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USB 3.0's New Jacks and Sockets
The Register has a brief look posted (with photos and diagrams) of "USB 3.0, the upcoming version of the universal add-on standard re-engineered for the HD era, made a small appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)." The posting explains that USB 3.0 "wasn't demonstrated in operation, but we did get to see what the new connectors look like." How does it handle backward compatibility? The extra pins needed for USB 3.0 "are placed behind the USB 1.1/2.0 ones. USB 3.0 connectors and receptacles will be deeper than the current ones."
Aargh, this connector is *still* symmetrical vertically in form factor but not electrically. Which means you'll have people fumbling behind computers/laptops turning the connectors upside-down until the cable is twisted trying to plug in their camera/mouse/hdd/coffee maker.
Either change the shape of the connector (something like RJ11 would be fine) or make the pins such that it can be inserted right-way up or upside down (figure-eight power cable connectors for example).
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Well part of it is Firewire isn't a replacement for USB. I haven't seen a Firewire keyboard, mouse, printer, or joystick. Yes it is mediocre all the way around but it works well for some devices that Firewire doesn't work at all for. And works well just okay for many devices that Firewire works well for. Firewire will always be an port you have to get in addition to USB. so it will alway be less popular. But I would agree with you that it isn't dead.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
In case a "clueless user" yanks it "without unmounting properly?" Excuse me, but I don't think that's a matter of the user being clueless. If I have a removable drive, I don't think it's unreasonable to be able to remove it at any time--the OS should expect that. If the OS is still writing data to the drive and there's some kind of window open to that effect, then I'm stupid for disconnecting it in the middle of the process. If I "finished" copying three minutes ago, I don't think it's unreasonable for me to be able to disconnect the drive.
This is why Linux is a great OS for a server but not so hot for the desktop. Write-caching for a USB drive might make sense on a server, but not so much on the desktop.
You can disable caching on Linux with -o sync.
However, neither that, nor what Windows does will prevent damage on a FAT32 formatted device, because the filesystem isn't made to deal with that. And even for a filesystem like ext3, reiserfs or ntfs that will not corrupt itself in this case, you'll still lose data if you yank the drive while a file is being written. Windows will warn you if you yank the drive without telling it to disconnect the drive precisely for this reason.
Really the only way of dealing with this perfectly is making the media impossible to disconnect until the filesystem is dismounted orderly. This can be done with CD and tape drives, but isn't going to work with anything connected to an USB port.