Re: Diversity - good or bad ?

On 10/01/2025 21:17, Lars Poulsen wrote:

Or the way car radios were standardized, so you could buy a new,
high-end AM/FM/CD radio to spice up your 10-year old car.
 Those days are over. No more aftermarket car radios, since
entertainment, navigation, climate control and other dashboard
functions became integrated.

I.e Diversity as in making incompatible shit is what Microsoft Apple and big vendors try and do. Betamax versus VHS
The people like standardised shit.
Not a hundred different 'diverse'  screw threads depending...
...yesterday I took delivery of a panel mount HDMI to micro HDMI connector for a Pi 4B.
It came without mounting screws.
No screw in my extensive collection fitted. It may have been #4 UNC.
I tried to re-tap it to M3. The metal inserts simply rotated in the flexible plastic housing
I ended up pushing them out with pliers and pushing in M3 bushes.
Diversity is there to address single points of failure, not to increase the chances of failure.
Mostly you don't want it. Only when there are extreme crises do people who are 'different' or technology that is 'different' survive by sheer happenstance. And become the 'new standard'.
Linux succeeds because it is a vendor independent *standard*.  Not because it has a thousand pointless diverse 'distros' that barely differ one from anther.
Diversity means 100 nuclear power stations so if one goes down 99 are still running.
Diversity means 100 nuclear power stations built to identical specifications with open source parts specifications so that anyone can in principle manufacture the same spares parts, thus providing a diverse supply channels.
It doesn't mean having a completely unique and non interchangeable and mutually incompatible collection of 'things that occasionally produce electricity' all built to different standards.
An example of stupid diversity from the early days of the internet. A pointy head decided that the ISP need 'diverse' routing from London, which was then the gateway too Europe, and Manchester, which is where a lot of transatlantic cables came ashore.
So the bought two channels from different vendors.
One day both failed simultaneously. Routing to the USA was going via Scandinavia, which had very limited US capacity.
How come 'diversity' had failed?
Simples. There was one very high capacity multi-fibre link between London and Manchester used by every vendor of bandwidth.
And a digger had sliced through it....
Diversity is an engineering concept taken up, misunderstood., used out of a valid context,  and abused by people who want to sell you shit that doesn't work.
--
I would rather have questions that cannot be answered...
...than to have answers that cannot be questioned
Richard Feynman