SV: SV: SV: [governance] ISO standards

[Roland Perry]

In message <008301c8ff02$ef49d570$0201a8c0 at wilkinson>, at 20:15:44 on 
Fri, 15 Aug 2008, Christopher Wilkinson 
<christopher.wilkinson at skynet.be> writes
>Well, GSM Cellphone chips have one corner cut off. Otherwise, we would 
>all have trouble knowing which way up to put the chip in the slot.

Oddly enough, the original plan was to have a GSM card that was the same 
size as a credit card, and which you inserted in any phone. The billing 
would be to the card, not the phone. Then business models changed so 
that hardware became locked to the SIM, and the lack of need (by then) 
to regularly swap SIMMs meant they could be made much smaller.

Even so, I doubt there's much ambiguity about which way to insert them, 
because even without the corner cut-off there's only four possibilities, 
and if people can be trained to realise that the "writing should be on 
top and the gold contacts underneath" that reduces to just two.

That doesn't mean that cutting off the corner is a bad idea, but I wish 
the "regulators" had managed to get the cellphone industry to keep to 
the original concept.
-- 
Roland Perry
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