18 Oct
2006
18 Oct
'06
10:34 a.m.
On Tuesday 17 October 2006 06:17 pm, Jules Richardson wrote:
Unless you were the mfr. and wanted a way cheaper interface connector maybe?
RS232 as far
as a general purpose consumer interface is dead.
In a way, I suppose it doesn't fit for a lot of devices beyond things like
terminals and modems and simple, low-speed stuff like UPS status/control.
Most consumer devices are just too bandwidth-hungry for serial - but that's
what parallel ports and SCSI were for; we didn't *need* yet another
interface standard... Makes me wonder how well SCSI would have fared had it
been hot-pluggable
from the start, as that seems to be the main benefit of USB (even if the
Microsoft guys can't seem to get the software side of it right!)
I've noticed that, where software that seems to want to deal with SCSI stuff
(in my case a flatbed scanner hooked to one machine and a burner hooked to
another) seems to want those devices hooked up and powered when they boot,
though I can do things like `cdrecord -scanbus` and get the software to
notice what's out there.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, dealiest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of spac, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin