If you want standards to drive an industry, then the innovators have to be the ones setting the standard. Yet people are already afraid enough of de facto standards; even less will they hand control of a new de jure standard over to an innovator. Result: a committee is formed, most of whose members are there to see that their company does not get locked out of the market for the new functionality. Thus we get a standard that works 3 years after the innovation and is widely used and understood 5 years after that.

Standards aren't magic. It takes time for them to be understood, for the kinks to be worked out, and for widespread acceptance to be gained.

This issue isn't about standards though. All large software vendors have to deal with the innovation vs. stability problem. If Mozilla can't figure out how to fork a stable release off its development branch once in a while, then they'll lose the enterprise; it's really as simple as that.

Mod parent up please. It's cool to be cynical AND spot on.

Did scary movies stop frightening people (especially children) somewhere back there?

This is really serious bunkum. Any sane judge will toss it in minutes.

American construction practices standardized and matured before the metric changeover was attempted. Make a proposal for how to change 2x4s, 4x8 sheets of plywood, and 16/24" centers into interchangeable and easy to understand and use metric equivalents and you'll be a hero. Failing that American industry needs to get off its ass and improve its products and get Americans to start believing--like Scandanavians--that manufactured housing is superior to stick built housing. Until then no conversion is feasible or likely.

Typical government incompetence. A LOT of personal information records can fit on a dime-width single stripe of a disk.

I advise my clients to reduce the disks to powder or liquid, if they're worried about government-level magnetic force microscopy and other forensic attacks.

Given they have to notify all the federal, state and local authorities before FB and Tweety, I guess that means we'll get the news several days after the event.

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Threat levels are always orange, even on Pandora

IMO, there's only one branch of government suitable for pure FOSS types.

I could see elements of FOSS working in the congressional setting, if you could get the lawyers to agree. After all, making law is somewhat like coding, and could be made a lot more like it if the legal community would accept the formulation of standard legal clauses that could be automatically reasoned about, a la automata and compilers.

OTOH, driving ambulances and paving roads is more like what Redhat and kin do, analogically. They may hire the occasional FOSS type, but it's executive-branch duty: to get the law out there, support it and make it work.

And there's no freaking way I'd ever hand over the judiciary to FOSS types.

After seeing this happen at my company, I recommend jumping in with both feet or leaving the company. The schmucks have already won, and are firmly in control. If you stay, you'll do a lot better playing the game their way.

I finally got rid of my Grandpa's wire recorder the last time I moved.

I'd like to see some experience from someone small who's tried to support OOXML as standardized by ISO. All this polemic is just that.

The sad thing is that this flow of crap has easily identified causes, but no easily identified remedies.

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Happy New Year and Good Riddance Old Year

Although TFA doesn't say so explicitly, I think it's talking about the race to get the best targeted advertising analytics in place for global applications like eBay, FB etc. These applications don't have the same database requirements as traditional business apps. It makes sense to talk about new ways of doing things for them, but TFA's author and a lot of other people make the mistake of thinking or implying that these new techniques will apply directly to traditional business apps as well. Sorry, not.

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Happy New Year, may it suck less for ya than the last one.

Or worse, they are elderly, and paying cash, and see value in giving exact change.

Airport checkin lines say you're wrong. The majority of the people in line don't have any issues and just need to check in. But as soon as the number of people with issues == the number of airline desk clerks, the whole line is stalled, and average wait times go way up. Your single-line-queue logic requires all transaction times to be roughly the same to work, I believe.

I used to whine loudly that they needed special lines at airports for people without issues. And thanks to automated checkin kiosks and online checkin, we now have them. As a rule, the kiosks and online checkin only work for people without issues, so they effectively segregate traffic into that which is easy to process and that which is harder.