39 points

MIDI.

Before the 80’s, there was no standard interface to control electronic instruments, just a bunch of proprietary interfaces unique to each manufacterer. But in 1983, amazingly they actually standardized on MIDI, and it remains a useful standard to this day, with any new versions of MIDI being completely backwards compatible, so your Yamaha DX7 from the 80’s is still just as viable to use today as the day it was new!

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5 points

DMX is a similar protocol for lighting.
Sure, there’s artnet and sacn, but most gigs still use good old DMX.

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2 points

I hate to tell you this but DMX passed away in 2021

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3 points

This really is a perfect example. I did a lot of MIDI things as a kid!

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1 point

Should mention Open Sound Control which is also pretty good. Not exactly a competitor, it was supposed to provide a richer, real time interface. Still popular for certain use cases, including beyond music.

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8 points

Surprised I haven’t seen anyone here mention unicode

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1 point

Probably because utf-8 vs utf-16 vs utf-32 makes people feel like it is still annoying multi-standard.

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50 points
*

There are many, I think. Like what other people have mentioned, sometimes the new standard is just better on all metrics.

Another common example is when someone creates something as a passion project, rather than expecting it to get used widely. It’s especially frustrating for me when I see people denigrate projects like those, criticizing it for a lack of practicality…

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7 points

The competing standards problem is mostly a problem of not actually talking to stakeholders. Most of these “universal standards” don’t cover some rare, specific, but very important, use cases.

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26 points

Light bulb sockets are the same all over. RJ-45 Ethernet, USB-C, Bluetooth, WiFi, TCP, HTTP, HTML, CSS.

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8 points

While light bulb sockets don’t change much from region to region, they definitely aren’t all the same. For the bulbs (not the bars), there’s two large categories: Edison screws and bi-pin. Edison screws also come in a lot of sizes. When compact fluorescents were rolling out, they got a new bi-pin connector from the USA: GU24. My whole home has GU24 fixtures (not by my own choice), but my lamps are Edison screws.

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2 points

Thank you for teaching me how to replace my porch light (ONLY MY PORCH LIGHT?!?!) that’s been out for over a year. I tried to pull the bulb out and it shattered in my hands. I was like WTF is this shit? Haven’t touched it since.

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3 points

GU24 is wack, especially for home lighting. I think they aren’t made much anymore.

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1 point

It was a pain to find gu24, I had to order them online for two rooms

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5 points

Include car cigarette lighter power ports

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3 points

USB-C

Gonna have to disagree with you there. Try using a USB-C data cable to charge a device. Now try figuring out which cable out of five is the charge cable.

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4 points

Those aren’t different standards, they’re just different USB-C cables. It’s like saying light bulb sockets aren’t a unifying standard because there’s different bulbs with different wattages. The fact that all those cables work over the same standard is an example of how ubiquitous the standard is. That said they should be labeled better, like how USB3 was color coded blue; each cable could have a color strip to distinguish it.

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1 point

Shouldn’t being able to identify which cable is used for which application be part of a standard?

You brought up light bulbs- imagine if they didn’t tell you the wattage? But they do. They print it right on the bulb.

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3 points

It seems a lot of sites these days are actively hostile towards the HTML-CSS combo.

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1 point

What do you mean? Do you have any examples?

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1 point

Not really. I guess Google search requires JavaScript now.

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1 point

HTML CSS and JavaScript each having different syntax is stupid and I will die on that hill.

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3 points

Just use React or something, you can use a single syntax for all three. It makes total sense why the syntax is different if you think about when and why they were made. We had HTML for years before CSS, and it was longer still until we got JavaScript. Each language has a different purpose, so naturally a different syntax makes sense. Your hill is poorly defended.

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1 point

In that case on general programming language should have taken over instead of trying to merge all three. Especially CSS, which in its infinite intelligence decided to use the minus operator instead of underscore, is completely out of place. Everything is jank and you can tell it has been patched together with duct tape.

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35 points

Whenever the new standard hits the almost impossible golden triangle of “cheap, reliable, and fast”.

It’s gotta be cheaper than the alternatives, better and more reliable than the alternatives, and faster/easier to adopt than the alternatives.

Early computers for example had various ways to chug math, such as mechanical setups, relays, vacuum tube’s, etc.

When Bell invented their MOSFET transistor and figured out how to scale production, all those previous methods became obsolete for computers because transistors were now cheaper, more reliable, and faster to adopt than their predecessors.

Tbf though transistors are more of a hardware thing. A better example of a standard would be RIP being superceded by BGP on the internet.

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8 points

Tbf though transistors are more of a hardware thing. A better example of a standard would be RIP being superceded by BGP on the internet.

another big example is the telecom companies being superseded by IP based networking, rather than whatever patch routing bullshit was previously cooked up.

Sometimes certain solutions are just, better.

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