Could we all work toward compatibility?
If you live with technology, you have been victimized by incompatibility.
On a recent trip to London, TechMan experienced that in a dramatic way. He plugged a multiple outlet device into the wall and was rewarded with a flash, pop and a wisp of smoke — perhaps because the surge protector didn’t like being plugged into the British 230 volts instead of the U.S. 120.
It tripped the circuit breaker in the house we were renting, making TechMan the darling of the group.
After that, he had to carry four adapters for charging and running his various devices. I suppose being different is part of the color, or colour, of foreign lands.
TechMa’am and Techman are in a mixed marriage. He uses an iMac and she uses a PC. When computer technology arrived, we all had a chance at uniformity, but we blew it. In some ways, it has been getting worse.
Apple abandoned one of the bedrocks of compatibility — the analog 3.5 mm headphone jack — on the iPhone7. With the new phone, you got headphones with an Appleonly lightning connector. In the box was an adapter to convert your devices. If you lose the adapter, it costs $9, so buy a few extras because you are going to lose them. Apple said it had the “courage” to do this because the future is wireless headphones. The company just happened to bring out its very own pair for $160, thank you very much.
Now, we have a chance to fix the frustration of incompatible charging with the advent of wireless charging. Qi dominates the industry, but there are several competing standards, so sit back and watch your Betamax tapes until it all shakes out.
Maybe companies could put
aside the short-term profits of proprietary connection schemes and instead work toward compatible connections that increase efficiency, ease and affordability for the consumer. That would be a horse of a different colour. Storage wars. Western Digitalsaid it has found a way touse microwaves to write dataonto hard drives, making themtop out at 40 terabytes comparedwith the present 14 terabytes,says BBC.com. A diskwith a data capacity of 40 terabyteswould be able to holdmore than 2,500 two-hour moviesencoded at standard resolution.
Keep your comments to yourself. Congress is at it again — messing with the internet. This time it is a bill called SESTA — Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. According to Reddit.com, a target of the act, SESTA would weaken Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Section 230 allows websites to publish user content by protecting them from being sued out of existence because someone uses their platform improperly. Under current law, websites can allow users to engage in free expression because they are not liable for the things users post, as long as they comply with the law and take down abusive or illegal content when it’s flagged.