Small net protocols like Gemini, gopher, spartan, IPFS because they don’t compete with the web instead they coexist as separate things.
The way I see it, it’s not so much an issue of making something that’s better than the other standards. It’s really about getting your standard into actual use and hitting critical mass which makes all the other standards irrelevant.
Yeah. No standard covers all use cases. It’s just best to have one standard that makes a lot of compromises.
see also: NACS (yep that’s a Tesla plug in a standards agreement)
Networking standards started picking winners during the PC revolution of the 80’s and 90’s. Ethernet, with the first standards announced in 1983, ended up beating out pretty much other LAN standard at the physical layer (physical plugs, voltages and other ways of indicating signals) and the data link layer (the structure of a MAC address or an Ethernet frame). And this series of standards been improved many times over, with meta standards about how to deal with so many generations of standards through autonegotiation and backwards compatibility.
We generally expect Ethernet to just work, at the highest speeds the hardware is capable of supporting.
networking standards were a mess before ethernet really fucking cooked with twisted pair wiring.
Ethernet had already existed for a little bit prior to this, and most other alternatives were actively being worked on at the time, and relatively similar to ethernet, save for the general technical implementation, token ring as opposed to the funny broadcast meta. But when ethernet was able to just barely get ahead and use twisted pair, the entire thing came crumbling down and everyone agreed that ethernet over twisted pair, with switched star topology was the best.
What’d twisted pair bring to the table? Noise reduction?
three primary things.
Fucking coax, literally the bane of anybody anywhere, fucking horrible standard. Works well, which is the only reason anybody uses it, it’s just a nightmare. (if you have ever dealt with a coax cable, you know exactly what i mean)
Offices were already wired up with phone lines, which often had redundant lines running to each endpoint, meaning you could just hook straight into the existing wiring infrastructure, and convert it to ethernet (very accessible and cheap)
twisted pair comes with the advantage of noise reduction over longer distances, cheaper construction, and significantly simpler wire structure, making it easier to route, manage, terminate, and just generally exist around. (basically the same as the first one lmao)
It was actually so much of a problem, that the original ethernet standard, based on RG-6? I think, don’t quote me on it, ended up moving to a smaller coax standard and was referred to as “thinnet” as it was thinner coax and easier to work with.
When the standard is a big interoperability push that leverages MORE functionality as a bribe to be implemented.
This is how USB (plug & play!), Bluetooth (wireless headset!), HDMI (high def, single cable!) , and USB-C (both sides are good!) all beat the entrenched pseudo standards.
Whenever the new standard hits the almost impossible golden triangle of “cheap, reliable, and fast”.
It’s gotta be cheaper than the alternatives, better and more reliable than the alternatives, and faster/easier to adopt than the alternatives.
Early computers for example had various ways to chug math, such as mechanical setups, relays, vacuum tube’s, etc.
When Bell invented their MOSFET transistor and figured out how to scale production, all those previous methods became obsolete for computers because transistors were now cheaper, more reliable, and faster to adopt than their predecessors.
Tbf though transistors are more of a hardware thing. A better example of a standard would be RIP being superceded by BGP on the internet.
Tbf though transistors are more of a hardware thing. A better example of a standard would be RIP being superceded by BGP on the internet.
another big example is the telecom companies being superseded by IP based networking, rather than whatever patch routing bullshit was previously cooked up.
Sometimes certain solutions are just, better.
If there are fourteen of them, do they deserve to be called “standards” at all?
Light bulb sockets are the same all over. RJ-45 Ethernet, USB-C, Bluetooth, WiFi, TCP, HTTP, HTML, CSS.
USB-C
Gonna have to disagree with you there. Try using a USB-C data cable to charge a device. Now try figuring out which cable out of five is the charge cable.
Those aren’t different standards, they’re just different USB-C cables. It’s like saying light bulb sockets aren’t a unifying standard because there’s different bulbs with different wattages. The fact that all those cables work over the same standard is an example of how ubiquitous the standard is. That said they should be labeled better, like how USB3 was color coded blue; each cable could have a color strip to distinguish it.
Shouldn’t being able to identify which cable is used for which application be part of a standard?
You brought up light bulbs- imagine if they didn’t tell you the wattage? But they do. They print it right on the bulb.
I agree with you, but I don’t think that makes it a poor example; those different cables aren’t competing standards, they’re different types of USB-C cables. They should absolutely label the cables though, big oversight on the standard there.
HTML CSS and JavaScript each having different syntax is stupid and I will die on that hill.
Just use React or something, you can use a single syntax for all three. It makes total sense why the syntax is different if you think about when and why they were made. We had HTML for years before CSS, and it was longer still until we got JavaScript. Each language has a different purpose, so naturally a different syntax makes sense. Your hill is poorly defended.
In that case on general programming language should have taken over instead of trying to merge all three. Especially CSS, which in its infinite intelligence decided to use the minus operator instead of underscore, is completely out of place. Everything is jank and you can tell it has been patched together with duct tape.
Idk, I like CSS, but I come from a web development background. Modern JS (ES4+) is fully capable of replacing CSS using the style property.
JSX is sort of like a singular language to do all three.
HTML isn’t perfect, but I can’t think of a better language for writing documents. TEX is unintuitive, PDF is opaque, markdown is just HTML shorthand.
While light bulb sockets don’t change much from region to region, they definitely aren’t all the same. For the bulbs (not the bars), there’s two large categories: Edison screws and bi-pin. Edison screws also come in a lot of sizes. When compact fluorescents were rolling out, they got a new bi-pin connector from the USA: GU24. My whole home has GU24 fixtures (not by my own choice), but my lamps are Edison screws.
Thank you for teaching me how to replace my porch light (ONLY MY PORCH LIGHT?!?!) that’s been out for over a year. I tried to pull the bulb out and it shattered in my hands. I was like WTF is this shit? Haven’t touched it since.
GU24 is wack, especially for home lighting. I think they aren’t made much anymore.
It was a pain to find gu24, I had to order them online for two rooms
It seems a lot of sites these days are actively hostile towards the HTML-CSS combo.
What do you mean? Do you have any examples?
Not really. I guess Google search requires JavaScript now.
Include car cigarette lighter power ports
Chess, there’s so many wonderful ways to play.
Also, playing cards. Every casino and basement house party uses the same 52 card deck. It’s sold in airports all over the world.
MIDI.
Before the 80’s, there was no standard interface to control electronic instruments, just a bunch of proprietary interfaces unique to each manufacterer. But in 1983, amazingly they actually standardized on MIDI, and it remains a useful standard to this day, with any new versions of MIDI being completely backwards compatible, so your Yamaha DX7 from the 80’s is still just as viable to use today as the day it was new!
This really is a perfect example. I did a lot of MIDI things as a kid!
DMX is a similar protocol for lighting.
Sure, there’s artnet and sacn, but most gigs still use good old DMX.I hate to tell you this but DMX passed away in 2021
Should mention Open Sound Control which is also pretty good. Not exactly a competitor, it was supposed to provide a richer, real time interface. Still popular for certain use cases, including beyond music.
USB has worked pretty well IMO
USB , mini USB, type C USB, iphone bs, do those not count?
USB-C is the latest standard. Try buying a phone, mouse or headphones swith mini USB these days.
Not compared to what we had before usb
It used to be 100% proprietary for everything
Yeah just don’t pay too close attention to the unofficial power delivery protocols.
or the cursed double ended USB-A cables
“looks inside” meme with the “oh. oh no” meme spliced onto the end
My main complaint about USB is the cables. There’s no way of knowing what standards and data speeds the cable may support.
They’ve now, at least, released a standard set of markings. Basically, the data speed in Gb and the power capacity in Watts will be printed on the connector. Whether chinese suppliers will bother complying is another matter.
Your typo makes your comment really confusing because it means the opposite of what you meant to write.
Edited to fix. 👍
I see this one quoted a lot when discussing Lemmy communities migration/consolidation/split.
I don’t think it really works that well for forums. Some communities have clearly taken over others (see [email protected] vs [email protected] recently). It’s not standards competing, it’s people going where the activity happens.
emacs is everything
Except fast.
Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping
Fortunately I have added a few dozen gigabytes of RAM since that aphorism was popular, and today emacs barely ever swaps very much when I don’t deserve it
It just needs a good text editor, is all.
There are a lot and in most cases you’ll notice when dealing with Americans, who are refusing to do stuff like the rest of the world. The meter and kilogram took over from hundreds of different measurement standards. Most of the world is using the same calendar and writes dates in the same way. Most countries are driving on the same side. Traffic signs are kind of the same worldwide. You can buy screws with the same standard everywhere.
what if instead of coming up with new standards to the pile you combine existing ones, based on what works and is reasonable to do?
…that would create a new standard.
yes, but the point is to make something that might actually become new standard instead of making the problem worse. I think the problem is that everyone wants to make something that is great for them and hopes others will just willingly or unwillingly use it.
I think it’s pretty rare that people aren’t trying to make a thing they think is better than what already exists. Even in the comic, they think they’re solving the problem, just like you.
Yes they are, but if result is not improvement then there is a problem in the process. I think that problem is that people just dont think beyond themselves enough.
Who said there weren’t improvements?
Even in your example of combining two, there’s going to be tradeoffs depending on what pieces they choose from each. Sometimes there isn’t an objectively better thing in all aspects.
the ultimate goal of everything should be to try making things better, otherwise what is the point. That is the baseline of all my thinking.
As is the mindset of everyone who set out to make a better standard. You don’t seem to be getting that.
Not exactly this, but it reminds me of my first job. I used to work in finance, and I was given the task of automating cash flow reports that were sent out to hundreds of clients.
The problem was that they were made manually in Excel, and most of them were unique. So every couple years they’d get a bunch of smart people in a conference room, and tell them to figure out how to automate the cash flows. The first step was always to create a standard cash flow template, and convince everyone to adopt it.
Some users would adopt the new template, but most of them would say that the client didn’t like it, so they’d stop using it and the project would fall apart.
By the time I got there, there were still hundreds of unique cash flows, but then there were a few dozen that shared the same handful of templates, like a graveyard of failed attempts to automate this process.
I just made the output customizable. The reports looked the same as what the client was used to, but it saved hundreds of man hours for the users. A lot of people got laid off.
