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Linux Kernel 2.6.31 Released
diegocgteleline.es writes "The Linux kernel v2.6.31 has been released. Besides the desktop improvements and USB 3.0 support mentioned some days ago, there is an equivalent of FUSE for character devices that can be used for proxying OSS sound through ALSA, new tools for using hardware performance counters, readahead improvements, ATI Radeon KMS, Intel's Wireless Multicomm 3200 support, gcov support, a memory checker and a memory leak detector, a reimplementation of inotify and dnotify on top of a new filesystem notification infrastructure, btrfs improvements, support for IEEE 802.15.4, IPv4 over Firewire, new drivers and small improvements. The full list of changes can be found here."
Support for what? A quick search of newegg tells me I can't buy a motherboard, add-on card, or peripheral that supports USB 3.0 today. What exactly was windows 7 going to support? An unreleased chipset?
From your own article:
Jeff Ravencraft of Intel said that he expects the final specification to be announced in San Jose, Calif., on November 17.
Wait, so I'm supposed to be upset that Microsoft didn't ship experimental drivers for an unratified standard in their new OS?
OSS made it impossible to play more than one stream at once on a lot of hardware.
With a standard configuration, alsa does also, you have to load the dmix module in your config to act as a software mixer on cards that don't do hardware mixing (most on board bits).
This is where the userspace demons enter it all, most of them just started out as another layer that does software mixing, but every man and his dog came up with his own invention.
As for just using alsa, that's great if you don't mind not having certain functionality, some of the sound demons do add some nice features (jack is the only one I've found worth using though). It could be argued the driver layer shouldn't have to deal with some of that advanced functionality though, another reason why these demons were made.
For tape-based systems, or for situations where a chain of components are expecting a DV stream to be arriving on schedule, you really can't beat firewire. And, for that reason, nearly any PC being used for DV editing will have firewire onboard. Nicer motherboards have it standard, PCI/PCIe expansion cards are cheap if yours doesn't.
However, the trend in camera tech, at least at the consumer level, is making that increasingly irrelevant. Flash and HDD based camcorders are gradually devouring DV camcorders in the lower end market. Pretty much all the HDD or flash based cameras(at least the ones that cost less than the computer they are connected to) just show up as USB mass storage devices, with one or more video files on them. Drag and drop and go. Unlike DV, where the transfer requires that X megabits per second make it from point a to point b, on time, or you'll get glitches, mass storage just requires that all the bits get from point a to point b before the user gets bored. USB still isn't quite as good as firewire at doing that; but the difference in performance is small, and the difference in price/convenience is large.
Once you get away from the real time streaming requirements of DV, to which firewire is well suited, transferring video is just a special case of connecting an external hard drive. Firewire is better there; but only modestly, which isn't really good enough to survive on the price sensitive end of things.