[Teever]

What I'm hearing from you is that we need to regulate companies to mandate interoperability.

Could you imagine a world where telephones couldn't make calls to each other or cars needed special gasoline that was only available from gas station chains that licensed it from your car maker?

What a terrible world that would be.

Why do we accept similar things with computers?

[noisy_boy]

I mean considering the continuous erosion of consumers' rights on their devices and manufacturing trying the assume the position of licensor instead of seller, I don't have a lot of trouble imagining such a world. If Apple said that they will void the warranty on iCars if users put anything other than iGas and make the iGas connectors proprietary, I'm sure a lot of people would nod and queue up to pay, like they do now because the build quality of iCars is the best and they want their cars to just work.

[6510]

I like the feature, it prevents my kids from putting the wrong fuel in.

[noisy_boy]

I rest my case :)

[imoverclocked]

Yes, let’s choose something that will work with everything, say:

RS232 for any wired data connectivity 110 VAC for any kind of power 802.11b for any kind of wireless data connectivity …

Now that we have these mandated, let’s zoom to the present day and figure out just how bad of an idea each of those decisions were.

I don’t know what “mandating interoperability” would mean for all cases in the original argument. eg: Does someone need to write software that can run on every single operating system that supports Bluetooth to perform a firmware update for AirPods before releasing them? That sounds pretty abysmal for anyone that doesn’t have the resources to understand/target/maintain a process for BeOS/Haiku/Linux/Android/iOS/Windows/whatever my car’s console is running/etc.

OTOH, you could write a standard for firmware updates to devices over different channels and see who would adopt it. Make sure it is future proof and covers all currently known use-cases. If it’s adopted by enough people, you aren’t using your local government to write something in stone which will likely be outdated in a decade or so anyway.

[6510]

110 V ? No one uses that!

[imoverclocked]

I know this comment is somewhat in jest but you can buy sockets which are usb/usbc straight out of the wall. While safe and UL-listed, you might technically break local code by installing them because you would replace standard outlets with something (potentially) more useful to you. The code you might break is having a certain number of outlets per linear foot of wall.

Most modern electronics convert from 110VAC to something else and spend a lot of hardware dealing with the fact that they are given single-phase AC and actually need somewhat clean DC. The big exceptions to this would be things like heaters/ovens/stoves or incandescent bulbs which just use 110VAC (or 220VAC split-phase) directly. None of those exceptions require AC and some might even work unmodified with DC. The big issue with single-phase or split-phase AC that's annoying for DC devices is the fact that you can get no power 100-120 times per second when the voltage crosses 0. Thus we end up with giant adaptors/fancy power supplies that plug into the wall sockets and produce DC.

On a power-distribution level, we use AC because we figured out how to transform voltages easily early on. However, we couldn't always agree on frequency (or voltage, or connectors) and thus we have situations like Japan's power grid to this day. Fast forward and we now have efficient ways to convert DC voltage but still pay the cost of AC everywhere because it's both ingrained and regulated.

edit: 0-voltage crossing is 2x the frequency in AC

[happyopossum]

> What I'm hearing from you is that we need to regulate companies to mandate interoperability. Could you imagine a world where telephones couldn't make calls to each other or cars needed special gasoline that was only available from gas station chains that licensed it from your car maker?

That's nonsensical - none of your examples came about from regulation, they were market-driven.

[projektfu]

Although, Tesla continues to equip a proprietary charging port and an adapter is required to use CCS1. Futuristic companies seem to hate standards.

[izacus]

Luckly EU put a boot to the neck of that dumbass idea and EU Teslas have CCS2 port.

I wonder if mandatory opening of interoperability protocols for popular products would improve health of electronics markets.

[imoverclocked]

> Futuristic companies seem to hate standards.

A standard is just something that gets adopted by a bunch of people. There are competing standards for all kinds of things… the market generally decides what standards win. Any company doing something new is by definition attempting to set a new standard.

[projektfu]

There was a time when standards would be developed voluntarily by the major players for the parts that are tangential to their innovation. Apple's success with the iPhone isn't because they use a connector that is prone to shorting and susceptible to lint. Tesla's success in electric cars isn't because they didn't help develop a standard connector. However maybe they plan to pivot to overpriced electricity at their proprietary stations if they lose their competitive advantages, who knows?

When innovation was occurring in integrated circuits the companies standardized on the 0.1" DIP. Then as needs for smaller packages came they worked together on TSSOP and others. Obviously the innovation isn't a matter of packaging.

[imoverclocked]

The original iPhone/iPod 30-pin dock connector was just that: a dock connector. At the time, I recall a lot of different dock connectors and they were all proprietary and special built for the electronics they supported; That was the state of the art in the late 2000s. The next iteration was the lightning connector which is standardizing on USB. It was also better than any usb connector at the time because it could be inserted in either orientation that made physical sense. After a decade of use, we have a lot of expectations around connectors that we didn't in 2012... like pocket lint and well-worn/damaged ports.

If you look at the USB implementors forum, you'll notice many of the big players are there (including Apple.)

I would argue that the 0.1" DIP was a technology innovation of its own. It was adopted because it solved a problem with scalability of TO-5 and similar packaging which was somewhat round in nature, maybe borrowing from the design constraints of vacuum tubes? (complete guess on that part!) There are variants of DIP which have different dimensions than the 0.1" DIP we see almost everywhere today. While there may have been cooperation in choosing 0.1" DIP, I think it's more likely that available parts were largely made in this form factor and thus it was adopted.

[projektfu]

I'm just saying that RCA didn't produce 0.1" DIP while Fairchild produced 2mm DIP, and then make people decide which overall format they're going to work with before buying breadboards and the like.