EU wants one phone plug to rule them all. But we've got a better idea. European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager has lost patience with phone makers insisting on using different connector designs for charging, and promised an impact study on the consumer pain that Lightning and USB causes. Vestager confirmed the policy in a Parliament Answer this month. In 2011, in response to pressure from the …
Read the links - sort of a crash course in biased, sloppy analysis, weren't they?
Something better than puff pieces pandering to British egos would be more useful - these three would all get failing grades in any risk analysis exercise. Not one of them looked at the things that can go wrong in the British wiring scheme, nor did any of them address the potential problems with overly high household voltages.
“second most painful after Lego surely?”
I kind of don’t understand this part of the argument. I’ve never stood on an upturned 3pin mains plug. I’d argue that if this is an occurrence frequent enough to be a problem then probably standards of basic tidiness are probably more in order. Or you could just look where you are putting your feet. Of course, if this is a workplace then both are already covered by H&S.
To be completely honest, the cable durability part is looking pretty shakey too given third party options that will outlast several phones and I’m not even going near the bit about enforcing a plug shape standard and then arbitrarily deciding not to wire half the pins with no external way to tell. Optionally disable data at the device is a far better idea.
"Would that be a reference to the 3 pin plug, which is the safest in the world? Also the most painful thing in the world to stand on."
That's a the added bonus feature. It teaches people not to leave potentially dangerous mains leads laying around where they may get damaged and later cause death or injury from damaged plugs or insulation. :-)
That happens when you let Germans design a plug
SCART = "Syndicat des Constructeurs d'Appareils Radiorécepteurs et Téléviseurs", so I think you might be pissing on the wrong bank of the Rhine, there.
For a standard developed in 1970, it proved to be extremely far-sighted: particularly in standardising a method for direct RGB input to TVs, something which only became useful in the late 1980s for home computers, and really only hit the broader consumer market in the late 1990s when Digital TV and DVD became popular.
For a standard developed in 1970, it proved to be extremely far-sighted: particularly in standardising a method for direct RGB input to TVs,
Yep. It's still the go-to connector for hooking up old videogames consoles for collectors. Everything up to the Xbox/PS2/Dreamcast/N64 era. As they said about Volvos in Crazy People "They're boxy but they're good". Pain in the arse to put through a wall though. SCART, not Volvos - they're pretty straightforward.
Pain in the arse to put through a wall though. SCART, not Volvos - they're pretty straightforward.
Risking ire by replying to myself, but I actually had to push a SCART through a partition wall today. Had to disassemble the connectors on both ends. It was an enormous pain in the area, and I'd have been easier threading a Volvo 440 through the damn wall.
Still, Dreamcast is up, so it's not all bad!
SCART .....For a standard developed in 1970, it proved to be extremely far-sighted:
It also proved unsurprisingly bulky and inconvenient, with a ludicrous cable thickness, and difficult to attach and detach, presumably because the French designer expected it to be hand-soldered by the terminally clumsy (like me).
When you look at the shortcomings of so many different connector designs, you can only logically conclude that they are almost all designed by people who don't know the intended use, and who apparently have no experience of the problem that their product is supposed to address. Just like like car park designers, road engineers, web designers, and the people who create alarm clock and heating thermostat interfaces.
For all these people, I hope there is a specially reserved circle of hell.
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The solution is obviously for the UK to unplug from the EU and maybe mandate US standards.
"It's up to the commercial end of the industry to agree on easy to understand labels, and the regional bureaucratic blocks (like the EU) to enforce them. So Apple would certify that its plug and cable support 'Blue speeds', for example. Wouldn't that be handy?"
Industry is like the free market: it can only work successfully under severe and expensive government regulation and oversight. It's like Microsoft or Intel: it creates pseudostandards like Win32 or PCI at best'.
I thought that was the purpose of the vote to rid ourselves of our EU overlords, so we could go it alone and get £750m for the NHS per week
And cake, don't forget the cake!
@alister I think you might have ignored the possibility of sarcasm in the original post. The list of standards that the UK, if it ever leaves the EU, that it can replace with its own and then try and force on the world is long, and growing.
My downvote was for the unnecessary Brexit related trolling, sarcasm or otherwise.
You're right. Over two years since the referendum result and there is still no idea what Brexit is or how to achieve it. The Unicorn-based nonsense is a parody of and in itself and no additional trolling or sarcasm is necessary.
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