Email, as far as im aware there isn’t some alternative email standard (messaging services, whatsapp, signal, sms, etc do not count imo as I believe they serve a different purpose than email)
DNS, while there are alternative root servers, they still fundamentally rely on the dns protocol.
TCP/IP, when the internet was first starting, this was not the only standard in use, but now it is (to my knowledge).
I thought about this for longer than I should’ve for a comment on a random post, but this is all I could think of lol.
edit: grammar
There are many, I think. Like what other people have mentioned, sometimes the new standard is just better on all metrics.
Another common example is when someone creates something as a passion project, rather than expecting it to get used widely. It’s especially frustrating for me when I see people denigrate projects like those, criticizing it for a lack of practicality…
The competing standards problem is mostly a problem of not actually talking to stakeholders. Most of these “universal standards” don’t cover some rare, specific, but very important, use cases.
Toilet paper rolls.
Somehow we settled on a pretty good size for toilet rolls, and there never seems to be a compatibility issue with holders.
At least not for households. Commercial products have their own things going on, but it doesn’t affect most people.
Is there a formal standard, or did we decide not to mess with good enough?
We’ve got a 100 year old toilet roll holder, the spindle was turned on a lathe and the wooden cutout it sits in was hand carved. It is a poor fit for modern high sheet count rolls. We can’t stand to get rid of it so we just leave the roll outside of it until it is small enough to fit.
You’re a machinist! Can’t you just like…make a better one? /s
I actually have a wood lathe and all the other tooling to make one, not that I would.
I’ve been fixing the place up since August. It’s a farm that hasn’t been properly maintained in about 20 years.
I’m doing my best to build to the standard of the original owner and his son with modern materials and methods. It’s a humbling experience. Nothing is quite square but everything is built like it’s bomb proof. You couldn’t afford to build out of solid wood like they did. The joints and meets are also super tight, you can’t get a sheet of paper between roof boards on the barn in most places.
USB has worked pretty well IMO
My main complaint about USB is the cables. There’s no way of knowing what standards and data speeds the cable may support.
They’ve now, at least, released a standard set of markings. Basically, the data speed in Gb and the power capacity in Watts will be printed on the connector. Whether chinese suppliers will bother complying is another matter.
Yeah just don’t pay too close attention to the unofficial power delivery protocols.
or the cursed double ended USB-A cables
