Celebrating open standards around the world

Posted Oct 15, 2016 2:49 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
Parent article: Celebrating open standards around the world

On this day companies throughout the world introduce new incompatible standards to celebrate this event.

Celebrating open standards around the world

Posted Oct 15, 2016 4:47 UTC (Sat) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (3 responses)

That's the wonderful thing about standards: there are so many to choose from.

Celebrating open standards around the world

Posted Oct 16, 2016 0:11 UTC (Sun) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link] (2 responses)

On Friday I was whining about RJ11 to BT phone adapters - why on earth didn't British Telecom use RJ11 like everyone else? (I thought) [2]

Then I took a quick look at what other countries use for telephony connectors. Then I looked at what BT (formerly the General Post Office - GPO) used in the past. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPO_telephones for example, and feel free to shudder [1].

I stopped whining and bought some cheap RJ11 to BS 6312 connectors.

Hmmm, now to look into codecs ...

Cheers
Jon

[1] One of my employees is an ex BT bod and remembers
[2] Turns out a fair few places use BT's connectors - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_telephone_socket

Celebrating open standards around the world

Posted Oct 16, 2016 13:08 UTC (Sun) by ianmcc (subscriber, #88379) [Link] (1 responses)

You are lucky that you can do this yourself. In Australia, we don't have a 'demarcation point' at all; for anything involving equipment that can *potentially* be connected to the phone network, you are supposed to get a professional in to do the wiring. Yes, that means that any CAT5 etc home wiring is technically illegal here! You are supposed to have a licence to make your own network cables too, but I've never heard of that being enforced (certainly, the Chinese-made cables you buy in a store were not assembled by anyone with an ACMA license!).

Celebrating open standards around the world

Posted Oct 19, 2016 2:59 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

It's like the pre-1980s US!

I like that we invented the acoustic-coupler modem so that computers could talk to the phone company with no electrons touching.