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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."
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? ;)
Read carefully :)
OS-Independent == NOT OS-dependent
Apple Releases Free, OS-Independent, FireWire SDK
Then reading the body: [...] The kit is not OS-dependent. [...]
... which means exactly the same.
The world will end in 5 minutes. Please log out.
Dude... you have contradicted yourself. "OS-Independent" and "NOT OS-Dependent" mean the same thing... :)
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
You know it's like definitely not Non-OS-independent you know.. we like putting things that way...
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?
Doh! It looks like I've not woken up yet this morning. Shame you can't moderate down your own posts... :-(
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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".
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]
Don't you know that's the new Apple slogan?
"Proudly going out of business for over 20 years!"
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Many major hollywood places are using linux in shop anyway... Just not for the editing.
And I have yet to seen any video editing program that is as refined as final cut pro is. i think it would take a while for VIMP or whatever, to get up to speed to where apple is. And I doubt it would be good for any video that is meant outside of the computer (color correction and accuracy don't seem to be big in the linux field yet).
- 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.
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
I have been using FireWire (aka ieee1394) on linux for two years now. Sony Vaio Picturebook and QPS CD-RW.
realkiwi
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.
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
You deserve the flamebait mod.
That Apple had to use TI's first generation FireWire Chips on the Blue and White machines is not surprising-- Firewire was very new then.
That none of their current machines shows they've solved the issue.
That you rant on and on about a machine that shipped three or four years ago, is just silly.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
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
Yeah, Apple sure would hate it if a couple million Linux users bought iPods!!!
Sheesh.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
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? =)
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.?
"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?
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?