Anybody happen to know why USB & FireWire even exist, if there's 100baseT/Gigabit Ethernet ? I mean, why not just use that for everything, instead of introducing 2 more "standards" ?
They serve completely different purposes. You might well ask "Why do we have Electricty and Television?"
Ethernet is a networking hardware layer; networked devices need a fair bit of intelligence to them, and a fair amount of stored state information to work effectively. In essence they all need some form of Operating System on them.
USB and Firewire are peripheral protocols, designed to connect dumb, or somewhat dumb devices to computers.
That you can network over Firewire is a testament to the flexibility of the TCP/IP protocol, which can be used with everything from fiber optics to ethernet to phone lines to bongo drums <http://eagle.auc.ca/~dreid/index.html> and homing pigeons <http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/>.
Though the lag on the latter network is rather fierce, ping times are on the order of 5 million ms...
-- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group
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