How many people actually send in their regisration card? I doubt you could acurately guess how many people bought which version from the number of people who send in the cards (or register online for that matter). It costs a lot of money for a company to support a new platform. Most companies are going to need some pretty solid numbers before some marketing guy sticks his neck out and pushes for a Linux version.
The people who decide what platforms to support aren't likely to be system admins or programmers. They also don't care who uses the software the most. They want to know how many coppies of each version they are going to sell. They're looking at the return on investment. If the net profit from a Linux version isn't more that they can make by using the resources to develop something else, they'll cancel the Linux version and have the developers wore on something else (probably another Windows product).
I doubt it's cheaper for ID or the publisher to distribute the software this way, and ID is committed to produce Linux and Mac software regardless of how this turns out. They are giving you the chance to show publishers that there's a high enough demand for Linux games to convince more people to follow their lead. If having Linux games commercially available to you is important, wait and buy the Linux version. If you can't buy Linux games locally, buy it online. ID is a leader in the gaming industry, and they are giving you a chance to prove the market exhists. The rest is up to you.
Re:Greedy Corporate Scumfucks
on
Copyright!
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· Score: 1
So the logic goes, it's easy for me to steal it, so it should be free. I just don't get it. I spend most of my day creating digital works such as software, design documents and manuals. Those things have value because of Copyright laws. If I didn't do it for my employer, I could make money doing it myself. I've got nothing against free software, it just doesn't pay for my computer, my education, my morgage, or my meals. I write mostly device drivers for a living. The hardware I develop for is often rather commonly available ASICs. It's the software I write that makes our product unique. If we gave that software away for free, someone else would steal it. Since they wouldn't have to pay our development costs, they could make the same product cheaper. We'd go out of business. Some markets lend themselves well to the free software movement, ours doesn't. I have to agree that copyright laws have been warped by big business, but neither extreme solution is rational. Copyrights shouldn't last for ever, nor should they be abolished.
Re:It's all how you look at it
on
Copyright!
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· Score: 1
They own their creations unless:
1. They sold their rights, which they couldn't do unless they owned them.
2. They gave their rights to their employer, who pays them to make the "creation".
Without copyrights I wouldn't have a job, because my company wouldn't be able to sell the software I write. Someone else would just steal it. Since our nitch market is too small, to make enough of a profit from support, not to mention that a well designed product doesn't require as much support, we'd go out of business.
I agree that past transgressions should be prosecuted, but the current justice department is pretty clueless. The only thing they were persuing Microsoft for was unfair actions agains Netscape. I don't think a cas based on some unfair contracts with ISPs, and a lot of name calling would have had a great impact on Micrsoft. Especially when the competitor they "harmed" is having to do a complete rewrite of their product because it was a buggy piece of crap that couldn't be patched and upgraded any more. Any ruling against Microsoft would be reduce on appeal to a fine and a slap on the wrist. If Netscape had such a good case why didn't they sue Microsoft for dammages.
The States claim against Microsoft about thier MS Office pricing are much more likely to have a direct benefit to consumers. If Microsoft can be made to charge end users similar prices to what they charge OEM, as well as reducing the disparity between what they charge different OEMs, they lose a lot of the leverage they use to force OEMs to do things their way.
The case agains Microsoft has been mostly theatrics, and they really made Microsoft look bad, but they didn't have a lot of real evidence. Now it looks like they're going to go for the highest profile solution. They don't seem to be concerned with what will help consumers the most. The just seem to like the headlines.
Let's face it. If you have three companies makeing slightly different versions of Windows, you're going to end up with compatability nightmares for consumers that will far outweigh any cost savings. Microsoft is already pretty responsive to what they feel customers want, that why their products are so bloated with features. You can split Microsoft along product lines, but I doubt this is going to reduce prices for consumers either. You may not like Windows, but you have to admit Microsoft dumps a ton of money into developing it. You can't make a product with as many features as microsoft sticks in windows inexpensively. MS Office is Microsoft's big cash cow. If you take those revenues away from the company making the OS the price for the OS is going to go up. The up side is that MS Office might become available on more platforms than Windows and Mac OS. Personally I'd rather see someone develop a good cross platform ofice suite than the government telling Microsoft what they need to develop.
If you want to stop microsoft's bad business practices take away the tools they use. Make them use a more even pricing structure, and disallow these exclusive contracts like the ones they had with ISPs. Also fine them for their unfair practices. Then let the companies who feel they are victims sue Microsoft themselves for damages, and keep the government out of deciding how software is made.
You may find this hard to believe, but I think Microsoft has done a lot to reduce the price of consumer software. Around 8 or 9 years ago it was Microsoft that was the ones making business style software affrodable to the user. The MSRPs didn't drop much, but their OEM priced did, and they started offering competative upgrades at reasonable prices to help get market share. It wasn't that long ago that Word Perfect was having to reduce their prices to match Microsoft's.
I'm not saying that Microsoft was doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, but the consumers did benifit. As for the bloat in Microsoft's software, ask ten business users what features they use in Office, and you'll find that although few of them use a large percentage of the features, each user uses different features. A lot of those features are used by someone. If you don't like the features in MS Office try, MS Works. Works is a pretty good low end application suite, but Microsoft doesn't sell as many coppies as they do of MS Office. Why? Probably because people like a lot of features even if they don't use them, and if that's what people want Microsoft will give it to them.
As for prices on hardware dropping faster than prices on software, most software isn't developed Tiawan where labor is cheap. Ten years ago software proces were dropping, while the the price of a new high end PC was staying fixed at around $3000 for quite some time.
Microsoft has obviously done some things wrong, and should be held accountable for them, but a lot of the things they've been accused of sound like whining by competitors who had poor products, or who failed because of their own mistakes.
It seems strange to hear people who extol the stability of Linux as it's most improtant feature claim that Netscape is so great in the same breath. I used Netscape since before IE existed. It is and always has been a buggy piece of crap. Microsoft's first two attempts at IE were even worse, but version 3 closed the gap, and version 4 overtook Netscape. Navigator couldn't continue to compete on it's own merits because it had become an unmanageable cluster of poorly designed spegetti code that had to be rewritten. Yet Netscape was the Justice department's victim for the first part of this case. Netscape produced a buggy product, and as soon as real competition arrived the cried foul. Then they took their millions they made, blamed everything on Microsoft and ran away. Microsoft, who built a better product, and competed, gets blamed. I'm not saying that thier licensing agreements with ISPs weren't illegal, but at least they built a well designed maintainable product. Netscape built a poorly designed product, had a questionable business plan as to how they were going to continue to be profitable, and instead of being investigated by the SEC for defrauding their shareholders, they're the rich victums of Microsoft.
I wonder who else will be blaming their failures on Microsoft.
I have to whole heartedly agree with you. The UI has some deficiencies, but in some ways I actually like Darkstone better than Diablo. My wife is also hopelessly addicted to Darkstone as well, which helps keep me out of the doghouse.
This is definately nit picking, but the distribution would include all the software on the computer, such as MS Office. This is different than even the MS version of the OS. I don't think you can define the OS as just the kernel and a few user level routines. You then have the OS being something that can't be used or even configured by itself. I understand that some people feel that that's the proper definition, but I don't agree. I feel the OS is the package of software you can buy from the vendor. Yes, I know that mean's I'm including things like IE, notepad, and even solitare as part of the OS, and leaving the definition up to marketing weenies.
I don't think the Prices for NT Server variants are going to be the cause for many companies switching to something else. The price is still pretty small compared to the administration costs of any server.
The price of Win2K Professional is to high IMO. If MS isn't going to target Win2K to consumers, does that mean that they won't bother keeping DirectX up to date on it and supporting game developers. What I really want at home is an easy to use system that I can play games on and browse the web. I think Win2K could offer a large improvement in reliability over Win98 in this capacity.
Not all of us live close enought to the phone company to use ADSL (two line miles I think). My house is 6 line miles from the phone company even though the phone company isn't physically that far from my house. A friend who lives a block away is less than 2 line miles from the phone company. So unless the phone company decides to connect me by a more direct route, I'm stuck with a modem until cable modems are offered in my area.
There are some things they can do to increase their latency. Faster DSPs with shorter pipelines, streamline the drivers, ect. Unless they're comparing their new modem against someone's Winmodem with crappy drivers I'm not sure there will be a noticable difference. I don't know much about the technologies they use in modems.
As for digital vs. analog, digital signals don't propogate any faster down copper wire than analog signals. There are some advantages to going digital, but I don't think latency is among them. Unless you increase the bandwidth with the digital modem, then you can improve the latency (depending on how you measure latency).
I would have to say that InstallShield is the standard way of installing packages. There's even a version of InstallShield included with VIsual C++. Not everyone uses InstallShield, but most do.
The people in law enforcement do a very difficult job. Most of them deserve our respect, some do not. By facing the dangers involved in law enforcement they've earned my respect, unless they show they don't deserve it.
USB is not in itself processor intensive. I however wouldn't be surprised if Intel's implementation in their chipset is processor intensive. It depends on how much intelligence is built into the USB host controller.
I have little doubt that Firewire will be running at 800GB before USB 2.0 arrives. 1.6GB will be difficult to get working over copper wire, especially since it has to pass FCC Class B and CE testing to be a viable product.
USB and Firewire really aren't aimed at the same market. There is definately some overlap, but USB is supposed to be for low cost devices that don't require peer to peer communications. Firewire provides bus arbitration, so there can be multiple bus masters. This however adds to complexity and cost.
Lets try an example. I'd like to design a USB camera I can hook up to my laptop. While the current implementations are nice, I'd like to have a higher resolution and update rate. THe device is relatively simple. The camera puts the data in a frame buffer, and the USB host controller does an ischronous transfer at a specified interval to pull the data out of the buffer.
So why don't I just do this with firewire? The simple reason is that the hardware to have my device work on firewire is likely going to cost me over half of the total product cost. The controllers for USB devices are relatively simple, stupid devices. This makes them much less expensive. Why add the cost and complexity of peer-to-peer operation when I don't need it for the majority of the applications. Do my keyboard, mouse, or speakers really need to tell me that they have data available, or can I simpley have the host controller poll them at a predefined rate. The majority of the intelligence to the host controller. Since every computer needs a host controller, and they are less expensive in volume, the cost goes down for the consumer.
Lets go back to the example of the camera. If I can use USB 2.0, (If and when it becomes a reality, not just a spec.) I can provide that faster frame rate and higher resolution. What will it cost me? It will be harder to get things to work at 480 Mbps. I haven't read the spec, but I wouldn't be surprised if cable specifications changed. Noise is going to be much more of a problem at thes higher data rates. There will also likely be a lot more noise of the power and ground lines for line powered devices. These are mostly development issues which won't take a good design team a long time to work out. The cabling might cost a bit more, but not much. In the end I can produce a better product, for considerabley less cost per unit than a firewire solution.
A faster version of USB will also work well for disk drivers. Drives are by nature target devices. Your hard drive doesn't tell your CPU that it has some data it may want, your CPU requests the data. One of the reasons that Firewire drives haven't caught on is that they are expensive. Some of this expense comes form the fact that they are new, and low volume, but there is also unnecessary overhead in firewire for that purpose.
How about digital camcorders? Does the camcorder really need to be a peer device? Not really, but it would be nice to have the higher bandidth Firewire provides, or will provide long before USB 2.0 becomes a reality.
What might Firewire be good for? How about hot plug and play network cards, or having multiple computers talk to the same device. If you want to have a small group of computers talk to a high speed printer and an array of disks, firewire might be nich. Then again Fibre Channel is also good for this and even faster. Personally, I'd like to see USB 2.0 and Fibre Channel on PCs in the future, but I'll take what I can get.
USB doesn't inherantly require more CPU power
on
USB2 Specs Are In
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· Score: 1
The USB implementation in Intel Chipsets may be more CPU intensive than a bus mastering PCI firewire card, but I don't think this isn't an inherant aspect of USB. The main difference between USB and Firewire, other than bandwidth, is that on USB the host controller is the only node on the bus which can initiate a data transfer. If the USB host controller wants data from a device on the bus it must send a request to that device to which that device responds. When a new device is connected on the bus, the host has to inquire what resourses it's needs (how much reserved bandwidth, how often to poll it). This does not mean that the computer's CPU has to poll the devices. The host controller could poll the devices, DMA the data, and interrupt the CPU to let it know that an opperation has completed.
Firewire is different in that any of the devices on the bus may be a bus master. The devices have to arbitrate for bandwidth, and each device requires more intelligent hardware. The result of this is that Firewire devices will likley cost more to develop.
This leaves us with the impression that we can use USB for lower end devices, and use Firewire for higher end devices, especially where there is an advantage to having multiple bus masters.
On the high end, at least for disk drives and networking, Fibre Channel is another option. This is where high end storage applications appear to be headed. Firewire still has the advantage of providing for ischronous transfers, while Fibre Channel doesn't, but Fibre Channel runs at 1 Gbps with 2 Gbps versions starting to appear.
If this were really internal use, Corel wouldn't need a lisence. I don't lisence the software I write to our tech support department. You need a lisence when dealing with external parties.
If I understand what Corel is doing, they just want to have the product tested by a wider base of people before they slap their name on it, and distribute it to the general public. While this desire to release stable products is commendable, their method violates the GPL. Corel is going to have to adapt their business practices if they want to distribute GPL'd software.
I've never released any software under the GPL myself so I guess I'm a bit of an outsider in this discussion, but it seems to me that if the GPL is going to mean anything, it's going to have to be enforced. This might be as simple of a thing as the authors of some of the software in the distribution contacting Corel and telling them that they are violating the lisence, and to cease doing so. Try to avoid lawyers and finacial penalties if possible.
Read the Claims and Description sections of those patents and you'll see that the patents aren't overly broad. The Abstract just tells you the type of technology that's being patented. VanL's post is extremely misleading. If you don't believe me try reading on of the patents yourself.
If you just read the abstract it's going to appear that the patent covers some obvious technology. I suggest you actually read the claims and description to find out what the patent really covers.
NCR invests huge amounts of money in research and development. They patent the results of their labors to protect their investments. Before you claim that they are enforcing frivilous patents you should find out what the patented material is, and how they claim it's being violated.
Microsoft's software definately has a large number of gaping security holes. Most professionals in the corporate sector are aware of this, yet they still use MS products. Maybe they like the features and feel the risk is acceptable (until they get burned). Maybe it's just herd mentality, other people are using it, the security must be good enough. Whatever the reason, people use it.
That however give some malicious jerk the right to write a virus and crash a bunch of servers. The melisa virus cost the corporate sector a small fortune in lost productivity. I hope they fine him for all he's worth and throw his but in jail for a good long time. The confiscation of his computer hardware should be the least of his problems.
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How many people actually send in their regisration card? I doubt you could acurately guess how many people bought which version from the number of people who send in the cards (or register online for that matter). It costs a lot of money for a company to support a new platform. Most companies are going to need some pretty solid numbers before some marketing guy sticks his neck out and pushes for a Linux version.
The people who decide what platforms to support aren't likely to be system admins or programmers. They also don't care who uses the software the most. They want to know how many coppies of each version they are going to sell. They're looking at the return on investment. If the net profit from a Linux version isn't more that they can make by using the resources to develop something else, they'll cancel the Linux version and have the developers wore on something else (probably another Windows product).
I doubt it's cheaper for ID or the publisher to distribute the software this way, and ID is committed to produce Linux and Mac software regardless of how this turns out. They are giving you the chance to show publishers that there's a high enough demand for Linux games to convince more people to follow their lead. If having Linux games commercially available to you is important, wait and buy the Linux version. If you can't buy Linux games locally, buy it online. ID is a leader in the gaming industry, and they are giving you a chance to prove the market exhists. The rest is up to you.
So the logic goes, it's easy for me to steal it, so it should be free. I just don't get it. I spend most of my day creating digital works such as software, design documents and manuals. Those things have value because of Copyright laws. If I didn't do it for my employer, I could make money doing it myself. I've got nothing against free software, it just doesn't pay for my computer, my education, my morgage, or my meals. I write mostly device drivers for a living. The hardware I develop for is often rather commonly available ASICs. It's the software I write that makes our product unique. If we gave that software away for free, someone else would steal it. Since they wouldn't have to pay our development costs, they could make the same product cheaper. We'd go out of business. Some markets lend themselves well to the free software movement, ours doesn't. I have to agree that copyright laws have been warped by big business, but neither extreme solution is rational. Copyrights shouldn't last for ever, nor should they be abolished.
They own their creations unless:
1. They sold their rights, which they couldn't do unless they owned them.
2. They gave their rights to their employer, who pays them to make the "creation".
Without copyrights I wouldn't have a job, because my company wouldn't be able to sell the software I write. Someone else would just steal it. Since our nitch market is too small, to make enough of a profit from support, not to mention that a well designed product doesn't require as much support, we'd go out of business.
I agree that past transgressions should be prosecuted, but the current justice department is pretty clueless. The only thing they were persuing Microsoft for was unfair actions agains Netscape. I don't think a cas based on some unfair contracts with ISPs, and a lot of name calling would have had a great impact on Micrsoft. Especially when the competitor they "harmed" is having to do a complete rewrite of their product because it was a buggy piece of crap that couldn't be patched and upgraded any more. Any ruling against Microsoft would be reduce on appeal to a fine and a slap on the wrist. If Netscape had such a good case why didn't they sue Microsoft for dammages.
The States claim against Microsoft about thier MS Office pricing are much more likely to have a direct benefit to consumers. If Microsoft can be made to charge end users similar prices to what they charge OEM, as well as reducing the disparity between what they charge different OEMs, they lose a lot of the leverage they use to force OEMs to do things their way.
The case agains Microsoft has been mostly theatrics, and they really made Microsoft look bad, but they didn't have a lot of real evidence. Now it looks like they're going to go for the highest profile solution. They don't seem to be concerned with what will help consumers the most. The just seem to like the headlines.
Let's face it. If you have three companies makeing slightly different versions of Windows, you're going to end up with compatability nightmares for consumers that will far outweigh any cost savings. Microsoft is already pretty responsive to what they feel customers want, that why their products are so bloated with features. You can split Microsoft along product lines, but I doubt this is going to reduce prices for consumers either. You may not like Windows, but you have to admit Microsoft dumps a ton of money into developing it. You can't make a product with as many features as microsoft sticks in windows inexpensively. MS Office is Microsoft's big cash cow. If you take those revenues away from the company making the OS the price for the OS is going to go up. The up side is that MS Office might become available on more platforms than Windows and Mac OS. Personally I'd rather see someone develop a good cross platform ofice suite than the government telling Microsoft what they need to develop.
If you want to stop microsoft's bad business practices take away the tools they use. Make them use a more even pricing structure, and disallow these exclusive contracts like the ones they had with ISPs. Also fine them for their unfair practices. Then let the companies who feel they are victims sue Microsoft themselves for damages, and keep the government out of deciding how software is made.
You may find this hard to believe, but I think Microsoft has done a lot to reduce the price of consumer software. Around 8 or 9 years ago it was Microsoft that was the ones making business style software affrodable to the user. The MSRPs didn't drop much, but their OEM priced did, and they started offering competative upgrades at reasonable prices to help get market share. It wasn't that long ago that Word Perfect was having to reduce their prices to match Microsoft's.
I'm not saying that Microsoft was doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, but the consumers did benifit. As for the bloat in Microsoft's software, ask ten business users what features they use in Office, and you'll find that although few of them use a large percentage of the features, each user uses different features. A lot of those features are used by someone. If you don't like the features in MS Office try, MS Works. Works is a pretty good low end application suite, but Microsoft doesn't sell as many coppies as they do of MS Office. Why? Probably because people like a lot of features even if they don't use them, and if that's what people want Microsoft will give it to them.
As for prices on hardware dropping faster than prices on software, most software isn't developed Tiawan where labor is cheap. Ten years ago software proces were dropping, while the the price of a new high end PC was staying fixed at around $3000 for quite some time.
Microsoft has obviously done some things wrong, and should be held accountable for them, but a lot of the things they've been accused of sound like whining by competitors who had poor products, or who failed because of their own mistakes.
It seems strange to hear people who extol the stability of Linux as it's most improtant feature claim that Netscape is so great in the same breath. I used Netscape since before IE existed. It is and always has been a buggy piece of crap. Microsoft's first two attempts at IE were even worse, but version 3 closed the gap, and version 4 overtook Netscape. Navigator couldn't continue to compete on it's own merits because it had become an unmanageable cluster of poorly designed spegetti code that had to be rewritten. Yet Netscape was the Justice department's victim for the first part of this case. Netscape produced a buggy product, and as soon as real competition arrived the cried foul. Then they took their millions they made, blamed everything on Microsoft and ran away. Microsoft, who built a better product, and competed, gets blamed. I'm not saying that thier licensing agreements with ISPs weren't illegal, but at least they built a well designed maintainable product. Netscape built a poorly designed product, had a questionable business plan as to how they were going to continue to be profitable, and instead of being investigated by the SEC for defrauding their shareholders, they're the rich victums of Microsoft.
I wonder who else will be blaming their failures on Microsoft.
I have to whole heartedly agree with you. The UI has some deficiencies, but in some ways I actually like Darkstone better than Diablo. My wife is also hopelessly addicted to Darkstone as well, which helps keep me out of the doghouse.
This is definately nit picking, but the distribution would include all the software on the computer, such as MS Office. This is different than even the MS version of the OS. I don't think you can define the OS as just the kernel and a few user level routines. You then have the OS being something that can't be used or even configured by itself. I understand that some people feel that that's the proper definition, but I don't agree. I feel the OS is the package of software you can buy from the vendor. Yes, I know that mean's I'm including things like IE, notepad, and even solitare as part of the OS, and leaving the definition up to marketing weenies.
The post wasn't very clear, but the article is about the versions of the software which will be accessed over the internet.
I don't think the Prices for NT Server variants are going to be the cause for many companies switching to something else. The price is still pretty small compared to the administration costs of any server.
The price of Win2K Professional is to high IMO. If MS isn't going to target Win2K to consumers, does that mean that they won't bother keeping DirectX up to date on it and supporting game developers. What I really want at home is an easy to use system that I can play games on and browse the web. I think Win2K could offer a large improvement in reliability over Win98 in this capacity.
Not all of us live close enought to the phone company to use ADSL (two line miles I think). My house is 6 line miles from the phone company even though the phone company isn't physically that far from my house. A friend who lives a block away is less than 2 line miles from the phone company. So unless the phone company decides to connect me by a more direct route, I'm stuck with a modem until cable modems are offered in my area.
There are some things they can do to increase their latency. Faster DSPs with shorter pipelines, streamline the drivers, ect. Unless they're comparing their new modem against someone's Winmodem with crappy drivers I'm not sure there will be a noticable difference. I don't know much about the technologies they use in modems.
As for digital vs. analog, digital signals don't propogate any faster down copper wire than analog signals. There are some advantages to going digital, but I don't think latency is among them. Unless you increase the bandwidth with the digital modem, then you can improve the latency (depending on how you measure latency).
I would have to say that InstallShield is the standard way of installing packages. There's even a version of InstallShield included with VIsual C++. Not everyone uses InstallShield, but most do.
The people in law enforcement do a very difficult job. Most of them deserve our respect, some do not. By facing the dangers involved in law enforcement they've earned my respect, unless they show they don't deserve it.
USB is not in itself processor intensive. I however wouldn't be surprised if Intel's implementation in their chipset is processor intensive. It depends on how much intelligence is built into the USB host controller.
I have little doubt that Firewire will be running at 800GB before USB 2.0 arrives. 1.6GB will be difficult to get working over copper wire, especially since it has to pass FCC Class B and CE testing to be a viable product.
USB and Firewire really aren't aimed at the same market. There is definately some overlap, but USB is supposed to be for low cost devices that don't require peer to peer communications. Firewire provides bus arbitration, so there can be multiple bus masters. This however adds to complexity and cost.
Lets try an example. I'd like to design a USB camera I can hook up to my laptop. While the current implementations are nice, I'd like to have a higher resolution and update rate. THe device is relatively simple. The camera puts the data in a frame buffer, and the USB host controller does an ischronous transfer at a specified interval to pull the data out of the buffer.
So why don't I just do this with firewire? The simple reason is that the hardware to have my device work on firewire is likely going to cost me over half of the total product cost. The controllers for USB devices are relatively simple, stupid devices. This makes them much less expensive. Why add the cost and complexity of peer-to-peer operation when I don't need it for the majority of the applications. Do my keyboard, mouse, or speakers really need to tell me that they have data available, or can I simpley have the host controller poll them at a predefined rate. The majority of the intelligence to the host controller. Since every computer needs a host controller, and they are less expensive in volume, the cost goes down for the consumer.
Lets go back to the example of the camera. If I can use USB 2.0, (If and when it becomes a reality, not just a spec.) I can provide that faster frame rate and higher resolution. What will it cost me? It will be harder to get things to work at 480 Mbps. I haven't read the spec, but I wouldn't be surprised if cable specifications changed. Noise is going to be much more of a problem at thes higher data rates. There will also likely be a lot more noise of the power and ground lines for line powered devices. These are mostly development issues which won't take a good design team a long time to work out. The cabling might cost a bit more, but not much. In the end I can produce a better product, for considerabley less cost per unit than a firewire solution.
A faster version of USB will also work well for disk drivers. Drives are by nature target devices. Your hard drive doesn't tell your CPU that it has some data it may want, your CPU requests the data. One of the reasons that Firewire drives haven't caught on is that they are expensive. Some of this expense comes form the fact that they are new, and low volume, but there is also unnecessary overhead in firewire for that purpose.
How about digital camcorders? Does the camcorder really need to be a peer device? Not really, but it would be nice to have the higher bandidth Firewire provides, or will provide long before USB 2.0 becomes a reality.
What might Firewire be good for? How about hot plug and play network cards, or having multiple computers talk to the same device. If you want to have a small group of computers talk to a high speed printer and an array of disks, firewire might be nich. Then again Fibre Channel is also good for this and even faster. Personally, I'd like to see USB 2.0 and Fibre Channel on PCs in the future, but I'll take what I can get.
The USB implementation in Intel Chipsets may be more CPU intensive than a bus mastering PCI firewire card, but I don't think this isn't an inherant aspect of USB. The main difference between USB and Firewire, other than bandwidth, is that on USB the host controller is the only node on the bus which can initiate a data transfer. If the USB host controller wants data from a device on the bus it must send a request to that device to which that device responds. When a new device is connected on the bus, the host has to inquire what resourses it's needs (how much reserved bandwidth, how often to poll it).
This does not mean that the computer's CPU has to poll the devices. The host controller could poll the devices, DMA the data, and interrupt the CPU to let it know that an opperation has completed.
Firewire is different in that any of the devices on the bus may be a bus master. The devices have to arbitrate for bandwidth, and each device requires more intelligent hardware. The result of this is that Firewire devices will likley cost more to develop.
This leaves us with the impression that we can use USB for lower end devices, and use Firewire for higher end devices, especially where there is an advantage to having multiple bus masters.
On the high end, at least for disk drives and networking, Fibre Channel is another option. This is where high end storage applications appear to be headed. Firewire still has the advantage of providing for ischronous transfers, while Fibre Channel doesn't, but Fibre Channel runs at 1 Gbps with 2 Gbps versions starting to appear.
I was under the impression that it's only free for internal development use. If you want to use if for commercial use, you've got to buy it.
The test has some flaws. They should pay the winner, fix the faulty CGI script, and try again.
Internal firewire is possible.
Anything which reduces the number of ribbon cables inside the case of a computer sounds like a good idea to me.
I'd have to guess that the biggest reason Apple isn't using firewire hard drives is that IDE is cheap, and they can make more money using them.
If this were really internal use, Corel wouldn't need a lisence. I don't lisence the software I write to our tech support department. You need a lisence when dealing with external parties.
If I understand what Corel is doing, they just want to have the product tested by a wider base of people before they slap their name on it, and distribute it to the general public. While this desire to release stable products is commendable, their method violates the GPL. Corel is going to have to adapt their business practices if they want to distribute GPL'd software.
I've never released any software under the GPL myself so I guess I'm a bit of an outsider in this discussion, but it seems to me that if the GPL is going to mean anything, it's going to have to be enforced. This might be as simple of a thing as the authors of some of the software in the distribution contacting Corel and telling them that they are violating the lisence, and to cease doing so. Try to avoid lawyers and finacial penalties if possible.
Read the Claims and Description sections of those patents and you'll see that the patents aren't overly broad. The Abstract just tells you the type of technology that's being patented. VanL's post is extremely misleading. If you don't believe me try reading on of the patents yourself.
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If you just read the abstract it's going to appear that the patent covers some obvious technology. I suggest you actually read the claims and description to find out what the patent really covers.
NCR invests huge amounts of money in research and development. They patent the results of their labors to protect their investments. Before you claim that they are enforcing frivilous patents you should find out what the patented material is, and how they claim it's being violated.
Microsoft's software definately has a large number of gaping security holes. Most professionals in the corporate sector are aware of this, yet they still use MS products. Maybe they like the features and feel the risk is acceptable (until they get burned). Maybe it's just herd mentality, other people are using it, the security must be good enough. Whatever the reason, people use it.
That however give some malicious jerk the right to write a virus and crash a bunch of servers. The melisa virus cost the corporate sector a small fortune in lost productivity. I hope they fine him for all he's worth and throw his but in jail for a good long time. The confiscation of his computer hardware should be the least of his problems.