Technology

clear text labels

The problem with using English anything is that while English is the most-widely-used language in the world, there are still a lot of people out there who don't know it.

The US has a history of just using English text for everything, because most people in the US can do English. Over in Europe, where the language situation is more-fragmented, I think that there's more push for using symbols, which...can have benefits, though it also means that everyone has to learn some symbols.

Maybe "STOP" or "ON" and "OFF" or something aren't that hard to learn. My gut is that maybe we could expect just about everyone in the world to learn a super-minimal subset of English using all-capital Latin letters or something for labeling purposes. "ON", "OFF", "STOP", "YES", "NO", "CANCEL", "POWER", "ERROR", "RESET", "UP", "DOWN", maybe something along those lines. Kinda like a pidgin English designed for devices. But that thing has "CERTIFIED", hardly the first thing someone learns. Also, it appears to have built a US trademark indicator and registered trademark indicator into various official labels, which I think is kind of funny. Like, if the USB guys go out and alter the registration status of their trademarks, are they gonna change the labels, and is everyone gonna go alter their plastic molds and whatever?

Imagine all that text was a bunch of Chinese and imagine how palatable that'd be for the US market. Okay, it's easier to learn the (small) Latin alphabet than Chinese characters, which maybe makes learning basic words easier, but I can't recognize a single Chinese character.

I mean, don't get me wrong. I speak English. I'd rather have descriptive English than a bunch of obscure and sometimes similar-looking symbols, myself. But I don't feel like this is all that ideal, either, not from a global standpoint.

Behind the scenes, here’s what those labels correspond to:

• USB 5Gbps: USB 3.0 and 3.1 Gen 1

• USB 10Gbps: USB 3.1 Gen 2, 3.2 Gen 2×1, and 3.2 Gen 1×2

• USB 20Gbps: USB 3.2 Gen 2×2

• USB 40Gbps: USB4’s initial version as currently shipping

That's cool. But even though it finally adds simplicity, it's still yet another renaming of the same things.

Here's a snippet from an article from 2019:

The upcoming 20 Gb/s USB 3.2 connection, which offers twice the speeds of the previous iteration, will be known as 'USB 3.2 Gen 2x2'. Its predecessor, 'USB 3.1' will be rebranded to 'USB 3.2 Gen 2', while 'USB 3.0', which ran at 5 Gb/s speeds, will be termed 'USB 3.2 Gen 1'.

Reading that I want to shoot myself, and even the latest change, which probably is a good one, drives me slightly mad due to the history of renaming everything so many times.