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ArsTechnica: "Report: FireWire doomed to niche interface status"

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Part of USB 2.0's success in supplanting FireWire as the high-speed connectivity interface of choice has to do with cost.

Initially, FireWire's IP owners demanded royalties of $1.00 per port (later dropped to 25¢ per system) from manufacturers, which turned some OEMs off. In contrast, Intel strongly backed USB 2.0 and quickly integrated support into its chipsets, where FireWire was usually available in PC systems only in the form of a PCI card add-on. As a result, FireWire's advantages over USB 2.0—like being able to support multiple hosts per bus and peer-to-peer device communication—were rendered irrelevant, and the interface is being relegated to niche status in the PC and peripheral market.

Seems like demanding (relatively) large royalties does not help to get a large market share and sustain it. On a slightly different topic, same can be said about adding DRM to one's products and preventing users from using what they have legally bought.

EuroPython 2007, the annual volunteer-run conference for the Python and Zope communities, will start in less than 2 weeks in Vilnius, Lithuania. It is on July 9-11, 2007.

See "EuroPython 2007 - Conference Timetable"

Wish I could be there. Via Simon Willison, met during HackDay London, who was looking for (and had found) an environment-friendly way to travel to the conference.

P.S. Talk abstracts are linked from the timetable. Will there be some more detailed information online at this site later on, e.g., papers/publications, transcripts, videos?

About Python 2.5 has a nice and easy-to-read overview of the new features in Python 2.5.

For a more formal, detailed description of all the things new please see "What's New in Python 2.5".

Added information about Python 2.5 which may be something useful in this post for those who are not going to the conference itself.

Tags: europython | hackday | python | vilnius

Need to blog more. HackDay London was great! This would probably fit within 1 Twitter message.