1 Oct
2014
1 Oct
'14
8:44 a.m.
Both of those
would be different now if Ethernet had won over USB. If
Ethernet were used for the things USB is now used for, PoE would be
ubiquitous instead of niche, Ethernet would be dirt cheap because it's made
in trillions of units, and USB, if it still existed at all, would be
expensive because it would be a low-volume niche\ thing.
USB was *designed* to be an extremely low-cost interface exactly so it could be
high-volume. For Ethernet to have "won over" USB, it
would have had to be
redesigned so that it was as naff as USB, at which point
everybody loses.
I'm not so sure about that. It appears to me that one could design
a lower cost physical interface for Ethernet that didn't require all
the magnetics by requiring that anything more than one-to-one had
to go through a switch instead of a hub or a bus. That would also
appear to simplify the MAC silicon. Now one could argue whether
that's really still Ethernet without CSMA/CD, and quite frankly, I
don't know that I care. What would make me happy about that is
that as far as controller and driver design go, the salient feature
is that we still have 802.3 frames on the wire. Then I can do
whatever I want with those frames, just like I can with Ethernet.
I'm not forced into doing something horribly complex to accomplish
something simple.
It's not the physical layer of USB that I object to (except of course
that the name doesn't match the physical characteristics). It's
everything in all the layers above the physical that makes me want
to wretch every time I find myself working with it.
BLS