“And the Great One did descend from the mountain, bearing a strange staff,
and looking a lot more like Neptune than he had before.
To the faithful he gave a list of things that should be, and some that should not be.
All who followed his commandments were happy, and those who disobeyed
were cursed with an eternity of non-standard cables and missing driver disks.”

Here are what I shall term as the “New Commandments”.

1. There shalt be no other interface than mine – All mobile phones, mp3 players, digital cameras and their like shall use a standard USB connector to interface to a computer, and if applicable as a power supply for charging. Nobody want to have to carry a bag of different adaptors, especially when the likes of Nokia can’t decide what size charger you need.
2. Spread the interface, for the interface is good – All desktop peripherals that use USB (and they all should), must include a built in mini-hub, or at least the ability to daisy chain one device.
3. Thou shalt not have any graven driver disks – Every USB device that requires special drivers should store them on the device itself in a sort of memory stick ROM. Nothing is more annoying that re-installing your machine an finding that you’ve misplaced a couple of inportant device drivers.
4. Honour thy specification, and do it properly – If I want to use my camera as a memory stick, I should be able to do it. It shows up as a removable drive on the PC, so it should bloody well connect to the printer for direct printing.
5. …seriously, do it properly – if the maximum cable length is 4m, bloody well work on a 4m cable.

Follow those five simple rules, and I won’t be forced to visit you with a flensing knife.