OT: UK \"price cap\"...

[rbowman]

On 08/31/2022 08:21 AM, Don Y wrote:

Why can\'t everything be like a phone plug? (no top or bottom, left
or right, easy to locate the mating connector and align \"blind\")

And come in three different diameters that I know of and 2, 3, and 4
conductor variations...

 

[Don Y]

On 8/31/2022 8:44 PM, rbowman wrote:

On 08/31/2022 08:21 AM, Don Y wrote:
Why can\'t everything be like a phone plug? (no top or bottom, left
or right, easy to locate the mating connector and align \"blind\")

And come in three different diameters that I know of and 2, 3, and 4 conductor
variations...

You\'d have no problem sorting out the correct diameter -- it would fit or it
wouldn\'t. Note that this isn\'t entirely the case with barrel connectors.

And, you\'d pin the connectors so they are \"well-behaved\" if misplugged
(as well as transitioning in and out).

Note there is no practical way of ensuring that a particular connector
can *only* be mated to another for a specific purpose; users are
quite clever in their abilities to mis-mate things!

[A friend once mated a legacy 4-pin -- 12V GND GND 5V -- power connector to
a disk drive *backwards*! I didn\'t think that was physically possible.
He said, \"Yeah, it was really hard going in...\" Ya think??!]

But, you could at least facilitate folks who are *trying* to do the
right thing...

(Try mating a VHDCI cable, blind!)

 

[rbowman]

On 08/31/2022 09:57 PM, Don Y wrote:

On 8/31/2022 8:44 PM, rbowman wrote:
On 08/31/2022 08:21 AM, Don Y wrote:
Why can\'t everything be like a phone plug? (no top or bottom, left
or right, easy to locate the mating connector and align \"blind\")

And come in three different diameters that I know of and 2, 3, and 4
conductor variations...

You\'d have no problem sorting out the correct diameter -- it would fit
or it
wouldn\'t. Note that this isn\'t entirely the case with barrel connectors.

Yeah, the 1/4\" fits fine in the electric guitar jack. The other end
doesn\'t necessarily fit the line in jack on digital recorders etc. Same
with headphones with a 1/4\" plug.

 

[Don Y]

On 9/1/2022 9:54 PM, rbowman wrote:

On 08/31/2022 09:57 PM, Don Y wrote:
On 8/31/2022 8:44 PM, rbowman wrote:
On 08/31/2022 08:21 AM, Don Y wrote:
Why can\'t everything be like a phone plug? (no top or bottom, left
or right, easy to locate the mating connector and align \"blind\")

And come in three different diameters that I know of and 2, 3, and 4
conductor variations...

You\'d have no problem sorting out the correct diameter -- it would fit
or it
wouldn\'t. Note that this isn\'t entirely the case with barrel connectors.

Yeah, the 1/4\" fits fine in the electric guitar jack. The other end doesn\'t
necessarily fit the line in jack on digital recorders etc. Same with headphones
with a 1/4\" plug.

You want one of these:

<https://www.bhphotovideo.com/images/images2000x2000/sennheiser_549346_universal_1_8_to_1_4_912789.jpg>

and a commodity line in/line out PC cable (1/8\" plugs on each end).
You don\'t want to do it the other way around:

<https://www.totalgadgetsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/9281-1.jpg>

as the weight of the cord and 1/4 plug on the adapter will likely
cause the 1/8 plug to fail. I stopped using my Senny 800s for this
reason (also, I much prefer having pinnae uncovered).

I have a box of \"widgets\" like this for all sorts of connectors.
The goal is to be able to make a cable that converts from X to Y
instead of STOCKING an X-to-Y cable! I learned this working for a
company that made comms gear years ago.

One of the rites of passage for every new product was to sort through
the 2\' x 2\' x 2\' box of \"magic cables\" in the hope of STUMBLING on
one that had the correct connectors *and* the correct wiring thereof!
\"Let\'s try THIS one... Nope! Keep looking...\"

Easier to just stock \"straight thru\" cables and build/buy little
\"widgets\" that you could add to one (or both) end(s) to get the
connectors and wiring you sought. You can store a shitload of different
widgets in a small box instead of having to also store a length of
cable wired as part of each (magic cable).

Hint: make each widget large enough that you can affix a label to it
that lets you understand what\'s inside so you can reproduce that \"cable
assembly\" when needed. It makes these oddball interconnect jobs considerably
easier -- esp if you\'ve chosen informative names for each widget.

 

[server]

On Wed, 31 Aug 2022 07:21:58 -0700, Don Y
<blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:

On 8/31/2022 6:59 AM, rbowman wrote:
On 08/31/2022 06:12 AM, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
USB was invented for that exact same reason.

Replacing RS-232 and DB-25 connectors didn\'t break my heart. Of course, like
everything else, they couldn\'t do it without spawning 4 or 5 incompatible
connectors.

Sadly, the amount of software required for a USB stack is considerably
more than even a full-featured serial port driver (and most folks probably
don\'t even bother with a formal driver).

We usually use an FTDI usb-to-serial converter chip in our boxes, with
a UART in the internal ARM. Most OS\'s recognize the FTDI as a com port
and nobody has to muck with writing or installing drivers.

And, they are flimsier *and* suffer from the same \"hard to insert
without looking, carefully\" problem that plagued earlier connectors.

The \"universal\" system bus has at least a dozen incompatible
connectors, all but the C being hard to mate.

Why can\'t everything be like a phone plug? (no top or bottom, left
or right, easy to locate the mating connector and align \"blind\")

In the pre-ethernet days, I wired a building full of dumb terminals to
a timeshare computer (DEC, RSTS-11, RS232) with phone jacks in the
wall boxes and phone plugs on the terminal cables.

You can step on a phone plug with jackboots, mate it in the dark, yank
it out of the wall by the cable, accidentally or on purpose.

This

http://www.highlandtechnology.com/DSS/T560DS.shtml

does RS232 with a mini phone jack.

 

[Les Cargill]

Martin Brown wrote:

On 28/08/2022 09:10, Don Y wrote:
snip

I can\'t fathom an (existing) equivalent mechanism in the US market...

I would hope that you don\'t have anything like it. Although the Enron
scam failure suggests that you probably do in some fashion but that it
is geared to ensuring that suppliers can price gouge their customers.

The \"Enron scam\" was mostly the California dereg deregulating
demand while doing nothing to address supply and the unscrupulous
( some of whom were Enron ) happily rode that pony. I say
\"unscrupulous\", once falling knife price effects set in it\'s
inherently red in tooth and claw. See also a recent Texas winter.

It\'s basically \"let\'s shave pennies off the monthly cost and pretend
that Nash equilibria don\'t exist.\" When you Google Nash equilibrium now
you get stuff from the mid 1990s. It\'s like it\'s been lost.

I saw a guy who helped engineer the earlier Mid-Atlantic states
dereg predicting this quite vividly almost as soon as it was
floated in Ca. I think it was on Charlie Rose. They didn\'t put
instruments in place to manage load peaks.

Here\'s the thing about Enron: The management *lost control* of
the energy traders through the magic of contracts. Unbelievable.

The capitalists have forgotten what capital actually is.

--
Les Cargill