, am smart and have a big dick! I'm not gay, just a fuckin' wanker!
Rational standards. The very act of being rational requires these judgements. You know what you know for fact, by direct sense of it. You know the rules of logic. You infer from that whether what you're hearing is bunk or not.
If its bunk, you know its not true. If it may not be bunk, you can provisionally say its true. If you know its true, then you know its true.
But you cannot say "That is blasphemy!" and use THAT as an excuse to suppress it. This is what moral relativists and other religious people (such as right wingers and liberals) do all the time-- liberals are always beating the drums of untruth and telling Big Lies-- such that merely saying the truth becomes blasphemy to anyone who has swallowed the Big Lie. An example of a big lie is "obviously greenhouse gasses are leading to global warming". A rational person recognizes that this may be true and there is some supporting evidence, but there is also evidence that brings this into question, so its not "obviously" true.
Those who want you to believe in irrationality use blasphemy as a tool-- they make it unthinkable (ie you're not allowed to think about) the ideas that they disagree with. Such as its not obvious that every human owes every other human their support. Or as Bush recently said, 4 years of our lives giving back to the "greater good". (I thought that's what taxes are.) Thats one of the biggest lies out there.
But they don't try to make a rational case for it, they just repeat it over and over until their followers end up repeating it as well. And standing up to it becomes blasphemy.
Here's another example: To a gay person, saying "yes that person has a right to decide who will live in the apartment they are renting" is blasphemy-- because they belive that "gay rights" triumphs over property rights. They don't. Just as gay people have the right of free association, people who own apartment buildings do as well. If a christian kicks me out of their apartment building because I'm a non-christian, then that is their right (Assumign they follow the lease) I don't want to do business with someone who doesn't want to do business with me. It may not be fair, but it is their right.
But many people say that anything that is "unfair" is wrong-- and that puts you into quite a moral quandry when you think about it. Because life isn't fair and you can't MAKE it fair. But to keep people from recognizing the quandry-- the questioning of it is treated as blasphemy.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
The question is whether reason alone is sufficient to allow a person to make moral judgements about the value of information. My point is that reason is insufficient to provide a moral basis.
.sig was commenting on the superiority of reason because it is "above" judging obscenity, blasphemy, etc, but at the same time asserting that a moral value could be attached to information. That seems illogical to me.
The quote that I was responding to was speaking about assigning value to information. How can anyone, on the basis of mere reason, assign value to information?
The very act of being rational requires these judgements.
Are you speaking of moral judgements - good/bad, right/wrong, or of true/false? Boolean is different from moral.
You know what you know for fact, by direct sense of it.
Do you? I would suggest to you that most of us know very little from direct observation, and most things we accept on the basis of a trusted authority
You know the rules of logic. You infer from that whether what you're hearing is bunk or not.
If its bunk, you know its not true. If it may not be bunk, you can provisionally say its true. If you know its true, then you know its true.
True or false has no bearing on right/wrong.
The
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?