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ANYWAY, the reason that I'm taking the time to write this is because either living in Holland does crazy things to the internet, or Raven's blog is gone, Raven's profile is gone, and Raven's AdSense account that was pulling in money from this blog for sweet prizes once we announced some contests is inaccessible (it always was to me, but now I can't even ask her about it or do anything with the money). Oh, and she's also not in the "Team Members" part of the blog. (Ann Apolis still is, but I don't think she was ever going to do anything anyway).
So! Looks like I've inherited this thing. Woo. Let's take a look at xkcd, shall we?
Title: Standards; alt-text: Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.
It's Micro-USB. Idiot.
Anyway, Randall has graciously shared one of his "observations" with us lowly plebeians on the internet. As usual, it's 1) not funny and 2) wrong. One big red flag that this comic is going to suck is the subtitle: "See: A/C chargers, character encodings, instant messaging, etc." That's right, give us specific examples so that we don't say, "That's not how Blu-ray became a standard! That's not how HTML became a standard! That's not how electrical plugs became a standard! That's not how literally ANYTHING became a standard!" Oh, and air conditioners don't have chargers. Idiot.
You know how standards form? Committees and organizations come together and say, "Hey, what's a good standard for this? Oh, that is? Okay, agreed!" Or, two standards exist and some catalyst forces one into the forefront (Sony including cheap Blu-ray players in PS3s), leaving the other in the dust. Nowhere, ever, has a company come out and said "Hey, there are so many standards, so just use ours instead!" (or if they have, they failed hard and we'll never hear about them).
Let's take a look at Randall's "examples." Maybe they're the exception to the rule. AC chargers? Nope, that's just everyone saying, "There's no standard so we're just picking one we like and bundling it with the device." What's the use case for that, anyway? "Must be able to supply power to device"? Well would you friggin' look at that, EVERY POWER SUPPLY COVERS THAT USE CASE. Holy balls but Randall's stupid sometimes.
Well, surely this applies to character encoding, right? I mean, there are enough character sets out there...oh. Nope, wrong again. ASCII was the standard for 45 years, and now UTF-8 is. Was that really so hard? The reason we have so many encodings is because we have so many languages! ISO/IEC_8859-6 and ISO/IEC_8859-8 are different standards because Arabic and Hebrew are different languages with different characters sets! Of course neither culture is going to agree to use the other!
Okay, last ditch effort. Maybe instant messaging falls prey to this so-called problem? No! As with the chargers, it's just a bunch of companies with a bunch of formats. All of the standards cover all of the use cases; that's why they're still in competition. If a new standard truly did something the others didn't, it would go the way of Facebook and take over. IM clients don't do that.
All in all, this comic is just another "haha what if" strip without the awareness that that's what it is. Sure, it's a funny situation: Everyone tries to standardize things, so we have a ridiculous amount of "standards." Problem is, that's not how things work in the real world. The things that cover all the use cases ARE the standards, and everything else is just competing products.
Randall's wrong again.
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And for crying out loud, Google, being in the Netherlands for three days does NOT make me Dutch! I'm logged into my Google account at all times, and you KNOW I'm an American! Stop making the first link to my searches nl.wikipedia.org, stop putting Blogger in Dutch, and stop trying to "help"! I can't read anything else here; at least let me look at webpages!
...Was this "feature" Randall's idea?
A/C charger... stand for Alternative Current... I*iot!
ReplyDeleteIt stands for ALTERNATING current. And there's no slash unless you're referring to air conditioning.
ReplyDeleteYou can use a slash when it's an "AC/DC adapter" (or transformer) which is often what you use to charge battery powered things from a standard electrical socket. I imagine that's where Randall became confused.
ReplyDeleteRaven seems to have deleted its google+ account too. Must've joined a cult/the Amish or something.
ReplyDeleteWell, at least we can look forward to actual reviews now.
"Raven seems to have deleted its google+ account too. Must've joined a cult/the Amish or something."
ReplyDeleteHer gmail account is also completely gone. How...ORWELLIAN. O_O
"Okay, last ditch effort. Maybe instant messaging falls prey to this so-called problem? No! As with the chargers, it's just a bunch of companies with a bunch of formats. All of the standards cover all of the use cases; that's why they're still in competition. If a new standard truly did something the others didn't, it would go the way of Facebook and take over. IM clients don't do that."
ReplyDeleteThis is where you're wrong. Let's see:
We've start out with IRC; it's pretty good, can do one-on-one as well as conferencing, has some nice features, but is ultimately too spartan for an IM protocol.
Then we've got Jabber/XMPP. Jabber solves many of the problems with IRC, but has no audio/video capabilities.
Then we've got Mumble, Skype, TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, ICQ, and Jingle, which are all incompatible messaging protocols.
That's not even including the abundance of non-open protocols:
Steam Chat
Almost all in-game chat
AIM
Yahoo!
PRETTY MUCH ANY EMBEDDED PROGRAM-SPECIFIC CHAT CLIENT
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"Let's take a look at Randall's "examples." Maybe they're the exception to the rule. AC chargers? Nope, that's just everyone saying, "There's no standard so we're just picking one we like and bundling it with the device." What's the use case for that, anyway? "Must be able to supply power to device"? Well would you friggin' look at that, EVERY POWER SUPPLY COVERS THAT USE CASE. Holy balls but Randall's stupid sometimes."
Let's generalize this out to power supply in general.
First, we have incompatible wall plugs.
Then, we have incompatible AC frequencies (50Hz/60Hz)
Then, we have incompatible AC voltages (12VDC (car)/110V/220V)
Then, we have incompatible secondary connectors (the connector between the AC cable and the wall wart, examples include IEC connectors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_connector#Connector_standard_sheets))
Then, we have incompatible output voltages and currents and fuses and frequencies and noise levels.
Then, we have incompatible output connectors (the ones Randall was complaining about)
Then, we have incompatible input connectors on devices
The industry *could* just go with one of the hundreds of standards that exist for this purpose, but no, they want to sell power supplies as an add-on.
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On character encodings, I agree with you
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- Remy
P.S.: I don't care that I put my points out of order.
On character encodings, agree today. There was a time when ASCII didn't rule, and was but one of many competing standards. EBCDIC was the most popular towards the end, but if you look back further you'll find BCDIC, and even equipment using plain 0-26 for letters plus a few punctuation characters used for pre-computer teletype machines sending news stories and stock updates. You can still see remnants of the conflict in modern character standards - the code for a pound symbol, for example. It has an extended-ascii representation at decimal 156, and a unicode representation at decimal 163. 156 in UTF8 is a continuation byte, and so unicode processors can print garbage upon encountering an ascii pound: Unicode was created to supercede the thousands of different language encodings, but those remain in use too. Eventually they'll fade into obscurity, but until then we are in the xkcd situation.
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