Pinto's Law of open-systems confusion

J

Thread Starter

JimPinto

Automation List :

Everyone recognizes the advantages of a fieldbus standard. However, end users are the primary beneficiaries, and vendors lose their proprietary edge.

All the while, multi-vendor committees meet to develop the "fieldbus standard". But, this movement is futile =96 since committees must achieve a consensus, and many suppliers thwart consensus. For this very reason, the European Standards Committee approved no less than eight "standards" for fieldbus. Which simply causes confusion.

Which brings us to Pinto's Law of Open-systems Confusion:

C =3D P x V/U

where:
C is the Confusion V is the number of Vendor's supporting a "standard" U is the number of happy Users and P is Pinto's Confusion-factor, which decreases non-linearly with time

Pinto's Law also governs other major standards developments - the emergence of competing standards such as VHS vs Beta format for video
tape; PC vs Apple microcomputers; PC operating systems Windows vs UNIX vs Linux, etc.

My new article is up on the AutomationTechies.com website - Pinto's Law of open-systems confusion:

"http://www.automationtechies.com/sitepages/art384.php":http://www.automationtechies.com/sitepages/art384.php

I'll appreciate your comments and feedback.::

Cheers:
jim
----------/
Jim Pinto
email : [email protected]
web: www.JimPinto.com
San Diego, CA., USA
----------/
 
Automation List:

An error came into the Pinto's Law formula, as published.

Which brings us to Pinto's Law of Open-systems Confusion:

C =3D P x V/U

I'm not sure where the 3D came from.

The correct formula is :

C = P x V/U

I'll appreciate your comments and feedback.

Cheers:
jim
----------/
Jim Pinto
email : [email protected]
web: www.JimPinto.com
San Diego, CA., USA
----------/
 
C

Curt Wuollet

And as a result the simultaneous progress function becomes asymtotic to the origin.

Regards

cww
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K
From the headers in your message:

> X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0)

This sort of thing is unfortunately very common in the current Internet, and is caused by software which ignores standards, presumably due either to the incompetency or the arrogance of its authors. I'm used to seeing and almost ignoring it, but it does serves to flag users of Microsoft's fine products. Another symptom is curiously appearing question marks in the text of a web page.

Sighingly,

Ken

--
Ken Irving
 
J

Johan Bengtsson

That one is simple, MIME encoding.

When you mime encode something some characters are replaced with an equal sign and the character written hexadecimal. Since an equal sign is used to tell that the two following characters are to be treated as a hexadecimal number and that is the character to be used one of the characters coded like this is equal signs. 3D is the hexadecimal number for 61, an equal sign in the ascii table.

Apperantly this conversion does not always work (you see it occasionally on other posts as well).


/Johan Bengtsson

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JimPinto:
> > An error came into the Pinto's Law formula, as published.
...
> > C =3D P x V/U

> > I'm not sure where the 3D came from.
> > ...

Ken Irving:
> >From the headers in your message:

> > X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0)

> This sort of thing is unfortunately very common in the current Internet,
> and is caused by software which ignores standards, presumably due either
> to the incompetency or the arrogance of its authors.

I haven't saved the original message, but the above looks like a quoted-printable encoding, which is standard MIME. The headers marking it might have got lost somewhere, for instance in the moderating process. I wouldn't be so sure to jump down Microsoft's throat on this one.

The real problem with this one is that the encodings for various currency symbols (pound, yen) end with a digit, which tends to merge with the amount, thus increasing it by an order of magnitude.

> I'm used to seeing and almost ignoring it, but it does serves to flag
> users of Microsoft's fine products. Another symptom is curiously
> appearing question marks in the text of a web page.

Hmm, that probably means you have an *excellent* browser, because normally the symptom is that certain characters - em-dashes, apostrophes, quotes - disappear altogether.

That one *is* a fault of Microsoft, because their Western-European encoding is incompatible with ISO Latin 1 and Unicode. (Their Eastern-European
encoding is worse - actual letters disappear similarly.)

Jiri
--
Jiri Baum <[email protected]> http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jirib
MAT LinuxPLC project --- http://mat.sf.net --- Machine Automation Tools
 
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