I always feel Apple made a real blunder with the FireWire licensing situation. FW was really interesting: It was a real memory mapped computer bus like PCI that also supported peer-to-peer operation. It was vastly superior to USB and had a lot of potential. That is, if you knew that Firewire was Apple's trademark, I.LINK was Sony's, Lynx was Texas Instruments, and generic IEEE-1394/1394 labels everyone non-technical was supposed to somehow understand. Great tech hamstrung by greed.
Then again, remote DMA to your memory via a port on the computer, while a great tool for debugging internal stuff, is also quite the wide door to getting hacked if someone every manages to plug in a malicious device in the same port.
I always feel Apple made a real blunder with the FireWire licensing situation. FW was really interesting: It was a real memory mapped computer bus like PCI that also supported peer-to-peer operation. It was vastly superior to USB and had a lot of potential. That is, if you knew that Firewire was Apple's trademark, I.LINK was Sony's, Lynx was Texas Instruments, and generic IEEE-1394/1394 labels everyone non-technical was supposed to somehow understand. Great tech hamstrung by greed.
Then again, remote DMA to your memory via a port on the computer, while a great tool for debugging internal stuff, is also quite the wide door to getting hacked if someone every manages to plug in a malicious device in the same port.