intel being the owner of the USB spec, we would suppose they think they stand the most to profit if they corner the markets on interconnect.
And that is precisely what they are trying to do. They killed UWB because they couldn't control it.
But they're just fouling their own market. If that market didn't have a huge overlap with the rest of the computer industry, I'd say let them commit technical suicide, and be done with them.
What bugs me is that it seems to me that intel is trying to re-invent USB to do what firewire already does.
Compatibility here is an illusion. You're not going to hook a USB 3 device to a USB 2 port (or vice versa) on a regular basis. Most people simply will never do it, and those who actually need to do it will buy some special controller that makes it work for real, rather than relying on the half-baked compatibility in the spec.
Why bother? We already have firewire to USB converters.
Lousy Xebec controller that started it all. I think it was designed by someone who didn't know that the 8086 had a lot more port addresses than the 8080.
And, yes, the Xebec controller was integrated, so to speak.
When I was young and innocent, I wanted a wife like Marie Curie.
The longer I live, the more I am convinced that most woman demonstrate an almost allergy to technical reasons for things being other than they think they should.
By the way, there was once, about six or seven years ago, an opportunity for the industry to do away with the wires almost entirely for most consumer grade devices.
You probably wouldn't have wanted to use Freescale's UWB for mounting the drive containing your/usr and/home, but it would have been fast enough for watching video in real-time, for moving files between your camera and your laptop, all of that. And it would have been about as secure as wire, as well.
intel and their group have done their best at erasing the history from wikipedia, so, no, you'll never read most of the lurid details.
I know I'm letting the joke fly over my head, but UWB, until iNTEL killed it by insisting it was their tech or none at all, was supposed to get rid of the cables entirely for most consumer devices. No more plugs.
Just for the record, I don't want a one-cable-fits-all universe.
For instance, maybe I have a luncbox computer with an internal HD and I want to use it as a server. The internal drive would be great for logging, but running a notebook hard drive as a server driver is not a guaranteed proposition. With a firewire port, I'm willing to boot and run it from an external drive. I could theoretically put / and/boot on the internal drive, and put/bin,/etc,/home,/sbin,/tmp,/usr,/var, and whatever on a USB drive, but no.
USB connectors really aren't up to the job -- slip out, corrode, just not really good for a semi-permanent connection. Also, while booting a USB thumb drive may be useful for some purposes, I don't think I want a server cpu having to work that hard, even if the server is just a home NAS.
It sounds like an extreme example, but we really need to be throwing less of our electronics devices away all the time. USB is great for keyboards and mice, but for storage beyond flash, it's mostly throwaway tech. A firewire port is going to better for extending the useful life of a device. SAS or (uggh) eSATA would be better, of course.
The point here is that there are good reasons for having multiple standards, and this "Improve the cheap solution and sell it hard!" attitude tends to me to be a good path towards polluting and devaluing the market.
Might sound a bit extreme, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say part of the blame for the current economy lies with this insistence on capturing the market with trash.
And I feel compelled to note that, for insurance, a savings account for emergencies comes with a different set of strings attached.
(You could say, no strings, but it does at least come with the string that you have to do your own planning and exercise a certain amount of self-control concerning it. Now, I personally think this is a good kind of string, but, considering the number of people that prefer to pay their insurance agent or manager to think for them, I may be in the minority.)
As far as office workers are concerned, the last 20 years can be seen as a terrible mistake.
AMEN.
(I'm looking at you, Bill Gates.)
The problem is, basically, Office.
And you can say that again.
The problem is, basically, Office.
And you can say that again.
It's interesting, reading discussions on Slashdot, to see people defending things like Word because OOo can't exactly reproduce the (usually visually illiterate) exact form of a Word document. The great majority of people in offices need to create files containing relatively transitory information, possibly with a shelf life of less than a day. Yet they spend absolutely hours fiddling with formatting and decoration, and thinking that thereby they are in some way adding value.
Well said. Except, well, it kind of makes me feel a little queazy to admit it, but they are adding value. Wasting time can be a valuable thing.
Think about the last time you got stuck on a really hairy problem and were spinning your wheels. How did you get out of the mental quicksand?
One caveat I'll interject here is that there are more and less productive ways to waste one's time, and MSOffice, I think, has become one of the less productive ways, by way of bloat. Too many questionable communication practices enshrined in code.
Salesmen and people in marketing spend lots of time messing around with Powerpoint producing crappy presentations, and think that somehow this makes their message more convincing (perhaps at a subliminal level one corporate drone is influenced by the presentations of another, but education should be able to fix that.)
Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. Most people have lost that personal war by the time they rise in management ranks.
Email came as a huge relief - so immediately Microsoft tried to extend email with formatting features to convert a text medium into a presentation medium, or turn it into a vehicle to shuttle Office documents around the Internet.
Well, yeah. But ASCII (and it's progeny, Unicode) seriously needs reworking. (I'm a bit of a fanatic about this. Tag characters should be context-free parseable, we shouldn't have to alias the alphabet and base 64, and the folding together of all the supposedly Chinese ideographic language contexts was a mistake of the level and kind that trying to fold Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic together would have been, except with much larger character sets.)
The rise and rise of the netbook creates an opportunity... .
Yeah. And, more in specific, the wirelessly connected netbook.
I was going to say something about the articles not containing much evidence of awareness of reality, but calling those random fright fantasies articles doesn't seem very meaningful.
But you're right. This is definite evidence that the wall of illusions is coming tumbling down.
However, no, $15 is not ridiculously low for ADSL to most homes. Hmm. Individual homes with a geek in the basement and/or attic, maybe a little low, but not ridiculously so. For ADSL to apartments, it's a bit high, really.
$150 is too high for most businesses. Way high for most small businesses whose primary access is maybe posting their current specials of the week and taking a small number of e-mail inquiries from customers. For businesses that depend mostly on the internet, maybe $150 is too low.
If the connectivity providers can't provide connectivity at that price, the product isn't worth it, and the whole thing should just go back to basic telephony and 56K modems. We don't need what the internet provides that much.
The implementation models of the US connectivity companies are screwed up and that's what pushes their costs through the ceiling. They are deliberately trying to design the pipes so they can maintain their monopoly, and that is why it costs so much. Monopoly is impossible to maintain, so they have to keep pouring more money into the digital equivalent of fancy toll booths.
And yet they can't stop spam. Or the botnets.
While it is true that Microsoft muscled in with tech that was not (and still is not) ready for the job, they were able to do so precisely because AT&T and others were dragging their heals because they couldn't figure out how to monetize it all, in other words, how to keep their monopolies.
On thing that we keep forgetting, the telephone system should have been considered to be under the same Constitutional mandate as the postal roads. If the internet is really all that important, it should be so because it is a replacement for the old phone system. If it has to go back to being a monopoly in the end, the government should take it over and regulate it. But it doesn't have to, just like the mail doesn't have to travel only on mail roads.
And that's where the big connectivity companies are failing. They aren't letting local community efforts shoulder the burden of the last mile, which is how it is with roads, water, and sewage.
They can't monetize (ergo, monopolize) it without controlling the last mile on both ends. Instead of realizing that they should focus on the backbones and get out of the way, they keep trying to monetize (see? monopolize) it.
But the reality is (I repeat myself) they can't really control the last mile. Period. Unless they run all the CAs and the name servers and so on, all the semantic side as well, and if we let them do that, well, they would become another governmental body, so we'd have to vote the guys running it in and out of office just like (we should) with every other government agency.
Slashdot Mirror
WOW!
intel chips don't fully support an intel spec?
you mean, lack of security, like SCSI? Hmm, sort of like ethernet, too?
... desktop PCs are dead.
Which is why intel is so enamored of dual processors.
intel being the owner of the USB spec, we would suppose they think they stand the most to profit if they corner the markets on interconnect.
And that is precisely what they are trying to do. They killed UWB because they couldn't control it.
But they're just fouling their own market. If that market didn't have a huge overlap with the rest of the computer industry, I'd say let them commit technical suicide, and be done with them.
Or should we be quoting Monty Python, from Holy Grail?
hmm. I think intel is the one with the mallet.
Isn't your description from the user side of the driver?
What bugs me is that it seems to me that intel is trying to re-invent USB to do what firewire already does.
Compatibility here is an illusion. You're not going to hook a USB 3 device to a USB 2 port (or vice versa) on a regular basis. Most people simply will never do it, and those who actually need to do it will buy some special controller that makes it work for real, rather than relying on the half-baked compatibility in the spec.
Why bother? We already have firewire to USB converters.
Lousy Xebec controller that started it all. I think it was designed by someone who didn't know that the 8086 had a lot more port addresses than the 8080.
And, yes, the Xebec controller was integrated, so to speak.
When I was young and innocent, I wanted a wife like Marie Curie.
The longer I live, the more I am convinced that most woman demonstrate an almost allergy to technical reasons for things being other than they think they should.
By the way, there was once, about six or seven years ago, an opportunity for the industry to do away with the wires almost entirely for most consumer grade devices.
You probably wouldn't have wanted to use Freescale's UWB for mounting the drive containing your /usr and /home, but it would have been fast enough for watching video in real-time, for moving files between your camera and your laptop, all of that. And it would have been about as secure as wire, as well.
intel and their group have done their best at erasing the history from wikipedia, so, no, you'll never read most of the lurid details.
I know I'm letting the joke fly over my head, but UWB, until iNTEL killed it by insisting it was their tech or none at all, was supposed to get rid of the cables entirely for most consumer devices. No more plugs.
Just for the record, I don't want a one-cable-fits-all universe.
For instance, maybe I have a luncbox computer with an internal HD and I want to use it as a server. The internal drive would be great for logging, but running a notebook hard drive as a server driver is not a guaranteed proposition. With a firewire port, I'm willing to boot and run it from an external drive. I could theoretically put / and /boot on the internal drive, and put /bin, /etc, /home, /sbin, /tmp, /usr, /var, and whatever on a USB drive, but no.
USB connectors really aren't up to the job -- slip out, corrode, just not really good for a semi-permanent connection. Also, while booting a USB thumb drive may be useful for some purposes, I don't think I want a server cpu having to work that hard, even if the server is just a home NAS.
It sounds like an extreme example, but we really need to be throwing less of our electronics devices away all the time. USB is great for keyboards and mice, but for storage beyond flash, it's mostly throwaway tech. A firewire port is going to better for extending the useful life of a device. SAS or (uggh) eSATA would be better, of course.
The point here is that there are good reasons for having multiple standards, and this "Improve the cheap solution and sell it hard!" attitude tends to me to be a good path towards polluting and devaluing the market.
Might sound a bit extreme, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say part of the blame for the current economy lies with this insistence on capturing the market with trash.
And I feel compelled to note that, for insurance, a savings account for emergencies comes with a different set of strings attached.
(You could say, no strings, but it does at least come with the string that you have to do your own planning and exercise a certain amount of self-control concerning it. Now, I personally think this is a good kind of string, but, considering the number of people that prefer to pay their insurance agent or manager to think for them, I may be in the minority.)
AMEN.
(I'm looking at you, Bill Gates.)
And you can say that again.
And you can say that again.
Well said. Except, well, it kind of makes me feel a little queazy to admit it, but they are adding value. Wasting time can be a valuable thing.
Think about the last time you got stuck on a really hairy problem and were spinning your wheels. How did you get out of the mental quicksand?
One caveat I'll interject here is that there are more and less productive ways to waste one's time, and MSOffice, I think, has become one of the less productive ways, by way of bloat. Too many questionable communication practices enshrined in code.
Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. Most people have lost that personal war by the time they rise in management ranks.
Well, yeah. But ASCII (and it's progeny, Unicode) seriously needs reworking. (I'm a bit of a fanatic about this. Tag characters should be context-free parseable, we shouldn't have to alias the alphabet and base 64, and the folding together of all the supposedly Chinese ideographic language contexts was a mistake of the level and kind that trying to fold Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic together would have been, except with much larger character sets.)
Yeah. And, more in specific, the wirelessly connected netbook.
Some people LIKE to type on those old Smith and Wessons.
Coronas. I mean Coronas.
(ahem. Nothing to obscure the point more than a stray allusion.)
No thanks. Not even if they swear on a stack of bibles they'll never sue.
I was thinking more along the lines of jail time. Scams that take money under false pretenses often do result in jail time.
But, then I thought about the recipients of the current bailouts, and bailouts do seem to be an alternative to jail time.
You could be right.
Hmm.
Yeah. They've always had a lot of bad things going for them.
(There's another phrase that has a certain meaning or two hidden in it.)
I was going to say something about the articles not containing much evidence of awareness of reality, but calling those random fright fantasies articles doesn't seem very meaningful.
But you're right. This is definite evidence that the wall of illusions is coming tumbling down.
Oh. pro-Microsoft. Westlake.
(Okay, the lame filter is getting lamer about comments in the subject:)
On a cashregister? Which cash register? (I don't think that's what the meme is all about.)
This kind of stuff would kill Microsoft.
That's the reason Microsoft's management is afraid of "open source." To them it seems something like a zombie. Or a bunch of zombies.
Have you ever tried Putting the GIMP on a Mac?
I actually find the GIMP easier to use than photoshop for a lot of things. Probably just me, I suppose.
I know what you mean, but in this case many of the theorists are promoting theories that allow their brand of corruption.
I think you meant fiefdom?
I kid.
However, no, $15 is not ridiculously low for ADSL to most homes. Hmm. Individual homes with a geek in the basement and/or attic, maybe a little low, but not ridiculously so. For ADSL to apartments, it's a bit high, really.
$150 is too high for most businesses. Way high for most small businesses whose primary access is maybe posting their current specials of the week and taking a small number of e-mail inquiries from customers. For businesses that depend mostly on the internet, maybe $150 is too low.
If the connectivity providers can't provide connectivity at that price, the product isn't worth it, and the whole thing should just go back to basic telephony and 56K modems. We don't need what the internet provides that much.
The implementation models of the US connectivity companies are screwed up and that's what pushes their costs through the ceiling. They are deliberately trying to design the pipes so they can maintain their monopoly, and that is why it costs so much. Monopoly is impossible to maintain, so they have to keep pouring more money into the digital equivalent of fancy toll booths.
And yet they can't stop spam. Or the botnets.
While it is true that Microsoft muscled in with tech that was not (and still is not) ready for the job, they were able to do so precisely because AT&T and others were dragging their heals because they couldn't figure out how to monetize it all, in other words, how to keep their monopolies.
On thing that we keep forgetting, the telephone system should have been considered to be under the same Constitutional mandate as the postal roads. If the internet is really all that important, it should be so because it is a replacement for the old phone system. If it has to go back to being a monopoly in the end, the government should take it over and regulate it. But it doesn't have to, just like the mail doesn't have to travel only on mail roads.
And that's where the big connectivity companies are failing. They aren't letting local community efforts shoulder the burden of the last mile, which is how it is with roads, water, and sewage.
They can't monetize (ergo, monopolize) it without controlling the last mile on both ends. Instead of realizing that they should focus on the backbones and get out of the way, they keep trying to monetize (see? monopolize) it.
But the reality is (I repeat myself) they can't really control the last mile. Period. Unless they run all the CAs and the name servers and so on, all the semantic side as well, and if we let them do that, well, they would become another governmental body, so we'd have to vote the guys running it in and out of office just like (we should) with every other government agency.