Bruce Murphy  <pack-news@rattus.net> wrote:
>CD writers, hard drives, and various other things should have never been
>sold with USB interfaces. Fortunately, most of the people who bought them
>have learned this important lesson.

I always avoided IDE burners too, and used SCSI, but eventually gave up
on the myth as implemenations matured.  USB external devices, esp storage,
makes a lot of sense as virtually every machine out there now has USB1 or 2
ports.

>> PCs have bays for additional hard drives
>> and so the need for high speed external storage is greatly reduced.
>
>This also is a myth. Unless you like gutting your machine to move
>storage around, waiting an age for scanners, etc, there are lots of
>things for which firewire is very useful.

My scanner doesn't have FW, predates its mass use by 6 months or a 
year.  I'm not going to replace a perfectly good nikon scanner (IV) to
get a bit more speed.  The only reason I'd get it is to do video.  

>PC owners think that external hard drives aren't needed becuase they
>don't have the opportunity to use them, thanks to IDE (spit).

I saw pull out IDE drive setups back in the early 90s, running about
$40 per unit.  It's nothing new.

-- 
Jason O'Rourke www.jor.com