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Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2015 05:25:54 -0800 (PST)
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Subject: Re: A few questions
From: brbarkstrom@gmail.com
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> Thanks for the info but I fear that it is more than overkill.=20
>=20
> It also shows that most "standards" have gotten this status only because =
things have been like that before and not because they are the best possibl=
e solution.=20
>=20
> So if you have a better solution than the actual one but are not part of =
a large community which supports this, then you can burn it immediately. On=
ly because no one wants to change a thing and prefer to use some crappy sol=
ution over changing something and investing time and effort.
>=20
> Somehow this world sucks.

That's a bit oversimplified.  "Standards" get adopted because some group
reaches a consensus.  In the case of botany, getting to agreement on the
standard Linnean nomenclature required about a century (roughly 1800-1900)
and five or six international congresses.  In the IT world, UDDI was of
interest to a number of large businesses - and then they dropped the effort
because it didn't seem to be in their interest to continue.

Note also that there may not be an agreement on what is the "best" solution=
.
That's particularly the case with time standards.  A classical astronomer
would probably prefer a time standard that kept the Sun in the same place
for a given day of the year - and would put up with leap seconds on an=20
occasional basis.  A physicist would prefer that time marches uniformly,
like atomic clocks.  An IT specialist may prefer using civil time because
it's understandable - but suffers from complicated representations and
irregularities, as well as the possibility that someone forgot to put in
a standard time zone.

Bruce B.