Firewire vs. USB 2.0

[Mac_forever]

I saw this on Techtv on The Screen Savers.


http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/supergeek/story/0,24330,3393571,00.html

[Omega]

That sucks that the overhead on USB 2.0 hinders its performance so much. Although this doesn't affect me, while I am basically against external peripherals, I feel it's simply poor engineering and marketing practice. It's also kind of sucky that USB 2.0 and FireWire are competing. If there was only one, there wouldn't be competition, and thus more support, and more products for everyone to use.

[Ryon]

You have to have competition is the basis of all of enterprise and is the main driver of any advancement in any field. If there was no competition people wouldn’t constantly be pushing to make better products to beat there competition and we would live in a bill gates world. People should be informed consumers and decide the products that best support their needs. If they dont know better than to buy the right thing that is not the producers fault.

[Omega]

I know competition is good, but take this example:

Hard drives as we know them have been around for a couple decades now. I'm not still using the 2,400 RPM ATA/33 hard drive that I was using back so many years ago, though. Maxtor, and IBM, and Sygate, and Western Digital (among others) have been competing, and making products with higher performance, and greater affordability. Now a 120 GB 7,200 RPM ATA/100 hard drive with an 8 MB buffer is available to me for what...about $170. There aren't really competing technologies out there, meaning all the manufacturers are concentrating on making drives for my standardized EIDE interface.

There wasn't a real competetor for USB 1 (with the exception of Macintosh's recent integration of FireWire), so it was a fairly "Universal" bus (which I don't percieve to have hindered technical development).

[Mac_forever]

All of you make make good points. If not for AMD, we would have only Intel as the cpu maker on the Window/linux side. Just think about it, how much would we be paying for Intel chips w/o AMD breathing behind their neck or vice-versa. Without compettion we would still be using ISA cards instead of PCI and AGP cards.