🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm interested in why the whole area of standards is so gothic
anyhow...

most the western world is enganged in a move away from monopolies,
state intervention etc and yet ISO represents one of the most
central repositories for standards around

contrast with the far more distributed approach of de facto standards
(e.g. internet, dare i say...)

i think until proper competition is introduced, and open peer technical
review, and discursive definition of standards as opposed to the
current hierarchical approach and dry post facto presentation style of
most full standard documents...

i know we can put anyone up to attend standards meetyings (and myu
community, UK academics, does) - however, trying to pursuade anyone 
really good from the technical world to go for any length of time 
results in cries of "oh mi gawd, no, anything to avoid that political 
quagmire"

in fact, i believe that the "internatinal standards" in general and "open
systems" in particular have almost exact opposite effects from the
original supposed intentions - 

they result in deliberate obfuscation by any companies with good technical
input in an area, as who wants to subvert their own sales

they result in zero competition where there is a good standard, and
semantic free standards where competition is likely (e.g. just look at
MPEG - deliberately avoids defining strict coding rules, since thats
where different companes will achieve an edge in
performance/quality...ends up underspecifying things...)

as for document availability, i don't object to copyright and so forth 
to protect costs, but there is legal recourse rather than simple
witholding of electronic versions

as for the idea of someone altering a standard spec, well that is a
very amusing idea - i can see a short term malicisous motivation - i
cannot see how changes would persist through any implementation by any
responsible company...

anyhow, there are technical solutions to that (e.g. issueing one way
crypto sums that can be recalculated by people on reciept of document)
- see lots of standards work on integrity and privacy in e-mail, document 
interchange and elctronic funds transfer

i mean to say, can you imagine a bank not connecting to swift on the
grounds that they might get told wrong numbers by another bank - would
last long would they...

or Dire Straits not issding an album on DAT on the grunds someonme
might alter it subtly to make knoppfler sound like he could play
guitar anymore:-)

how about some OPTIMISIM in how to do things, with legal redress for
when it goes wrong later

i spose its too much to ask for - iso is based on levelling
down/lowest common denominator almost by defn.

 jon