Re: Government standards
Re: Government standards
- Subject: Re: Government standards
- From: Ernst Dinkla <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 08:53:40 +0200
Mark Rice wrote:
Presently the government Bureau of Standards keeps a constant index of what
the "meter" is, and what a "second" is, and they do a pretty good job. Are
you implying that private industry, such is Microsoft, or Apple, could do a
better job of defining these standards?
In the USA it looks like the industry sets the standards
independently. Mothball archiving of standards by the
government doesn't really help. Those nice leaflets on
metrification issued since the 1950's are no real attempt to
change the industry. The 1/72 inch for font sizes contradicts
any set standard in the world including the US standard but it
dominates today's prepress since IBM used that size for their
desktop composers. The US paper sizes - weights are a PITA for
the entire continent. A mission to Mars ended in infinity
because Lockheed and NASA couldn't use a single unit system.
In general I get the impression that US citizens not only pay
dearly for the haphazard use of imperial and metric units but
they also find it difficult to do arithmetics in both systems.
Whether that is the objective of the industry I'm not sure but
it wouldn't surprise me. Proprietary isn't a dirty word in the
US, the abuse of the patent system today is just one symptom,
the rate of metrification so far is another one.
On topic:
Microsoft did time its announcement well. Apple's change to
Intel hardware is as risky as the change from 68000>PowerPC
was. At that time M$ had W95 to attract Apple customers, this
time it could be a better than Apple's CMS and having PS run
natively. That's probably Adobe's main concern now, get PS
running on Intel-OS X in time. Not for the volume in sales but
with M$ trying to get into other parts of Adobe's market it is
nice to have another platform to build on. Apple could do
itself and Adobe a favor by decoupling hardware and software
soon and reinvent Colorsync in the process. I do not believe
it will harm their hardware and iPod activities if they keep
their designs at the usual level.
--
Ernst Dinkla
www.pigment-print.com
( unvollendet )
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