Standards

'Standards are the beginning of doom' 

                    -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

We all love standards, supposedly they are what makes the modern world possible, improve efficiency, make products compatible, create competitivity, spread 'best practices, and so on.

'Mediocrity finds safety in standardization.'

                    -- Frederick Crane

And lets not forget the blesed few that have the joy of sitting in some exotic island with a comittee of super smart people finding a consensus on what the silly and ignorant rest of the world should be doing.

But have you read any standard recently? And before getting though the first dozen pages of griberish didn't you wonder 'What the hell were those people smoking?'

'K: (n., adj.) a binary thousand, which isn't a decimal thousand or even really a binary thousand (which is eight), but is the binary number closest to a decimal thousand. This has proven so completely confusing that is has become a standard.'

                    -- Tonkin's First Computer Dictionary

'Multilevel standards are like onions. They're smelly and make you cry a lot.'

                    --Ron Natalie

'Geez, you'd think standards were a continental disease or something.' 

                    -- Brian Reid

'If there was [sic] a single standard for the English language it would not be necessary to support redundant spellings.' 

                    -- OSF1 ls(1) man page

'Standards is an area that is constantly changing.'

                    -- Carl Cargill (ed. ACM StandardView)

'Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.'

                    -- Alan Bennett

'How'd it go? "hundred madmen raping a girl for a week and conceiving a homicidal maniac - perfect allegory for ISO standard development process.'

                    -- Al Viro on standard commitees.

'It indicates your bios authors can't read standards. Thats a quite normal state of affairs, so common that the kernel cleans up after them.'

                    -- Alan Cox

'The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.'

                   -- Andrew S. Tannenbaum (disputed)

'**'

Alan Cox wrote:
> In theory however i2o is a standard and all i2o works alike. In practice i2o
> is a pseudo standard and nobody seems to interpret the spec the same way, the
> implementations all tend to have bugs and the hardware sometimes does too.

That's a pretty good description of standards in general, at least
when it comes to hardware :-)

                   -- Jens Axboe

Good standards

Yes, there are some sane standards out there, and we list them here for reference:

Bad standards

This pretty much encompases everything else, but we will list some here that are particularly illustrative.