I never realised how stupid it is that toslink can only plug in 1 way
Comment on I'm just gonna stick to slotted, thanks
Tehdastehdas@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The EU should fine companies for introducing new standards that break old standards. Or any shit standards like Toslink: lemmy.world/comment/10671314 . Standardization organizations shouldn’t be sleeping through all this shit.
EddoWagt@feddit.nl 2 months ago
amenji@programming.dev 2 months ago
I don’t use screw drivers enough to know what these are for. But from a programmer’s standpoint, punishing people to deviate away from standard may cause more harm than good, no?
Suppose it’s easier/cheaper/more effective to deviate a bit from standard, why should I be punished to do things a bit differently?
monotremata@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
One issue is that it can be leveraged to maintain a monopoly. Microsoft famously made a bunch of small modifications to the HTML standard, so that web sites that wanted to work with MS Internet Explorer had to write custom versions to be compatible. But because so many people just used IE because it was bundled with Windows, those “extensions” started to become their own standard, so that then other browsers had to adopt MS’s idiosyncrasies in order to be compatible with the sites, which in turn harmed standardization itself. They even had a term for this technique: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.” It nearly worked for them until Google pushed them out with Chrome. Microsoft tried to do the same thing again with Java until the government got involved.
It’s complicated, certainly, but there are legitimate cases where “just a little tweak” can be quite a big problem for a standard.
amenji@programming.dev 2 months ago
Thanks for the explanation.
whoreticulture@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Think about all the micro USB, lightning cables, USB cables etc. In programming it’s different, but for this stuff it’s a waste of money and actual resources.