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Naturally Occurring Standards
An anonymous reader writes "The phrase 'de facto standard' can denote anything from proprietary tyranny to a healthy, vibrant, market. What makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization? Should you use such informal standards, or ignore them?"
What makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization?
The tests would be: "Does that standard meet the needs of disparate groups of people who may be using a tool for different purposes within an organized framework? Is the standard accessible? Also critically important: "does that standard lock one into a narrowly defined structure that is difficult to extend or modify as needs change? Is the standard backwards/forwards compatible? To answer your final question, standards become formalized when they begin to meet these tests and are adopted by appropriate shareholders. This of course is aside from issues of criteria definition, or guidelines which often begin to take on lives of their own and bastardize "standards".
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In my experience, things become an informal standard because either someone with a lot of influence says it should be (e.g. Microsoft) or the technology just makes a lot of sense and hits the market at the right time (e.g. Java).
Just remember: Microsoft Office is an informal standard, as is Microsoft Windows. Of course, if you ask Microsoft, it's all "the industry standard".
(Which reminds me of an amusing story. My company had a third party do a web video for us at one point. The third party then asked us what format we wanted it in. I replied "MPEG2" because it's the most portable and is a cross-platform standard. We then got back a WMV file with a note about Windows Media being "the industry standard". Apparently the only reason they asked was that they wanted to know if we wanted the file coded as VBR or not.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If rich, the follow the informal standard. If right, ignore it.
If you're very, very lucky, right & rich converge, but if its either/or I think my 1st 2 sentences sum it up.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
CC.
P.S.: An excellent article!
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=standard Something, such as a practice or a product, that is widely recognized or employed, especially because of its excellence.
.DOC format, but if people wont use it, it wont be a standard (it wont matter if it is an ISO-XXXX standard). Of course, now, .DOC is a kind of document standard.
What makes [or should make] something standard is the wide acceptance from the population. And after all, that is a standard. As an example (trying not to flamebait) Microsoft could try to standaraize his
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Few use the ISO network protocol. -> not standard
Microsoft Word *.doc is not open. -> not standard
HTTP is open and common. -> true standard
Man, when I was in college, we had 8 or 9 different "Industry Standards". While most teachers were absolutely convinced that their method was the "Industry Standard", there were a few knowledgable enough to explained the whole thing to us. Mostly when people talk about "Industry Standards", it's manager-speak for "The Way We Do Things Here." So if you don't follow the "Industry Standards", you will not be working for long.
Also keep in mind that "Industry Standards" in the sense that I'm talking about has absolutely nothing to do with real ISO or QS standards. Those are actual organizations that create a set of standard rules for companies to follow, usually for the safety of workers and quality assurance of products. No, I'm just talking BS manager-speak...
IMHO monopoly, patents, non-free available information about a specification is the dead to a public acceptable standard.
Without the above the best of breed will prevail and become "de facto standard".
Just a pity that when a company has the monopolicy on their market they only risk market share when using "good" standards, capitalism is good for starting up an economy however sometimes it is better to do some thing "socially" it's for the common good.
Good urban architects don't impose pavements on people. They let people walk freely and observe the walking routes and patterns. Then they put down the walk-way, and that becomes the standard place to walk. You follow it until you find something better, a shortcut. Then you build a new pavement there.
Folksonomies[1] are hot these days, and they go against the rigid a priory classification that has been standard so far. That's another example of a shortcut. Because it's better (easier, faster, more natural, etc.) people are adopting it, and it's becoming a de facto standard. That's the new shortcut, and pavents are being built to facilitate this new route.
[1] simpy (use demo/demo for a demo)
Simpy
IBM
1970
IBM
1980
IBM
1990
Microsoft
2000
Microsoft
2003
SCO
It's de facto when it requires no further explination.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I've found that a 'standard' is often something that is found to be merely acceptable by the majority, not specifically desired or due to it's excellence. Standards are commonly just that...the minimal acceptable process/result.
Perhaps it's useful to discuss what the difference is between a de facto standard and a convention. If there is none, then I'd say conventions evolve through traditions established by whomever pioneered a given technology/idea, and those conventions can and do change over time (Liebniz notation in calculus comes to mind as a mediocre example) as better ideas come up. But usually over a long period of time.
I mean, we had damn near purged the world of programmers who put their opening brace for a new code block on the same line as the conditional statement, and then that Gosling dude from Java went and set us back 20 years.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Should you use such informal standards, or ignore them?
Like using a '?' to end a sentence?
When standards form in the wild, it may be a cry for formal standardization
Level: Introductory
Peter Seebach (crankyuser@seebs.plethora.net)
Freelance writer
12 Apr 2005
Column iconWhat makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization? Should you use such informal standards, or ignore them? Learn more about de facto standards in this month's Standards and specs.
Dave Clark once said, "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code."
The IETF (the organization Dave Clark was speaking for) is a standards body that has taken an unusual, but empirically quite effective, approach to standardization, preferring to see proposed standards tested out a bit in the field before they get formal blessing. In short, whenever possible, they formalize an existing de facto standard, rather than inventing a new one from scratch. The RFC process (see Resources) has worked well enough to produce many of the most widely used standards in the world, and IETF standards have a credibility even ISO can't always match.
What makes a de facto standard good enough to formalize, or possibly so good it doesn't even need to be formalized? In the wild, you will often encounter standards, with or without the blessings of a standards body, which seem like they might be applicable to your work. Sometimes, you may find no applicable standard, but a likely partnership to create one. In this Standards and specs, you'll see a few things to keep in mind when talking about de facto standards.
First, though, to dispel a few myths: Not all de facto standards are the same. Some of them are really good. Some are really bad. Not every de facto standard represents the best possible technical decisions; not every de facto standard represents the tyranny of a proprietary despot dribbling out just enough crumbs of documentation to keep the peasants from revolting. De facto standards can be temporary kluges, or carefully considered and planned designs; they can reflect an individual's vision or a committee's indecision. In short, it is dangerous to treat them as interchangeable.
Physical connectors
Computers love to talk to other devices. This (unless you're using radio) requires them to have some kind of cable connecting them, and that means connectors for the cable to plug into.
In most cases, a connector intended to be shared or used by multiple devices will be the topic of a formal standard. There is ample documentation on the pinouts of a standard USB cable, for instance. However, if it isn't the topic of a formal standard, the compelling need for interoperability is likely to lead to an informal standard. Connectors with formal standards are generally fairly precisely defined. The RS232 specification for serial ports describes signals, voltage levels, and everything, for standard DB25 serial ports. However, many computers ship with a 9-pin serial port. The pinouts for these have become a de facto standard.
It's worth noting that the formal standard (RS232) solved the hard problem, and the informal standard just covered a common extension. Network effects make standards like this a pretty good bet. If you're making serial cables with 9-pin connectors, they need to plug into the "standard" PC pinout. Given the widespread availability of such cables, if you're making a serial port, a 9-pin male serial port with the same pinout is a good bet. This is a great standard: it's free of licensing requirements, it's very easy to implement, and millions of machines use it. Given this, it seems obvious that anyone looking to build a serial port would want to use this standard, and certainly, anyone using a 9-pin d-sub connector would use it.
This makes it frankly inexplicable that I have a few uninterruptible power supplies that use a 9-pin d-sub connector, which is connected by a cable to a PC serial port, but which has some other pinout, such that the special serial cable the UPS comes with is the only one
Well, the question is: Are you killing standard time?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You know a good Standard when you see one. Pretty hard to nail down, otherwise, because of the hugely varying contexts in which they're employed/evolved.
That said, my sense is: it's a standard when its wide acceptance makes things easier/cheaper/more-reliable. Of course, standards have a bad habit, over time, of turning into Orthodoxy or other dogmatic-thinking-type problems. For example, people constantly give me trouble for using Furlongs Per Fortnight when expressing velocity.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
...there's a naturally occurring standard at Slashdot that demands that at least one story like this gets posted a day.
Meanwhile, my story submission about monkeys that play cards on the Internet gets rejected. F*ckers.
IronChefMorimoto
In my mind, an industry standard is simply the most popular design/implementation. Its quality and its popularity don't necessarily coincide, but if it's popular, isn't it easy to make the case that it is a standard?
To one person, PHP may be the industry standard for dynamic web pages. To another it may be ASP. Or JSP. Which one is the best? Depends on who you ask. The fact is, each of these technologies is an industry standard because they are popular.
In the end, doesn't it all just seem a little arbitrary?
http://nerdfortress.com/
However, you should still do so openly - build interfaces that people can use, and document them so people can figure out how to use them, and if you're lucky, people will use them for things you've never thought of, so try not to prevent that.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Java is still a proprietary defacto standard. When will Sun learn?
Just because it has a stamp of approval from a big-name standards organization doesn't at all mean it's viable, though if it's not, it probably does mean that it's already popular in some way and someone wanted a stamp of approval for the sake of having it.
... but we can't say "we don't support HL7 because we think it's stupid" without being laughed at. So you support it. And once you're done with that, you're too tired to go implement another spec that makes more sense, so you do what everyone else does: advertise that your software is HL7-compliant and therefore compatible with "every other major piece of software" in the medical industry (where "major" == "supports HL7", circular logic.)
Like, say, HL7 for medical information exchange. The format sucks (we constantly find ways in which it can't handle the true cardinality of relations, because people assumed way too much)
Sure. It's standard. And approved (ANSI.) And widely used. And it sucks. (And no, moving it to XML in v3 doesn't make it any better.)
In practice, a word processor that can't read Microsoft® Word documents is an economic dead end. The formats used by the Microsoft Office applications have become a de facto standard, giving Microsoft a substantial competitive edge because each new release of its software can deliver for it a window of opportunity during which only its software is fully compatible; this is mitigated a bit, though, because incompatibility in a new version makes customers slow to upgrade to that newest version.
Not true. Even Microsoft makes its products backward compatible. (One might say they make their products backwards, but that is another story).
In some cases, a standard comes with some kind of licensing restrictions, or involves something that someone has a patent on. For instance, Unisys had a patent governing a bit of the algorithm used for GIF images. In general, patents are a huge weakness for a standard. The MP3 standard is used very widely by people who simply don't know -- or don't care -- that someone theoretically has a patent on part of it, and only some code using the patented algorithm actually has a license from the patent holder. Developers and users can be bitten by this many years after they make the design decision to use a patented algorithm, due to the nature of patents. De jure standards often require contributors to clearly disclose any known patents; de facto standards generally have no way to do this.
Software patents are evil. Full stop. It has nothing to do with standards.
Ironically, this article, published by IBM, fails to mention how once IBM itself used to be a de facto standard for PCs.
Iran captures three CIA agents
You only need to look at time 'standards', which stemmed from the railways in the UK (how can you run a 'timetable' if all parts of the country run their own time?' - as an aside, railway timetables are worthless now, as the punctuality of UK trains are soul destorying if you need to use them commuting).
Then look at gun manufacture that introduced 'standards' to make parts that all fit no matter where that part was made.
Now look at the software state. Companies deliberately adopting the 'standard' that every agree on to make it all work, then once in common usage, change it slightly (privately) to break the standard and have their own monopoly.
de facto standards in practice mean that something has become widely used and there is no major argument (indeed there is probably an 'unwriten agreement') with the general concept of it's functionality or application.
Take XML for instance. Now widely used in many areas, although not *directly* by Joe Public.
However when people try to force standards like XHTML (a silly ass cludge between HTML and XML which defeats the point of both) there is no consensus on it's use or application and in the end it gets widely rejected.
For something to become a de facto standard it should never be a solution to a problem that in everyday life doesn't exist.
These types of standards help define the characteristics between rival groups but also help a general level of understanding how certain things should be done. The result is a shared common-ground.
I'd generally lean towards order than chaos on any given day.
Here is the md5 hash of the article: 3ac3b1972e1cfdef6d522a821c720fc8
A standard is a good one when it has an open interface, regardless of whether it's 'official' or not. The relevant question is, "Can I interface with this 'standard'?" If the answer is "no", proper systems engineering becomes impossible, and everyone suffers.
This reminds me of the term "Best Practices". Usually I rather hate the term because typically stuff labeled as such receives little to no public scrutiny. I'm left wondering, how does one know they really are "the best", and who is the author to say they are "the best."
In sciences like chemistry or physics, or other disciplines, knowledgeable people peer-review ideas before they get published, or widely at least. Those ideas are more measurable or provable, and seem to amount to more than a heap of words without any mathematical basis. The same is mostly not true in computing.
Instead, I think what defines standards have little to do with technical merit, and much more to with money. If you want to know what's a standard, look towards how much money companies have spent either creating, promoting or using it.
If the idea is bad enough, it'll probably be financed by someone.
This article makes several interesting points, however I am stuck on their second example where they discuss "PC Compatible." In this example, they state that PCs share in design from the original IBM PC. As an example it shows how a new PC may have 4GB of memory, but it still uses the 640K of base memory. Then it makes a fairly strong claim. It claims that this became the defacto standard in part because it was better than the standards it replaced. However, this doesn't seem to be true, necessarily or otherwise. The IBM PC became the defacto standard out of popularity more than anything else. One needs to look no further than the battle between VHS and BetaMax. Sure, Beta had better video and audio quality. However, due to cost, simplicity, and marketing, VHS became the standard for magnetic video tapes.
Here's a better question. What makes a blessed standard viable? A standard is only as good as it's market penetration, and defacto is the only standard that makes a lick of difference. Don't buy it? Go ahead, write your site in SVG, your competitors will use flash and make money while people scratch their heads when they read "plugin needed" on your page.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
The English language itself is an example of a naturally occurring communications standard. Although it is an informal standard, I do not recommend ignoring this one.
To be honest, it's what everyone in the Unix world did from the start, Microsoft does more than most people change their socks, every browser coder does by not meeting someone else's, and what your parents do whenever you surprise them.
/. standard it seems.
Seriously though, who writes the standards? Whoever is purveying the popular thing of the moment. Who follows the standards? Those who want to weasel market share from the one writing the standards. Who changes the standards? People who rightly or wrongfully think they should. Who makes us follow them? No one.
(Aren't you glad that "no one needs more than 640K" standard is not?)
I prefer not to deal with standards beyond common sense and knowledge of the species using the thing based on the standard, except where important like engineering requirements for structures and so on. The only other time I'd bother is if I'm trying to interact with those who insist on adherence to some standard.
Rambling, incoherent, without standards.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
The great thing about standards is there are so many of them to choose from.
But then again, there was no private organization that benefitted from which side of the road people used. If Ford made money from the left side, and GM from the the right, then we can well imagine there would be a battle for which side of the road we drove on, and which side would probably vary from location to location. ("Hey New York, I'll give you a million bucks if you require people to drive on the left!")
Take away the private interests, and people will naturally organize themselves to one format or another. And, in most cases, consumers will be better off for it. The only reason they may be worse off is if people rally around an inferior standard, but that's probably more likely to happen with private interests.
Moving on to my opinion....the answer isn't to have the government force one standard or another on us. The answer is to have the government force the private interests to allow us to choose a standard with a minimum of baggage that comes with it. e.g., Don't force everyone to use .DOC, simply make it so that if you choose to use .DOC, you can use it with Word, OpenOffice, or whatever.
"My girlfriend's got sodium laureth sulfate hair."
Haven't seen anyone really address the fact that certain companies (and for once I'm not referring to MS) do control the standards of the industry. My humble opinion follows. Try cabling. EIA/TIA standards are the norm. They typically derive straightly from the BICSI protocals. Hmmmm! BICSI is an industry driven society and they make their standards almost verbatim from what the cable manufacturing industry says. Why does this establish what will work and what won't? It doesn't. YOU CAN install non-conforming (to the "Industry Standard") cabling that will work. Even more efficiently than the "Standard" cable. Just try to sell a structured cabling system that DOESN"T conform to the standard. It doesn't happen too often. Gueese what. Fiber to the desktop isn't an acceptable solution for Gigabyte communications under the current standard. Go figure.
Literally or figuratively, a "standard" is a flag that the troops rally around as we head into battle.
If we're lucky, we rally 'round because the standard inspires us and represents something we love.
If we're unlucky, we rally 'round because the Commissars are standing behind us with sidearms ... literally or figuratively.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
This really is something that everyone in this community should be taking to heart. This is why Linux has had difficulty breaking into heavy usage, why hundreds of projects (including open source software projects) have failed, and why we haven't moved to better architectures in the computing world.
In practice, a word processor that can't read Microsoft® Word documents is an economic dead end.
I think that's probably one of the most important statements in the article. If every reader who plans on writing any code, coming up with a piece of hardware, or decides to rethink Support conventions were to take the heart of that message and put it into their plans, we'd really start making headway in the real world with real innovation.
In summary: Your idea may be good, but that doesn't mean squat in the market. What DOES matter is: How much of a headache is your solution to X going to give me versus what I already have? Yet I STILL get asked by my co-worker why we aren't using Linux for our desktop PCs...
This forum Sig is licensed under the LGPL.
It might well be better. The IBM PC didn't win the market place because it was better.
There were better computers on the market at the time. There were good programs written for those better computers. Yet IBM comes along with its PC and everyone almost instantly gravitates to it. It wasn't cheaper, it wasn't better, it didn't have more software available. It was command line when several other computers were already gui. It wasn't even easier to use.
I'm still baffled. Well maybe it was the availability of clones. Apple took a hard line on clones after everybody cloned the Apple II. IBM encouraged clones by publishing the technical reference. Maybe it's another case of open standards prospering.
What?
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
A good standard is one that most software is 80 to 99.9 percent compliant with, has few exceptions, and is not heavily weighted towards a specific vendor.
A bad standard is one that most software is less than 80 percent compliant with, has a significant number of exceptions that you can misinterpret many different ways, and/or is heavily weighted towards one or more specific vendors.
If the standards committee spends more than 80 percent of their time arguing over minutiae that 99 percent of the software users of the standard will never use, you can be sure that it will be a bad standard, no matter how much everyone thinks it's the best thing since sliced bread.
Caveat: I like unsliced bread, personally.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The only "natural" standards I know of are things like C, e, pi, alpha (the fine structure constant), and the charge of an electron.
So, a de facto standard is one everyone is already using.
I have no idea how you set out to become the de facto standard other than getting everyone to use it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I'm not saying that standards are bad, but they are usually way out of synch with reality by the time they are adopted, and that they are usually watered down to appease the players rather than focused to achieve the goal.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
On OSNews
Copied verbatim. Nice. What do we call dupes from other sites without credit? Oh, yeah, plagiarism
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
So til dey pubLish a off,ishul standad deesyded bai cummiti 4 inglish mai ritin wil luk laik dis
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Don't laugh, I've done that... A short time after, I started using firefox, and even I couldn't visit that part of my site.
Gravity Sucks
I've just finished an article covering the emergence of del.icio.us as an example of a new standard that works without the formal blessing of a standards organization. In this case it is a standard of categorizing knowledge.
In short, the emergence of physical libraries of knowledge forced the adoption of a taxonomy around which to organize it. As libraries grew, they were organized to reduce seek time. Now that information has been released from the constraints of physical form, exponentially expanding in scope, magnitude and power, the seek time problem has arisen again. The information explosion costs an increasing amount of time, people and programmers are needed to ensure the floods of new knowledge have been classified correctly. Something had to give.
So a new way of organizing information has emerged which harnesses the folk-masses to categorize their own information. In grass roots style, users classify information using separate single words. Whatever words best describe a chunk of information. It's open source cataloging in which a personal vocabulary is the set of categories.
It's a surprisingly simple and viable approach.
Thoughts on the Emergence of Computing Intelligence
like using a '?' to end a question, which it is.
To paraphrase the old joke, the Solid Rocket Boosters on the Space Shuttle are limited to the diameter they are because of the finite diameter of the rail tunnels between the Morton-Thiokol plant in Nevada and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The railcars which carry the SRB segments are all on carriages which have trucks with the wheels exactly 55 inches apart, which is known as Standard Gauge in railroad lingo.
Why was this figure chosen?
Early railcars derived their design from mining cars which rode on rails inside mines before the locomotive was invented. For convenience, the railroads adopted their standard gauge very close to this common pre-railroad standard.
Why were the carts made with this width between the wheels?
The early mining carts were adapted from cargo wagons which travelled on the old Roman roads in Europe, which had developed deep ruts over the centuries. The distance between the wheels was selected so the wheels rode in the center of these ruts to avoid breaking an axle frequently?
Why did the Roman roads have their ruts at this distance from each other?
The distance between the center of the ruts on the old Roman roads was a function of the distance between the wheels of the old Roman Charriots.
Why did the Romans select the wheel spacing they did?
The old Roman charriots were designed so that a pair of horses could pull them. The track had to be wide enough to accomodate the hind quarters of two horses.
So there you have it, the design of the Space Shuttle is constrained by a couple of horses' asses!
Not that your process line is remotely similar to that other one. Or that the way they did it actually DOES work.
What industry do you work in where somebody hands you a standard on a silver platter before you start work?
In manufacturing startups, we have a word for a job where everything is nicely laid out and defined before the work starts. It's called "vacation".
I love the fact that nobody in this f---ing industry has a decent standard (well, one company does, but they have other problems).
If they had half a brain and came up with a standard, startup engineers would be out of a job.
The US government, and most developed nations, have standards for quality and safety for nearly every product on the market. These are simply there to protect the consumers from lies, withholding of facts, and simple ignorance. The history of consumer protection in the US has been that when some nasty problem happens, the industry is extremely slow to adopt any changes because they cost money. The government many times must step in. Quality is sometimes cost effective, and safety is almost never cost effective. If you buy a brand new car, and it kills you in an accident because it had faulty breaks I didn't know about, sure my family can sue, but ummm I'd prefer to be alive thank you.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
A "standard" exists so that independently developed entities can work together. Nuts and bolts, network protocols, whatever. Standards succeed when people really need interoperability, and the standard provides this in a convenient manner. X400 (ISO email) didn't succeed because SMTP was sufficient and was more convenient. X500 (ISO directory) didn't succeed because people didn't need it badly enough to spend the money on implementation. LDAP (dumbed-down X500 over TCP/IP) was more successful because it was cheaper and more convenient. Microsoft Word documents are a standard in the sense that people use them as a way to exchange formatted information that everyone can read (as long as they have the right version of Word ...). It works because most people already have compatible versions of Microsoft Word. Convenience again!
A de facto standard is the standard by default - nothing else exists, or can compete in terms of market share. This is different from a natural standard which exists naturally - not as a default, but as the result of a healthy ecosystem.
A natural standard, in practice, is no different than an "open standard": they both serve the same purpose and have the same end result. Take the SMB protocol for instance (at least for the most part).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
"IBM PC Compatible"
... .
Most folks on Slashdot probably take IBM PC Compatiblity for granted. It's assumed. I don't think vendors even bother to advertise it anymore. But a few of us recall where there were a few, not quite compatible, contenders. They didn't last long.
But let me try to sell you this perfectly good Xenon motherboard without it, today. I can hear the support calls now
Stuckee: It won't boot my install CD.
AC: Does the ACBIOS come up?
Stuckee: Uh, yeah, is that what that is?
AC: Yes. Did you get your Install CD from a ACSoft approved vendor.
Stuckee: It's Win XP, I got it at CompUSA.
AC: Ah, that's the problem, then. You need ACOS.
Stuckee: Isn't it a PC?
AC: Yes it is a personal computer, you're not authroized to share it with anyone else.
Stuckee: I mean PC, like it runs Windows.
AC: ACOS has windows.
Stuckee: No, Microsoft Windows!
AC: Ah, you wanted an IBM PC Compatible BIOS, that's another $400.
Stuckee: Yeeeeyeeeyeee....
AC: I shouldn't tell you this, but I hear there is a NetBSD/386AC port coming out.
No, not the Windows software. Red wine bottles have one shape (with a sholder) and white wine bottles have a different shape (more sloping). This is true all over the world and has been true for a long time. How's that for a natural standard!
What makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization?
A standard becomes viable because it's used, regardless of whether or not it has the formal blessing of a standards organization. A standards body can be useful, both in description of de-facto standards and prescription of new standards, but its usefulness in prescription requires the standards body to make a good argument for its case.
It's not enough to simply specify a standard. In order for your standard to be adopted you've got to promote it. Sometimes there's a great enough need that a standards body can just throw out a proposal and the industry will go ahead and promote the standard for it, but times it might take a lot more work on the part of the standards body.
One thing which seems to never work is forcing a standard upon others. This is not to say that a forced standard can never coincide with a viable standard, but this is only the case if the force was unnecessary in the first place. Ultimately, a standard needs to make sense if people are going to use it.
The W3C's formal standard has been trumped by the practical reality of making Web sites which work in at least some browsers.
The W3C are an industry consortium, not a standards body. HTML is not a standard. ISO-HTML, which is based on HTML, is a standard, but HTML is not.
The same goes for other "web standards". CSS isn't a standard - if you want a standard stylesheet language, use DSSSL. Javascript isn't a standard - ECMA-262 is a standard that is based around Javascipt syntax.
A pesar de las esfuerzas de la Real Academia Española de promulgar sus normas para el español, este idioma también sigue normas informales en el uso cotidiano.
Exactly what techies should find important
> What do we call dupes from other sites without credit?
I don't read OSNews and I couldn't care less who submitted the article. What is this ridiculous obsession with "credit"? Give me the information, I don't care who wrote it, who submitted it, or who found it in the first place. All I care about is what the article says. People don't matter, only results do.
Does anyone know why the FP hardware rounds to the nearest even integer? It seems like a rather strange standard to adopt.
A flagpole is not called a standard bearer. The person carrying the stick, with or without a flag, was the standard bearer. Roman standards were the sticks, not the flags (although flags were attached). Each Legion had a standard.
The Roman Emperor had the (metaphorical) power to gather the standards (sticks) of his Legions into a bundle, called fasces. The bundle of sticks was a sign of his power. This is the base of the modern term Fascist.
/The more you know ->^
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I've gotta say that the standard of de-facto's in Australia seems pretty low.
Housebricks are pretty much the same size wherever you go, even in old buildings which predate the standard housebrick (215 x 102.5 x 65). Why? Because a housebrick is The Right Size For The Job: not too big to be manipulated with one hand, not so small that you need more of them per building.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Perhaps the oldest de facto standard still in use is the track width for US railroads (and some, but not all non-US). IIRC it's 4'8", which is: a) not really wide enough; and b) certainly not a nice round number like, for example, five feet.
The history is interesting, and demonstrates the power of an established de facto standard. (I don't recall the source for this, but I think it was a PBS TV show.) When the very first railroad cars were built, they were built by wagon makers, who used the same jigs and fixtures they used for wagons. Wagons had a de facto standard track width of four feet eight inches.
This track width dates back to Roman times. Roman chariots had this track width, because it worked correctly for the horses that they used. So for roughly 2000 years, wagons were generally made that size.
As railroads began to expand, they used a variety of gauges up to seven or eight feet. (The famed Orient Express had a seven foot gauge, IIRC.) Some early railroads used different gauges as a competitive measure, to prevent competitors from running trains on their track and requiring customers to change trains, often several times within a short trip.
Abraham Lincoln was President when the first transcontinental railroad was to be built, which would require that the different companies involved would have to use the same gauge. He actively questioned the "odd" 4'8" gauge, and after some discussion, signed a Presidential edict that all railroads henceforth must have a gauge of five feet. The railroads proceeded to totally ignore this law, and built everything in 4'8" gauge, thus demonstrating the power of de facto standards. So today, we (mostly don't) ride in railroad cars whose dimensions are descended directly from the width of a Roman horse's behind.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
ignore them and be intuitive, inspirational, original and spontanious, its more fun ,rarely better and almost always wrong or unsuccessful, but hey, keep your own standards flying higher than those already set and soon everyone will be trying to reach yours.(or ignoring them)
Tucked away towards the end of the article:
Hiding a patent and springing it on people later is just plain evil. Wise users will destroy any company doing such a thing, and salt the earth where the corporate headquarters once stood. The damage to everyone, developer and user alike, is simply unacceptable.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
of course there are all those northwest pinot noirs in the sloping bottles, and chardonnay's in shouldered bottles, so this doesn't hold up as well as it used to...
like so many things, bottle shape has become a fashion, and not a signal.
does anyone know the reason for the original bottle shape differences?
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
This brings to mind a pet peeve of mine -- toilets with non-round drain holes, which can't be sealed by round plungers. It drives me crazy. It's "American Standard" for chrissake, and you can't plunge it when it plugs; the water just escapes around the corners of the square hole. They look stylish, though, at least when they're not plugged.
"Debugging" by Dave Agans - the perfect gift for your favorite imperfect engineer.
just a little research for the curious... apparently the shape of the shoulder relates to how much sediment in the wine. the more sediment, the sharper the shoulder to catch it before it ends up in your glass. though as with so many things, the standards have been corrupted by the whippersnappers.
m lb ott leshapes.shtmll eshapes.htmla pes.html
http://www.foodreference.com/html/artbottles.ht
http://www.thewinedoctor.com/advisory/buystore
http://www.westcoastwine.net/bott
http://www.cellarnotes.net/bottlesh
sorry, next time I'll do the research first. (chagrin)
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)