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Apple Patent Applications Look Toward Thunderbolt on iOS Devices
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Apple took the technology to Intel. Intel agreed to be part of the Hardware Development .
Only way to know what is what is to read the Development Agreement.
You still need to charge your devices. Fast wireless charging is a long way off, and will always be somewhat less practical than a simple cable, as you will probably need a base station of some kind.
So if you have a cable for charging anyway, why not include the option of super high-speed multi-purpose data transfer as well?
And so did Intel when it demoed Light Peak. If I remember right, the switch to MDP only happened after the USB board raised objections about the use of the USB interface for another connection protocol. Sony was well on the way to launching its LP notebook by then and it was too late to switch.
Is it just me or do these patents look like they would be essential to any Thunderbolt implementation ? Even if Apple is planing on licensing these, won't attaching these royalty costs hurt adoption ?
Thunderbolt seems to already have a hard enough time taking off as it is.
Thunderbolt seems to already have a hard enough time taking off as it is.
And you'll be "looking forward" for a long, long time.
Warning - personal anecdote follows...
During a remodel a few years ago I wired my house with structured cabling and Cat6 everywhere. (The kitchen alone has six Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 outlets on the walls at various locations - plus bedrooms, offices, home theatre - even the garage has a couple.)
Recently I started a copy of a 45 GB BD rip to one of the laptops sitting on the kitchen counter. After a short time - the progress bar said "7 hours remaining".
Aiden said "D'oh" and slapped himself in the forehead - the laptop was on WiFi (or as we call it "SlowFi"). Grabbed a Cat6 cable and gave the laptop a copper connection to the RJ45 jack a metre or so away. The laptop transparently switched from the SlowFi connection to the copper GbE, and a minute later the progress bar said "12 minutes remaining".
It amazes me when people say things like "we don't need local disks - we have the cloud". Totally clueless about the bandwidth needs of applications vs. the bandwidth available to the massively overwhelmingly large portion of ISP customers.
Now if my router did not die during a simple file transfer via SMB...
This is a replacement for my ancient /g/ router but I feel like I need to replace it again. That or Tomato is acting up.
110MB/s to/from my server with cables and somewhere between 0 and 4MB/s with a wireless connection (dependant on the height of the moon and the position the dog has decided to sit on the sofa)...
Calling 'the internet' 'iCloud' doesn't change a thing.
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What is a replacement for your ancient router? I've got a separate AP and don't use the wireless-G radio in mine for anything heavy (or its switch at all), but I've got an ancient wrt54g running tomato and its uptime is almost a year at the moment.
I am currently on a $29 ASUS NT-12. Though Fry's Electronics had a deal on one of those fancy, new dual band ASUS RT-N53 ones. I would have to stick with the stock firmware.
Then again Tomato USB has not seen any development since late 2010 (except for someone's own custom spin) and I can live with dd-wrt but I just do not like it as much.
You just need to learn how to harness the heat for the greater good. When my bedroom gets cold, I simply start playing The Old Republic to get my iMac really warmed up. If it's really getting cold (ie. some idiot left the backdoor open) I turn on the harman/kardon stereo amplifier that isn't currently hooked into anything. So much easier than getting up to change the thermostat...
My carbon footprint resembles a Monty Python gag. I am the 99%.
Thunderbolt hasn't existed long enough to know for sure if it'll have a hard time being adopted. PC manufacturers should start adopting it this year, and Intel is likely to include it on their motherboards (high end at the very least) in the future. You just have to wait and see.
For me - router isn't involved in the CIFS data transfers, there's a 24 port GbE switch in the "wiring closet". And a couple of smaller GbE switches (like an 8-port switch in the AV cabinet for the HTPC+TiVo+XBR+AVreceiver+BD+SlingBox).
The router connects to the outside world only - no local packets go through it, so no issues with CIFS.
It may be time to ditch Tomato - open source stuff running on ancient hardware.
I got the Linksys (Cisco) RVS4000 ($112 at Newegg) for my router - in addition to normal router functions (port forwarding, etc) it is also an IPSEC VPN gateway, so that authorized users can have full access to the internal network. (The supplied VPN client software works with 95% of the computer systems sold, if you're in the 5% minority you can download free or for-pay IPSEC VPN clients that work.)
That's the thing, if Apple is hampering it with patents and licensing fees already, Thunderbolt may never take off in at all. Is this another Firewire in the making ?
Apple took the technology to Intel. Intel agreed to be part of the Hardware Development .
Only way to know what is what is to read the Development Agreement.
Apparently this "Development Agreement" mandates Intel not to give Apple any credit for Thunderbolt. Here is how Intel describes Thunderbolt: Developed by Intel (under the code name Light Peak), and brought to market with technical collaboration from Apple.
Does this leave any room for claims that Apple developed Thunderbolt? I guess not. As far as I understand, Apple's part was limited to applying for Thunderbolt trademark (they are good at it) and then transferring it to Intel.
In a typical Apple manner they are just trying to patent some trivial stuff ASAP to be able to sue everybody later. Obviously, this is not going to fly with Intel backed standards.
Not really - 1394 had some uptake and momentum in some niche markets (video, for example).
T-Bolt in the Apple V1.0 implementation has nothing but $50 cables and promises of future hardware - except for a couple of very expensive exceptions that help prove the rule.
It's also crippled by the stupid idea of using a video connector and requiring video signals sucking up the bandwidth.
Hopefully, when T-Bolt comes to PCs this spring it will use a different connector - or at least drop the idea of video on the T-Bolt port except as an optional feature for compact laptops.
Or, possibly more likely, when T-Bolt comes to the PC it will be T-Bolt 2.0 which is completely incompatible with any T-Bolt 1.0 cable or peripheral.
I assumed he was using wireless to break his smb/cifs transfers. Even on the most sketchy of soho routers, maxing out lan traffic should be completely fine, its just running through a simple switch.
And my comment was an attempt to narrow down his issue, tomato works perfectly fine on my hardware which is older than his (not that things have changed much). Tomato is a simple firmware replacement, that's effectively a 'better' version of the original and works without quirks on the wrt54g (hence the lack of active development now?), it is nothing as advanced/customisable as dd-wrt.
And anyway... If you need a solid router (my usage and isp makes it a pointless waste of electricity for me) I'd run m0n0wall or pfsense. Even if I was a multi-billionaire with multiple 10gig lines into my place, I'd still most likely run pfsense rather than splashing out on 'proper' gear.
It is wireless to wireless alright.
I have the money for a server but I do not really need one. I just use a flash drive for anything larger than 500 MB. Oh wow, I have to walk up a flight of stairs.
Code:
Name tomatoRAF
Model Asus RT-N12
Chipset Broadcom BCM47162 chip rev 0 pkg 2
CPU Freq 300MHzI'm almost at the point where I've had it with all these cheap routers/APs. I used to run my home network off a Cisco PIX 501, and I'm eyeing one of these babies nowadays :
http://ncix.com/products/?sku=888898902&vpn=CISCO891W-AGN-A-K9&manufacture=Cisco Canada
Flexibility, power, stability. Screw all these custom firmware flashings, cheap router hardware, barely supported chipsets and crap default OSes.
I doubt we will see thunderbolt on iPod/phone/pad because of the whole thickness issue. And wireless is really starting to work right.
I thought one of the main reasons the 30 pin has lasted so long is because of its thinness.
I'm sure there are other not-yet-known devices in the works that could benefit from this connection though.
I thought one of the main reasons the 30 pin has lasted so long is because of its thinness.
I'm sure there are other not-yet-known devices in the works that could benefit from this connection though.
I don't know why the thickness of the Thunderbolt port is an issue. USB and HDMI are too large for small devices, so now there are mini versions of those connections. No one complains about that. I could see a mini Thunderbolt connector being made.
With the beveled edges of some iOS devices, the current dock connector is becoming tricky to use. I'm not sure how a smaller connector will solve that problem. I agree that wireless is the way to go, but the bandwidth isn't there right now.
With the beveled edges of some iOS devices, the current dock connector is becoming tricky to use. I'm not sure how a smaller connector will solve that problem. I agree that wireless is the way to go, but the bandwidth isn't there right now.
Looks to me like this is specific to Apple's 30 pin connector, which isn't a part of the specification anyway. I'm guessing Apple wants patents so that they can keep control of third party products through the "Made for iPhone" program or whatever it's called.
No big deal.
For people thinking this is niche, be aware that sometime in the not so distant future, we will be carrying around iPad compute capability that would melt a Mac Pro. Thunderbolt makes a nice pipe to connect to the world, maybe not the only pipe though.