I love how both FB messenger and Google talk/chat/whatever were compatible for 3 months, thanks to a fucking standard, before they both “improved somewhat” to be incompatible.
Proof: what are the other source management softwares? (Don’t mention Mercurial, that’s cheating).
Also for Linux, it’s down to the license and history. Linux isn’t a bad investment because all commits directly to the kernel are given freely to all. And it’s not Unix. It doesn’t have the stain of AT&T and their sue happy ways. Also Linux dominates all computer markets except for user desktops. Servers, phones, application specific utilities, etc.
It is also the version control system that uses sqlite which is pretty cool as far as disk space and resiliency are concerned esp. as compared to Git.
I don’t however like that it prides itself on not having any history rewriting features because I am kind of a fan of those. I like keeping embarrassing mistakes like a typo’d commit message or missing file out of my permanent commit history.
I actually miss SVN. It had a lot of issues, yes, but the cognitive barrier was so much smaller. When I have a merge error in git, I basically just delete my repo and make a new one…
There are times when the original standard has zero forwards compatibility in it, such that any improvement made to it necessarily creates a new standard.
And then there’s also times when old greybeards simply disregard the improved standard because they are too used to the classic way.
Without knowing the context of what drove OP to make this meme, my guess is they have some high and mighty idea for some sort of standard and someone else pointed out the XKCD comic is the most likely result.
Found it on Mastodon, I don’t know if it’s the original source. The XKCD does have a good point, of course. But I mean, if we’d all think like that, no good standards would ever develop, so people shouln’t cite it as a fundamental truth everywhere and avoid all meaningful discussion.
Yeah it is worth looking into why certain new “standards” get adoped and others don’t.
Standards don’t ever get designed just to be the new universal standard, right? There’s gotta be some kind of improvement in mind, whether iterating on previous designs or otherwise. I’d say that in many cases the improvement is the focus for the developer, not the delusion of creating the next big “standard”.
It’s better for “standards” to develop naturally as happens in FOSS rather than for them to be imposed by authorities that will resist changing them once they become outdated, or companies that don’t care either way and will follow the profit of least resistance.
Plenty of standards are created with the express purpose of being a standard and selling the license for that standard to large companies. USB, HDMI, BlueRay, CD, Bluetooth, etc. all of these are standards designed as standards.
Which is why they often suck, no? Took years for USB to really find its footing, and now with all the EU legislation setting USB-C I feel like it’s gonna become frustratingly outdated eventually.
I like the idea of having a regulated, living, backwards compatible standard. Which seems to be what USB-C is now, for phones. The EU has soon to be active regulation that will make it a requirement for many things. Yet, it’s not a single, set in stone standard, but one that’s constantly being expanded (eg, version 3.2 and PD).
Of course, the regulation has to also be living. Eg, at some point, maybe there’ll be a strong enough reason to allow another standard (by no means do I think USB-C will always make sense). And the regulation has to very carefully choose the standard.
That way we get the benefits of standardization (from actually everyone using the same format), but we aren’t unreasonably crippling ourselves to do it.
The original image has something along the lines of “I hate this system” and the smug guy in the well is saying “Ah, and yet you participate in said system!” as a gotcha. I think the purpose in this one is just carrying over the smugness with which people post the XKCD when any new possible technological standard is proposed (whether or not it has any merits)
Not that I'm a proponent of it or anything, but people were saying the exact same thing ten years ago after the first big bubble. I don't think it's going anywhere. There's too much greed in the world, and it's too enticing. At this point you might as well be a nun trying to get porn banned worldwide.
It was never an anonymous form of payment. And you didn’t hear it from me, but a certain agency has nearly the whole thing mapped to real people (when possible). There’s a whole division dedicated to it.
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