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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?"
There's a lot more to HL7 v3 than just changing the message format to XML. They've completely redefined the message development process, for one. Also the range of things you can express in a message is comparable with any decent ontological language, although that expression itself may be very complex. I'm curious to know exactly what relationship cardinalities you can't express.
You can do XML with v2.x now, anyway.
Is there an "animated-postscript" format?
SVG is the closest thing. Unfortunately, your customers will need a plugin. Sadly, Flash is the "de-facto" standard in this case. If you really don't want to use flash, just use animated GIFs.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Animated gif? Flash, maybe?
SVG might be your best bet, though.
Anything you can do, I can do meta.
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I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
This is a very big assertion; you might want to back it up. As for your statement about Ford and GM not being able to change people's mind, keep in mind that the US "drove on the right" long before cars were even invented. These conventions occured during colonial times with horses as well, long before the automobile was invented.
On a side note, there are two people that we have to thank for the fact that most people in the world drive on the right - Napoleon and Hitler. Napoleon introduced to many parts of Europe convention of keeping right when he rampaged through Europe and those conventions stuck around after his departure. After Napoleon, it was pretty much just Britain and the Hapsburg Empire (Austria) on the left side of the road. Hitler took care of the latter after the anschluss.
Not necessarily. A lot of the rise in violent crime is credited to increases in drunk pub violence and mobile phone robbery.
Before guns were outlawed, perps couldn't be sure that their intended victims were defenseless.
Now they can.
Perps now feel safe to commit more crimes.
In the United States, violent crime rates have declined in states where concealed carry has been legalized.
New Jersey adopted what sponsors described as "the most stringent gun law" in the nation in 1966; two years later, the murder rate was up 46 percent and the reported robbery rate had nearly doubled.
In 1968, Hawaii imposed a series of increasingly harsh measures and its murder rate, then a low 2.4 per 100,000 per year, tripled to 7.2 by 1977.
In 1976, Washington, D.C., enacted one of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. Since then, the city's murder rate has risen 134 percent while the national murder rate has dropped 2 percent.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Until someone types a tab instead of spaces, and the application goes AWOL.
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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."
Smile :)
I mean SMIL
http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/
Actually, Standard Guage is 4 feet, 8 and one half inches. The Roman chariot story is a myth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Gauge
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
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.
Great Britain and Australia have seen their violent crime rates soar since revoking the right of ordinary citizens to own guns.
No, we haven't. (Not in Australia, at least.)