Slashdot Mirror
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".
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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
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'
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...
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."
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
...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 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.
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.
The great thing about standards is there are so many of them to choose from.
MS Word *.doc is a standard because 80% of the desktop market runs MS Word.
Just becuase it's closed doesn't mean it's not a standard
Free MacMini
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."
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.
I sincerely hope you mean c, not the language C.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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."
Yes, the speed of light varies. But c is specifically the speed of light in vacuum. Only in vacuum the speed is equal for all observers, thus it is the vacuum speed upon which relativity is built.
On the other hand, the speed of light in vacuum may not be a constant after all. In some theories c is the expansion velocity of the universe in the fourth spatial dimension, therefore it is slowing down all the time. The slowing down has been reported in some recent experiments.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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!
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/