28 Sep
2014
28 Sep
'14
5:57 a.m.
On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 01:44:02PM -0400, David Riley wrote:
I don't. Consider the options:
a) A small plug, which provides 2.5W of power and has a simple 1.2Mb/s
protocol, which is more than adequate for keyboards and mice. Costs beer
money.
b) T-pieces, terminators, mini-hubs, crappy Realtek chipsets, and a separate
wall wart because there's no bus power. Costs hundreds of pounds.
Fast-forward two decades, and Ethernet *still* doesn't provide bus power by
default, requiring ugly PoE injectors or expensive enterprise switches. Worse,
it clocks the link even when idle, drawing a surprising amount of power. Fancy
a laptop with 10-20% less battery life? Just plug it into a gigabit network!
On Sep 27, 2014, at 12:33 PM, Brian L. Stuart wrote:
[...]
I for one
think that Ethernet with UDP is an excellent alternative to USB
for most, if not all, applications.
Indeed, Stuart Cheshire (who may have already
been working for Apple at the
time) made the same point a few years before USB became the dominant
standard. I wish that idea had gotten more traction.