Ah, I didn't realize the Isight was firewire. I've got an IMac Isight
so that is quite interesting. I've never owned a machine that had
firewire capability so is there a lot of hardware beyond cameras and
drives that utilize firewire? I know usb your limited to I believe
127 devices on any one port so I imagine there's some limit with
firewire as well. I guess firewire is sort of like scsi without all
the mess of termination etc.
Thanks for the bits of info, you learn something new everyday..grin
Scott
On Jan 6, 2006, at 11:05 PM, Bruce Bailey wrote:
Firewire devices can be daisy-chained. That is, one device plugged
into another into another. This is as opposed to the hub and spoke
topology used by USB. Desktop Macs have two Firewire ports as much
for this reason as any other. One can actually network Macs using
Firewire. Who remembers phone net cables and early AppleTalk?
Firewire is better than USB for anything that benefits from a
sustained data transfer rate. Or anything with a modest power
requirement (like an external hard drive) so that an external power
supply is not required. This is why the iSight cameras are so much
better quality than Windows USB web cams.
The only significant advantage of USB is that it is less expensive.
(This, of course, leads to it being more widely used. The popularity
of USB is based only on the cost factor, not any technical
superiority. But popularity is an important factor.)
