[BobbyT]

There’s really a Firewire 3200 on the way?

I figured after 800 they just gave up. Why throw all those resources at developing something for an ever-shrinking market (even Apple’s support USB)?

This just means another generation of Firewire and Firewire/USB combo external drives instead of having the full economies of scale of a universal connection.

[Dr. Sivana]

This just means another generation of Firewire and Firewire/USB combo external drives instead of having the full economies of scale of a universal connection.

Firewire will continue to have a place. First, it has a large established base in the professional video world, where devices are used for more than three years before retirement. Second, USB 2.0, and of curse 3.0 have good throughput, an important rating, but it has been my experience that Firewire is vastly superior in other aspects of real world usage. Latency is vastly superior, its initial responsiveness is much better (important for databases). I used both USB and Firewire drives to backup a Mac graphics department, and the Firewire 400 drives performed better than the USB 2.0 drives. More important still, I have found that USB ports and external drive controllerss have a really nasty tendency to burn out on long sustained data transfers, and are more likely to corrupt the hard drive in so doing.

Professionals will continue to use and pay for Firewire support in high end equipment for some time. Those downscale don't need to even know about it. All of those unused serial ports on all those computers made since USB modems and broadband connections haven't hurt anybody. The mere existence of USB doesn't either. Firewire largely takes the spot SCSI used to have.

[SunkenCiv]

Yeah, there’s a website, let’s see, it’s something obvious, like this:

http://www.firewire3200.com/

I’ve got a few bottom-feeder type ideas for FW products, but this is a little like Kramer having the idea for redoing the restaurant on top of the Chrysler bldg, or whatever...