Meanwhile, tensions are running high in a long-standing conflict elsewhere in the industry: FireWire vs. USB 2.0. FireWire's been around for a long time, now, and yet it hasn't exactly been embraced by the industry with warm smiles and friendly hugs. The only major computers on the market that currently ship with FireWire built-in are most Macs, a lot of Sony systems, and a couple of Dells-- and when it's present, FireWire is touted almost exclusively as a digital video interface instead of a versatile peripheral bus whose 400 Mbps makes even most flavors of SCSI look pokey by comparison.

Now, long-time followers of this particular subplot will recall that the early opposition to FireWire was due largely to Apple's exorbitant licensing scheme. See, Apple invented FireWire, and originally it was widely reported that manufacturers would have to pay a dollar per port to include the technology on their equipment. A buck a port may not sound like a lot to you, Rockefeller, but in the razor-thin-margin world of PC manufacturing, you can bet that an extra couple of clams wasn't winning any friends. Eventually Apple slashed the price to twenty-five cents per system, but by then the industry was already firing back-- by supporting Intel's upcoming USB 2.0 specification. USB, which really only caught on when Apple made it the sole peripheral expansion bus in the wildly popular iMac, only moves data at 12 Mbps, which isn't exactly optimal for bandwidth-hungry devices like hard drives. So Intel's next revision to USB is going to increase its speed forty-fold; at 480 Mbps, it's supposedly going to surpass FireWire, thus rendering Apple's technology unnecessary.

Now, never mind the fact that FireWire's here now, it already works with dozens of peripherals, it connects directly to digital camcorders, and it'll be up to 800 Mbps by the time USB 2.0 ever sees the light of day. (For an excellent overview of why FireWire's still better than USB 2.0, we heartily recommend David Every's article at MacKiDo.) The reason we're bringing this back up now is because Intel has only just finally released the completed specification for its pretender to the high-speed throne, and The Register reports that Microsoft's jumping in on the FUD wagon. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt are collectively the single best weapon that the rest of the industry has ever had against Apple, and judging by Microsoft's latest comments on FireWire, it's a weapon that's still in heavy use today.

Carl Stork, general manager of the company's Windows hardware strategy group, was quoted in EE Times as saying that "some of the control protocols and content protection technologies still have undefined intellectual property regimes that make [secure FireWire links] a challenge." Loosely translated, Stork's saying "hey, manufacturers... don't use FireWire, because I'm using some scary technojargon that ought to impress you and scare you simultaneously." As it turns out, though, these "content protection technologies" of which Stork speaks aren't specific to FireWire at all-- and, in fact, since they "relate secure transmission of data across any bus," they may relate to USB 2.0 as well. But it's good to see that Microsoft's current legal fracas hasn't got it so worked up that it can't take the occasional potshot at the competition...