By the time the EU tried to harmonize the plugs, the Germans dominated the continental economy and most continental countries could accomodate the German type plugs (Schuko). Obviously, the intended standard (IEC 60906-1) could be used with the continental sockets and plugs with little fuss. But NOT with the rather bulky UK BS 1363 plugs.

Predictably, the BS1363 countries were extremely unhappy. So the UK refused to accept the IEC 60906-1 standard. They would only go for a completely NEW standard that would be equally inconvenient to all countries. Of course, nothing really happened in the end.

One problem that cannot be handled by the plug standard is the difference in wiring. UK homes mainly seem to have ring wires with high current 32 A fuses. Continental homes generally have star wiring with (10?) 16 A fuses. As a result, each BS1363 plug needs a seperate fuse for safety. This is not necessary in continental plugs.

Winter

Speaking about office documents, everybody is abandoning the existing _defacto standard formats_ (the binary ones)! Microsoft pushes to replace them by OOXML, while most other vendors push to replace them by ODF.

But in any case, everybody agrees that the existing defacto formats have to be changed…

The cost of changing the “existing lines” will have to be paid. But you have the choice between a looking-forward approach or a looking-backward approach. And in the long run the backward approach (OOXML) will be more costly for everybody, but more profitable for Microsoft…

Historically they did in fact change thousands of miles of train tracks, especially to integrate the South. On May 31st, 1886 thousands of workers in the South adjusted their tracks by 3″ lining up with the Northern gauge. Eleven-thousand miles of tracks were converted in just thirty-six hours.

As for choosing a document format, I’d take the long term view of it. The future is a lot bigger than the past. Sure we have a lot of old documents, but we’ll have even more documents created in the next 10 years than we have accumulated in all of our digital past.

If track gauges different only in measurement, then of course you would go with the predominant one, all else being equal. But what if one gauge offered greater choice of vendors, including vendors who offered products and services at a lower price, and their gauge was more efficient, required less fuel, and that products that worked with that gauge used off-the-shelf parts and used technologies that were more familiar to the engineers coming out of school? Then you might make a different choice.

It is bad business and bad economics to let sunk costs rule decision making.

Actually it’s irrelevant if they work perfectly or not.

How come ?

It’s easy: either “it is trivial to run data from one file format to another” or it’s “not trivial to do”. In the first case the easy solution is to keep all public documents in one format (ODF since it’s already standardized) and convert to OOXML on as-needed basis. In the last case problems are quite real, conversion tax is real and two standards will incur “conversion tax” – forever. Thus OOXML is unneeded too.

The real solution is to produce some mix of ODF and OOXML (if it’s needed), but to have two competing standards in counterintuitive and stupid.

Both of them are more or less easy to produce. Many of the smaller gossamer players already have trains running on the defacto standard lines. There might need to be some upgrades and changes to the wheels of third-party locomotives to put up with new standards imposed by the government (ISO) and Union Pacific, but that is far less costly to the whole world than ripping up and replacing all those extant rail lines. Are the Erie Piemakers of the ODF movement that sure of their own interests that they would be willing to impose huge transition costs on the whole world just to spite the Union Pacific? Is it worth rebuilding all those locomotives and freight cars rather than just changing a few wheels and extending what we’ve got, even though it was originally produced at Union Pacific?

However, the ‘value’ has moved along the value chain. It’s sitting with those who devise the pricing structure for rail fares. If you can book your rail travel 12 weeks in advance, and travel after 10.30, then you can usually get an 80% discount.

The complexity of the ticket prices is such that nobody understands it.

Here’s the latest twist BBC on train fares . We have ‘regulated’ fares, and ‘unregulated’ fares.

“These fare spikes are bad for people and bad for the environment.” — well, maybe. Or maybe just a different kind of pieman ?

Here in “academia” we face the same problem. We are doing Brain Imaging with MR. We are slightly more advanced in the sense that we have a “container file format” that can be adapted to contain anything we need for our analysis.

Unfortunately, squabbling among different research groups means rather than simplify things, it is a container for all things. A lot of group specific stuff went in, for example, two different ways of specifying rigid-body transformation matrix. Sounds familiar? Yes, it is like those “deprecated” features in OOXML, only different is it is not deprecated but part of the standard. Important things, such as timing and slice acquisition orders are optional, and we STILL have the problem figuring out which is the left side.

Why these problems? As you said “some will benefit from others misfortune” and nobody wants to be the misfortune one. Nobody wants to modify their existing software to the other “transformation parameter”. Nobody wants to be the one who have to flip their images to fit the convention. Hence, the compromise is that you can do everything you want in the file format.

In the end, we have insufficient progress to achieve the ultimate goal of able shift data from one application to another. Why? like OOXML, the data is ill-defined.

“it is trivial to run data from one file format to another”

No it isn’t. Look at Microsoft’s own decision to drop file formats with Office 2003 SP3 for boneheaded obvious evidence that running data from one file format to another actually has a cost — one that MS has decided is too great to carry.

I wonder if this anonymous person is the same one who believes that editing the registry is also a trivial matter for end-users?

It is not impossible to run a train from one gauge to another. It has been done before, with specially designed trains, in particular by the Germans when preparing to invade Russia. But it is not as cost-effective as having a single gauge.

Ditto for file formats. You could convert if needed, but it will never be as efficient in terms of fidelity or runtime resources, as having a single common file format.

I’ve been meaning to do a blog post to address that topic, since there are some common misconceptions. So thanks for the reminder that there is still a need for elucidation on that topic.

Maybe I can get 8 more seconds of your brain on that post as well?

While it is impossible to run a train from gauge it gauge it is trivial to run data from one file format to another and we have been doing just that for as long as we have been practicing computer science.

The general theme of anybody bringing this analogy up in public generally runs to a next step of waving an international electrical plug converter in the air talking about the lunacy of different countries socket and electrical standards, stating that it makes it almost impossible to travel with a laptop.

Dyslexics of the world, untie! :-)