[techtalk] RE: [issues] Standards?? PHOOEY!!!

[Fan, Laurel]

[moving to techtalk to conform to the topic "standards"]

Yeah, who needs standards?

Why adhere to the outdated, archaic standards of punctuation
and grammar when I can nNOvate by writing    like this??!?!?!!!1!!

Why bother with the standard method of quoting by prepending
a character to each line of the quoted text when you can just
hapazardly paste the desired paragraph in the middle of your
reply.........?

yeah, PHooeY on dis         speling       stuf!  This      is
innnnnnnnovation!  it's difrennnnt, soooo it muzzzzzzt beeeee
        betttttter!!!!11!!!

Oh, and why adhere to "standards" of topics for the mailing lists
(In case it's below you to read documentation, issues is for
issues about "women and technology".  This would belong on
techtalk.)  Let's move this to jobposts!!!!

And on ASCII/Unicode  t o   o        !!!! standard!!! phooeY!!!
¡#B±ÁRÑð$3br!!!!!!!!!

It's not a standard, it's an agreement?  Oops, standard flame-kiddie
tactics.. change the definitions in the middle of the discussion.

(I really don't see how you can even do this. My dictionary gives the
definition of standard as "That which is established as a rule or model
by authority, custom, or general consent; criterion; test" ie. standards
are established by "custom, or general consent".  I'd like to see you
name any "authority" over this kind of thing.  I'll chalk it up to
your general contempt for the language.)

There are no standards in the computing world.  They're all agreements.
There is no authority saying "you can't do this.  you must do this".
They're all agreements of the form "all devices/programs wishing to
interoperate can't do this, must do this".  If your device/program does
not wish to interoperate, go right ahead, you just can't talk to anyone.

The lack of agreements results in gratuitous incompatibility, creeping
featurism, and data loss.  Standards arise when the participants in the
creation of the standard feel the need.

Take, for example, instant messaging.  I have friends on both ICQ and
AIM.  Both employ a different, closed, non-standard, protocol.
Therefore, to communicate with these people, I must either install and
maintain two different proprietary clients (not an option, since these
proprietary clients only run on a proprietary, non standard, operating
system), or use an open source client that has to keep up with two
obfuscated, moving-target protocols.  If there was a standard (agreement?)
for instant messaging, I wouldn't have to do this.  I'd write a client,
conforming to the open, standard, protocol, and it would communicate
perfectly with other standards-conforming clients and servers.  I think
that makes my life a whole lot easier.

Standards make my life a whole lot easier.  It's because of _Standard_ C++,
and the _standard_ library, that I'm able to write code that compiles on
VMS, Digital Unix, and Linux.

It's because of standards that innovation is possible, and easier to adopt.
If we couldn't port from VMS to Unix, if we had to write this thing all
over again, we'd still be using VMS on VAX.  And this has repurcussions too.
We do CAD for Alpha.  The 21264 simply could not have been simulated on
VMS/VAX because of address space limitations.  It would have taken years
to rewrite our tools, and this would involve more than coding.  And if we
didn't have a standard for interchanging data between the two operating
systems, we'd have to reenter all of the data as well.  This would have
taken years.  The 21264 would have been even later.  One would assume this
would be the case for other chip manufacturers as well.  No Pentium, no
Athlon, no Sparc (these are all years old technology, you say?  Then
why aren't you using a 286?).

New is better! Throw out the old and proven!  So goes the chant for those
who would jump on the bandwagon of Merced, though there are indications
that it won't be able to match the performance of existing 20 year old
RISC architectures.

There's enough of that around.  Mindless following of the latest and
greatest is not innovation.