Why is FireWire too much work? At the core, both Ethernet and
FireWire are "simply" fast serial ports. (:
"All" someone would have to do is write a FireWire driver as if it
were an Ethernet driver, and voila, FireWire for the Newton!
"All, he says," I hear you saying. Yes, I realize that nothing is
that simple-- there are probably two totally different communication
stacks involved, not to mention a host of details-- can the Newton
even -think- that fast, or would it be forced to constantly send
pacing instructions to slow down the sender.
As far as the power is concerned, there's a teeny power Ethernet
card; aren't there any teeny power FireWire cards? Since Apple can
charge the iPod from the FIreWire port, would it be possible for Some
Manufacturer to build a parasitic FireWire card, that would suck
power from the network, not the host device? (Gee-- a vampire-based
card, and just in time for Halloween!)
Stupid! APPLE's already done it! iPod has one! Now, all we have to
do is buy an iPod, rip out its FireWire guts, stuff them into a
PCMCIA (sp) form factor, and we have the card. (:
--Paul E Musselman
PaulMmn_at_ix.netcom.nospam.com
>on 10/24/01 1:12 AM, Michael Drabicki at drabicki_at_mac.com wrote:
>
>> Can drivers be made to use a PC Card Firewire card usable with a
>> Newt? I'm thinking alternate storage on a portable Firewire hard
>> drive for packages...
>
>This is, unfortunately, way too much work to be done. You would first have
>to recognize the FireWire card so you would have to write a driver for it.
>Then, you would have to implement the FireWire API, which, I must admit, I
>haven't looked at, but I imagine fairly large given the number of devices
>that you can use. Or, put in another way, once you can recognize the card,
>you would have to write a driver for every category of device that implement
>that interface.
>
>Paul Guyot has done marvel with his ATA driver, but I don't think a FireWire
>interface working on the Newton would be something even remotely possible...
>
>Hey, Paul? Correct me if I'm wrong!
>
>-Laurent.
>--
>=====================================================================
>Laurent Daudelin <http://home.cox.rr.com/nemesys>
>Logiciels Nemesys Software mailto:nemesys_at_cox.rr.com
>
>casting the runes n.: What a guru does when you ask him or her to run a
>particular program and type at it because it never works for anyone else;
>esp. used when nobody can ever see what the guru is doing different from
>what J. Random Luser does. Compare incantation, runes, examining the
>entrails; also see the AI koan about Tom Knight in "Some AI Koans" (Appendix
>A).
>
>
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