back to article You have to have standards – or do you?

Given that so much of the time and effort expended by you technical and computing types revolves around standards, just how important are they in the larger sense? And if they are important, who ought to be devising them, and should they be voluntary or imposed? This might sound a tad odd in this modern age, for the default …

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  1. Dom 3

    Iberian gauge

    The trains in Spain run mostly on the plain, sorry, I mean Iberian gauge. Some trains are equipped with variable gauge axles allowing them to run on standard gauge as well.

    1. iMark

      Iberian gauge

      Iberian broad gauge is used in Portugal too.

      The new high speed lines in Spains were mainly built to standard gauge. Some Talgo trains have variable axles so they can run on both standard and Iberian gauge. The technology has been there since the 1960's when the first Catalan Talgo trainsets were introduced with a gauge changing facility near Port Bou (Spanish/French border). The original Catalan Talgo ran from Barcelona to Genève. Later is was cut to Montpellier where a change to the TGV is provided.

      What the article misses are the different loading gauges even if the rail gauges are the same. The British loading gauge means that trains are narrower and lower than in continental Europe. No doulbe decker trains in the UK therefore.

  2. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

    Horses for courses

    Metric is all well and good is you are trying to work out volumes of water or electrical charges - but if you need to know how many oxen you need to plough your garden you can't beat furlongs.

    For everything else there is of course the el'reg unified linguine/grapefruit/Jordan scale

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    friendly word of advice, Tim old son, ...

    Write about what you know about. Cheers

  4. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

    That Geneva Convention

    If Scotland wants to drive on the right, it's going to have to declare independence. Even though there are no roads between Scotland and England, Wales, or Ireland. (Some parts of this paragraph are not true, but do you know which?)

    According to one web site, (other) British colonies "drove on the left, gradually changing to right-hand driving after independence." Wikipedia says "Over the course of the 20th century, there was a gradual worldwide shift from driving on the left to the right." It seems an awfully bad idea.

    I forget which one developing nation also announced sometime probably in the last couple of decades that they would have a changeover and it would be gradual... they may have meant, regulating the sale or use of wrong-side seated vehicles.

  5. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    US measurements and standards

    Field Marshal Von Krakenfart, you make it sound worse than it is. Not that I should be defending the nonsensical system we use in the US... but, links, rods, chains, and furlongs were based on using a chain as measurement (I'm not sure who used this). A link was the length of one link on the chain, and I assume the chain the length of the whole chain. Fathoms, cables, and knots were used navally and are rope-based; a knot would be tied in the rope at a certain distance apart, rope run out into the water, and the knots counted (a knot is 1 nautical mile per hour.)

    Links, rods, chains, and furlongs are not mixed with fathoms, cables, and nautical miles and these are not mixed with inches, feet, yards, and miles. I've never heard the term "thou", we just call them thousandths of an inch. Although, in keeping with twisted units, most smaller stuff (well, bolts and sockets) are half inch, quarter inch, sixteenth inch, with less used 32nd inch and 64th inch (rather than being given in 1/1000th of an inch). It's real entertaining to realize "oh the three eighths doesn't fit, I must need a seven sixteenth."

    Anyway... standards by law simply are no good. An example, internet protocols. No government intervention there. What did governments come up with? X.25, which worked certainly but wouldn't have allowed most of what the internet amounts to today. And ISO/OSI, which many have heard of as the 7 layer model, but you may not even be aware they tried to come up with a networking standard in the 1980s. It failed completely.

    Policies pushing for governments THEMSELVES to use standards are not necessarily a bad thing -- for instance, records from years back would be much easier to read now if they were in a RTF (Rich Text Format) than if they are in Wordperfect, AmiPro, or indeed even older Word format. At present, ODF would be a good way to go. I don't think any SPECIFIC format should be set in stone (legally) since the lawmakers would be too slow to react if some format suddenly "went out of favor" (for instance I doubt they'd want to STILL be using RTF now, but if it were enshrined in law they probably would be.)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      No, it's: The 3/8th doesn't work and neither does the 7/16th,

      so it must be one of those bloody metric wrenches I don't own!

  6. VeganVegan
    Boffin

    Surprised and disappointed

    Apparently nobody has weighed in with Bulgarian airbags, Wales and such.

    (I guess I just did).

    (Icon because of the complicated conversions involved).

  7. jake Silver badge

    Just to muddy the waters ...

    I've used ASL to communicate with non-English speaking people on six continents, often using ASL as a go-between when discussing technical issues :-)

    1. Captain TickTock
      Boffin

      Unfortunately...

      It wouldn't have helped with deaf British people...

      Roll on a universal sign language.

      1. jake Silver badge

        @Captain TickTock

        Actually, Mr. Tick Tock, I've had no trouble using ASL in the British Isles ... Not that I generally need it in technical situations, mind ... But it's nice to have as an option :-)

        For the record, I'm not deaf ... but I do enjoy having the ability to communicate.

        1. Captain TickTock
          Pint

          I suppose...

          A lot of signers must be bi-.. manual?

          And that's Captain to you, Arrr ;-)

          Beer, one in each hand.

  8. Captain TickTock

    And when are the shops really going to going metric?

    Selling in multiples of 454g and 568ml isn't metric...

    In Australia, they went straight to 600ml and 1L for milk.

    Beer is still sold in pubs in middies and schooners (1/2 & 3/4 pint). Bottled or canned beer is in round metric quantities

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I agree with the initial premise

    standards don't matter, as long as everyone knows what they are working in.

    Look at the measurement argument - OK metric is easier to deal with in that it is all decimal based, whereas imperial is all weird numbers that often bear no intuitive correlation to each other.

    But it doesn't matter. At all. If you are talking about vague estimates then having an accurate system is no better than an inaccurate system, and if absolute accuracy is required than it is unlikely that all the numbers are going to be exact factors anyway.

    Take the distance from London to Birmingham as an example. If you are talking about driving it you would say it is about 100 miles, or in metric about 160 Km. Which is close enough whatever system you want to use. However if you needed to accurately measure the distance, then you would have to say it is 101.556945832 miles, or 163,461.56 Metres, neither of which are that easy to deal with.

    Throw in the fact that time is not decimal, most water is not pure (so won't have a density of 1) and the Earth is both spherical and non-standard then you see that it is unpossible to be able to define many real-world situations in terms of whole numbers of metric units anyway.

    And the same for standards - back in the old days you would find most networks used NetBIOS for accessing Windows servers, IPX for the Netware, AppleTalk for the Apples and IP for unix (and quite often many more protocols for specialist kit) but everything worked quite well truth be told so why should it be any different now?

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