[OT] A general gripe...

["Phil Harris" <phil@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

What the hell is going on with connectors nowadays?



Remember the "good old days" T where SCSI cables had thumbscrews
and IEEE
connectors had those little wire clips to retain them?



BNCs? Ahhhhh - good old BNCs, where are they now on consumer kit?



Locking DINs? Whatever happened to locking DINs? Who uses those nowadays?
(Oh yeah - my employer does - oh well, I'll skip that one then.)



I thought SCARTs were bad enough - no locking mechanism and flimsy contacts
and hoped we'd never see such a travesty of a connector again but no . the
world seems to have gone crap connector crazy!



I'll point out that I'm not including the Macbook Pro power connector here
-
that's a nice bit of design - but the power connector on the Mac Mini is
sloppy and will fall out with only very minimal tension, not good on a
desktop PC!



HDMI, jesus! The geeky AV world loves cables the size of sewer pipes and an
HDMI connector is just not up to the job of holding in securely when
there's
any kind of pulling or twisting force on it (and where are most HDMI
connectors? Yes, vertically underneath TVs where the weight of the cable
tries to pull them out and where they're subjected to the cable that goes
into them being immediately bent sharply to one side or the other so that
you don't see it poking out outside the footprint of the telly). Gefen have
their own unique version of an HDMI connector moulding that has a
thumbscrew
in it - bloody well done!



TOSLink - hell, in the current scheme of things TOSLink actually fares
pretty well! It actually has some kind of retention mechanism that works!



SATA - well I suppose at least they realized they'd bollixed that up and
butchered in a locking mechanism after a while.



eSATA - bwahahaa! Those connectors fall out easier than they go in FFS!
I've
had to hot melt glue the eSATA cables into the back on my external hard
disc
caddy to get it reliable (I notice that "TEMPO" have followed
Gefens lead on
HDMI and have their own version of an eSATA connection that has a
thumbscrew
moulded into the connector - good on them!)



Grrrrrr!



Phil



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