Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Friday, August 2, 2002
19:24 - Once again, we're stuck with cheaper instead of better	(top)
Kris just noticed an external DVD-RW drive hooked up to a computer in IT as he walked by. Upon close inspection, he noticed that it was connected via USB. USB 2.0, to be exact. And a good thing, too, because if it were USB 1.1, DVD write speed would be so slow as to be unusable. So USB 2.0 has now arrived, and what it means is that FireWire's speed advantage over USB has now been more or less nullified. Its early lead over USB in fields such as DV camcorders and mass storage was valuable, and now a lot of those devices have been built and entrenched; but now that USB 2.0 can match FireWire's speed for one-way downloading of data such as digital photos or to-be-burned DVD data, and because USB 2.0 will now be the shipping default on all new PCs, FireWire will cease to have a clear advantage, and will be relegated to a second-class status and eventually die in obscurity. Like all good things crowded out by something cheaper, uglier, but backed by more companies bent on smashing all competition at all costs. Those USB cables, as Kris explained, have to have ferrite beads-- those big, heavy, metal chokes-- clamped around each end, if they're going to carry large amounts of data. You know the kind. It's like having a huge bullet strapped to each end of the cable. Why is it there? Because USB only has four wires, and is an unbalanced specification. Your four wires are power, ground, transmit, and receive. The data wires are driven independently of each other, and their states are read relative to the ground wire. This means that you have to run it at a high voltage, like RS-232 (which operates at 12V). It means you've created a radio transmitter. Two unbalanced data signals oscillating relative to ground. Hence the big slugs of metal to try to shield the transmission effects. Whereas FireWire has six wires-- power, ground, a pair for transmit, and a pair for receive. Each data pair is complementary to itself. When one wire is positive, the other wire is negative-- and they average to ground. The difference between them is read as the signal, not their relative voltage to ground like USB, which means FireWire can operate at a much lower voltage than USB, like in the neighborhood of 2V. And the two pairs are twisted, as in Ethernet, which cancels out any transmitter effects. So what you've got is a balanced design, one where the signals all average out to nothing. The four-wire i.Link version of FireWire just has the two pairs for send and receive, and no power. It's still nice and balanced, and noise-free. But six wires means more expensive controllers at the endpoints, so everybody sticks with USB. And that means transmitter noise, which means we have to strap these chunks of metal onto them in order to keep them from scrambling everything FCC-regulated in the house. FireWire's native speed is 400Mbps, and USB 2.0's is 480Mbps. FireWire's speed can be bumped up by a factor of two, four, eight, and so on-- by using the same tricks Ethernet has been able to get away with, in order to jump from 10Mbps to 100Mbps to 1000Mbps. Signal can be sent on different pairs of wires with more complex components at the ends. But USB can only be sped up by clocking it higher, which makes the noise characteristics leap into the unmanageable. Sooner or later we'll have USB cables that have to be sheathed from end to end in lead, because hey-- we gotta have that speed, but we can't use FireWire. That's not the standard. FireWire will get faster, doubling and quadrupling in speed in very short order-- but it won't matter, now that USB 2.0 is at the level that we all oohed and aahed at when FireWire let us put 150 CDs onto an iPod in five minutes. (And this is aside from other stuff that I haven't gotten into-- like how FireWire is a peer-to-peer/daisy-chainable protocol, meaning you can hook up all kinds of devices end-to-end-- camcorder to DV bridge to hard drive-- without even having a computer in the mix. You can even put your PC into FireWire target disk mode and access its disks from another machine. But USB is host/hub-based, meaning that if you want to hook up more devices than you have ports in your hub-bearing devices (PC, monitor, keyboard), you have to buy a USB hub and use up another A/C adapter slot in your power strip. And it has to go through a computer in order to work. But for most people's purposes, that's close enough to being a good design.) It pisses me off no end to see an elegant and effective design shouldered aside by the big, dumb, lumbering competitor with fewer features, worse expandability, and significant engineering drawbacks-- just because it has the trump-card of lower price and corporate-backed ubiquity on its side. Power over the market is so much more important than putting the best solution into people's hands, after all. No, I'm not jaded by this industry yet. But some days...