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xkcd 927 - How Standards Proliferate
(See: A/C chargers, character encodings, instant messaging, etc.)
Situation: There are 14 competing standards.
Cueball and Ponytail stand facing each other:
Cueball: 14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone’s use cases.
Ponytail: Yeah!
Soon: Situation: we did it our standard beat all the other ones and is universal yay :D
Situation after: there is a single universal standard that everybody adopts, it’s divided in 3 dimensions of 24 incompatible sub-standards everybody mashes at random.
It’s more like we all agreed on one physical standard. Cool!
Now the problem is that standard doesn’t actually say what should go on the inside and how it should all be wired up.
So we have entirely divorced the physical and electrical aspects.
We won half the battle and somehow it made everything worse…
i really do not understand why people keep saying it’s worse, it’s very very obviously so much better than it has ever been.
It’s not difficult to understand, it’s like how you have to put larger pipes in the wall if you want more water from the faucet. Obviously we can’t just shove huge pipes everywhere!
Well, 6 physical substandards, with 3 in “current usage” and 3 “deprecated” ones…