This confused me when I read about, I thought the point of lightpeak was that it was optical, I didn't even know they could substitute in copper.
It sounds like a bad idea to me and seems to be coming more out of pricing issues rather than any type of long-term compatibility plan. Basically, unless the ports are optical AND copper from Day 1, you're going to have a situation whereby future devices will have to support both connectors in order to be backwards compatible with version 1 devices or some kind of adapter (we all know what a PITA it is to have to get a FW400 adapter to use on a FW800 port because they couldn't think ahead for the FW800 connector). You'd eventually have "Light Peak" cables that are optical and those that are copper and stores would have to carry two lines indefinitely since you could never get rid of the copper cables once introduced.
As for expense, it's hard to believe they cost THAT much. Toslink optical cables are around $1 a foot or less from online stores. Retail stores GOUGE the public on ANY kind of cable these days except maybe RCA. HDMI 1.4 (copper) cable is also less than $1 a foot online, but you'd never guess it at a place like Best Buy (I just bought a high quality 33 foot cable for $27 online).
2011 will be the yr of the single port MBP (not including magsafe) with a lightpeak dock offering numerous USB 3.0 ports, triple FW800, eSATA, twin ethernet, optical in/out, hdmi and displayport.
Who would want to have to carry a dock around just to use common ports that you need on a daily basis? That sounds like more of a hassle than a benefit, IMO. Having a dock to add MORE common ports through Lightpeak isn't a bad idea, but a Macbook without USB ports on it to connect such basic things as wired mice and keyboards would be a nightmare, IMO. I wouldn't buy one. They could run the ports internally off the same buss if they wanted to, but I think any notebook is going to need a number of standard connectors for some time to come (at least USB, Audio and Ethernet).
ABSOLUTELY FALSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ethernet is twisted pair(s) - the electrodynamics of which I do not want to get into (it was an undergrad homework assignment years ago). While it may be physically wire, the geometry of the wire is absolutely crucial to its bandwidth capability.
j
I'm not sure shouting absolutely false out will change the fact that they're still conductors (and thus not "absolutely" false). All wire has some kind of geometry, BTW so I don't know that you can infer anything either way about his rather generic statement (which seemed to be about optical versus electrical conductor, not types of conducting cables). In any case, there's nothing complex about "twisted wire" or why it's done. Each conductor will tend to pick up the same levels of interference and other effects. By using equal and opposite pairs of conductors, the difference of a signal between the two can be removed at the destination. Crosstalk becomes a problem with nearby conductor pairs interfering with each other so by twisting the two conductors uniformly, the crosstalk is exchanged with the opposite wire at every twist and thus keeps the crosstalk common mode and easily rejected at the destination.
SCSI was awful. I mean, it was much better than anything else available at the time, but man, SCSI was seriously temperamental and required serious voodoo to get it working at all in the first place. Should this device be terminated? Unterminated? Set as a slave device with jumpers? etc.?
I think you're confusing SCSI with PATA (aka "IDE"). SCSI devices didn't use "slave" devices and only the last drive in the chain needed any termination (if at all). SCSI devices were set by "ID" and therefore were set to a number from 0-7 (on older SCSI interfaces like the Amiga; this went to 16 total devices on newer interfaces). Setting a number could be as simple as a set of numbered dip switches on a given device. If you could count from 0-7, it wasn't that hard. SCSI is still in use today (mostly in professional usage) and typically uses serial cables now or even Ethernet for external devices.