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.
Surprised I haven’t seen anyone here mention unicode
Probably because utf-8 vs utf-16 vs utf-32 makes people feel like it is still annoying multi-standard.
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.
see also: NACS (yep that’s a Tesla plug in a standards agreement)
Yeah. No standard covers all use cases. It’s just best to have one standard that makes a lot of compromises.
USB has worked pretty well IMO
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 not 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. 👍
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
USB , mini USB, type C USB, iphone bs, do those not count?
Not compared to what we had before usb
It used to be 100% proprietary for everything
USB-C is the latest standard. Try buying a phone, mouse or headphones swith mini USB these days.
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.
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.
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.
Standards committees: We don’t discriminate. Everyone can have their own standard.
Toilet paper rolls.
Somehow we settled on a pretty good size for toilet rolls, and there never seems to be a compatibility issue with holders.
At least not for households. Commercial products have their own things going on, but it doesn’t affect most people.
Is there a formal standard, or did we decide not to mess with good enough?
We’ve got a 100 year old toilet roll holder, the spindle was turned on a lathe and the wooden cutout it sits in was hand carved. It is a poor fit for modern high sheet count rolls. We can’t stand to get rid of it so we just leave the roll outside of it until it is small enough to fit.
What’s the width like? Consistent with modern rolls, or no?
Correct, width is the same. It can’t handle the diameter of modern jumbo rolls.
You could always buy smaller rolls. Someone must, since they still exist
My girl makes that decision and wants to keep the holder as well.
You’re a machinist! Can’t you just like…make a better one? /s
I actually have a wood lathe and all the other tooling to make one, not that I would.
I’ve been fixing the place up since August. It’s a farm that hasn’t been properly maintained in about 20 years.
I’m doing my best to build to the standard of the original owner and his son with modern materials and methods. It’s a humbling experience. Nothing is quite square but everything is built like it’s bomb proof. You couldn’t afford to build out of solid wood like they did. The joints and meets are also super tight, you can’t get a sheet of paper between roof boards on the barn in most places.
When one roll is empty, have you considered rolling half of a new roll onto it?
That sounds like a lot of fiddly work. Just sit a new roll on the back of the tank and use it until it fits.
I have a half-bath with a modern holder. When that roll is 75% consumed, I move it to the bathrooms with the older style.
I like how you roll.
This is a cool one I haven’t thought of before!
Systemd
I’d argue systemd is the opposite. It was so controversial that it made a bunch of init systems appear when before you had just good old sysV.
You can avoid the issue when a government just mandates one standard, ideally after consulting with experts on which is the best.
See: USB, SCART, etc.USB-C is a total failure though. Switching voltages, extremely high currents, expensive cables, fickle connectors, …
non standard conforming cables, and connectors, plus the entire mess of it supporting anything from power only, to usb 2, to usb 3, to thunderbolt 3, to thunderbolt 4? and usb 4.0 now.
It’s an utter fucking disaster of a shithole.
A lot of people seem to be opposed to this argument, seeing it as a kind of government overreach, but I think it can work if done correctly. Things like USB and HDMI are already governed by collectives of companies, I think having the government work together with them can be beneficial for both consumers and producers alike.
obligatory DisplayPort > HDMI
Cries in CEC.
Sometimes the regulators sit back and see how the market is pushing, then regulate it to reduce waste. EV chargers for example.
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
If there are fourteen of them, do they deserve to be called “standards” at all?
For home automation, Matter/Thread has the potential. We’ll see over the next five years, but yes market forces can make a new standard work
Reasons I’m hopeful
- this is the first time major companies are involved: Apple, Google, Amazon agree
- first time home automation hubs “just happen”, with the millions of people who have Echo, Google Home, Apple devices
- small companies that dominate home automation seem to realize the problem of the market can’t reasonably expand without interoperability and ease of use
Matter/Thread is the new kid on the block. Will it be yet another home automation standard, or will it gradually replace the previous ones? We’ll see.
The only place I have seen thread mentioned before was this blog post: https://overengineer.dev/blog/2024/05/10/thread/
If you’ve seen anything about Matter, it most likely talks about Thread as well. They usually go together
Matter/Thread
i still think IP based smart home kit is a mistake. The internet is already such a big vuln, we don’t need a shit ton of garbage sitting on the network only making it more vulnerable.
communication standards like zwave, and zigbee, are preferable here. It looks like at least one of those supports it, but perhaps both will be protocol agnostic.
Think of Thread as Zigbee with an IPv6 stack. It’s a local communication standard but with a compatible protocol.
I was excited that my current phone has a Thread radio so it can be on the local network for presence and control. Unfortunately not supported yet.
I’m definitely worried about the recent Matter standard for internet access. They say it’s optional, but that capability is easily hijacked by unscrupulous vendors.
- my thermostat has cloud functionality that I want, so I’m fine with the option of giving them internet access
- my air purifier requires internet access to report back to a vendor-specific portal filled with advertising. I’m not ok with that tradeoff so don’t use any smart functionality.
it’s definitely cool that we have the capability of things like thread/matter zigbee and zwave now.
I would be more ok with local IoT devices being IP based if they were intended on being used with an “offline” network. Though that’s a little funky to setup, and causes interference issues, so i think i prefer the zigbee and zwave solution of using a different protocol entirely, especially since it mandates offline handling.
My two biggest concerns with IP connected devices are most home networks are not properly delegated, so people aren’t creating a second subnet specifically for IoT devices for example, and they most definitely aren’t properly providing access controls through that network as well. So if someone manages to get into one of the devices, you basically have the entire network at that point.
One of the big advantages of non IP based systems is that you have a “point of relay” or gateway between all of your IoT devices and your network, which becomes the attack vector, making it a lot easier to secure, and manage. Even if you managed to hack into a zwave/zigbee network, it would only be locally, and IoT devices only, so it’s not going to be hugely problematic.
theoretically you can do all of this on a traditional IP based network, i just don’t think it’s the correct approach. Sort of like making a carboat, or a boatcar. You could, but why?
I think at minimum, a standalone IoT device should not be capable of connecting to the global internet, period. Through something like a gateway or “point of relay” sure, that’s fine by me, but even then i would prefer open standards and documentation on that specific feature set.
My guess is that the speed with which new device types are supported is too slow to make it truly revolutionary. It was a good idea, it just does not happen fast enough to become dominant.
Definitely a problem - but the positive side of that is the slow pace is from reaching a consensus. It’s easy to be impatient with how slow the rollout is going but if that means that most manufacturers of each type are on board it could still be a good thing
Let’s hope so, I would love that! It is so frustrating shopping for new Home Assistant gear, finding something nice and then realizing it uses FlooSnorb instead of zigbee or wi-fi or bluetooth or whatever you already have. And yeah, sure, you can buy a controller for that, and there is probably an integration for that for HA, but damnit…another one? 😁 ™️
At this point i already support the most common protocols in HA, so i really hope for the end of WiFi, and vendor specific portals
Light bulb sockets are the same all over. RJ-45 Ethernet, USB-C, Bluetooth, WiFi, TCP, HTTP, HTML, CSS.
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.
Include car cigarette lighter power ports
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
