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Admin
The bane of my life. Tha absolute bane of my life.
Anyone found passign a strting date in any format other than "YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss ZZZ" should be taken out, beaten to a pulp, shot, beaten some more and then shot again.
The above format is the only format that should ever be used. It is unambigious (VB and most M$ apps will cope natively and not do their "helpful" error swallowing gubbins) AND you know what date/time is actually meant because you know the GMT offset.
GAH!
Rant! Froth!
Admin
Of course, everyone knows that 40 rods is a furlong, and his car is going to be traveling at about 80,000 furlongs/fortnight. Pretty fast for an old geezer!
Don't put down inches and feet, though. A foot can be easily divided into 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12 parts. That is nice if you ever do any building or crafting. And everyone knows that fractions are more accurate than decimal numbers. However, that is spoken by someone who grew up in the dark ages of slide rules and abacuses. I always feel more comfortable with whole numbers.
Has anyone else noticed the new units of measurement used in the news? I keep hearing about things being "as long as a football field," or "as large as a football field."
Admin
Uh, is that an American football field, or the other kind?
Admin
Hm, yes, not very logical, you know, small scale to big scale.
Does anyone have a sense-making explanation why they use mm/dd/yyyy on the other side?
How about changing the forum software to show the correct date format if it detects the time zone?
Admin
$ TZ=UTC date
Wed Jul 19 15:57:31 UTC 2006
$ TZ=MST date
Wed Jul 19 08:57:39 MST 2006
The trick is to set the TZ environment variable.
$ TZ='new/timezone'
$ export TZ
Admin
The real WTF is that you once looked something up in a manual...
http://www.comics.com/comics/workingdaze/archive/workingdaze-20060627.html
Admin
Another WTF Waiting to Happen
Your comment highlights the sort of ignorance abundant in Windows developers (and Windows developers who end up developing on UNIX/Linux) which (not surprisingly) make up the majority of WTF's. (Look at me - I took a 2-week Microsoft-certified course at Devry so I'm a "Duvelapir").
What he's referring to by "Ordinary" is userspace or "not a daemon" ("not a service" for the Windows monkeys). Try researching the concepts involved - I guarantee you it will take real thinking unlike obtaining your MSCM (MicroSoft Certified Moron) certification...
Admin
Right on, Franz. The phrase "total bobbins" is, in itself, complete and utter bobbins.
I was going to say that faulting someone for cultural differences like date formatting is a lot like saying they shouldn't speak their native language because another one is "superior" or "more convenient"...but then there he goes labeling America's brand of English as a "twisted dialect" (as if the British did such a great job of creating a perfectly logical, completely sensical language in the first place). Also, if you want to criticize whoever came up with the American style of date formatting then go ahead, but what do you expect the rest of us (the one's who were born into this culture and that way of doing things) to do? "Dare to be different" and start using meters, grams, Celcius, and YYYY/MM/DD just to appease some people half a world away who we'll never meet while at the same time causing confusion and being just plain annoying to those we actually do? Yeah, good luck with that.
Standards aren't necessarily global; they can apply to just a particular domain or system. In this case that domain is a particular country, and in that country the common convention (or standard) is to format dates as MM/DD/YYYY. Sure, if you're talking about software then hard-coding an application to use American formatting or any other country- or region-specific formatting is just plain irresponsible. But if you're just talking about how people communicate with each other in general...well, then get over it. That's the way we do it over here. You do it a different way over there. Congratulations. Welcome to the world of the...the world.
This may come as a shock, but in some Middle Eastern countries text is written and displayed from right to left. Accomodating that isn't exactly convenient from a software development point of view, is it? Perhaps we should just ask them "Hey, do you all think you could knock that off and start writing your text 'the right way'? That'd make things a lot easier for us."? Or what about those crazy Asian countries that don't use the Latin alphabet...or any alphabet at all, really. Using little pictures to represent words sure is silly, isn't it? They should really change that. Never mind if it works for them and is part of their culture, it's just plain inconvenient for the rest of us. How dare they? Of course, when we reach the ultimate goal of creating an entire planet of people who think, speak, write, and act alike then I suppose communication itself will be unnecessary...
Admin
I don't know who decided that. They're probably long dead, though. Had you ever considered the possibility that maybe, just maybe these conventions came into use way back before we had a global economy and before the need arose to store information in formats that were easily digested by non-human tabulating machines? I'm not sure why some of the posters on this thread act like they personally invented the metric system or the YYYY/DD/MM format and are such geniuses because of it. They didn't. They just happened to be born into a culture that uses those systems. What's more, I'm not sure why some people act like the decision to use one convention or another was made yesterday. It wasn't. This stuff has been around for centuries.
And if you look at it from the standpoint of written/spoken text rather than something that will be consumed and understood by computers, I actually think the American version makes sense. If you think about how you'd write a date when only two of its three components are specified, it does seem to be the most logical. For example, to indicate the year and month I'd write "July 2006" and for the month and day I'd write "July 27". "27 July", on the other hand, seems unnatural (though admittedly justifiable) and "2006 July" is just weird; "27 July" can at least be read as "27th of July", but what about "2006 July"? What preposition could you possibly insert between those two words and have it make sense without reversing their order? "Unto"? So, if your long form date formatting is "[MONTH ][DAY[, ]][YEAR]" then logically your abbreviated form is going to be "MM/DD/YYYY", right?
But what about "YYYY/MM/DD"? How do you go from that short form to a full text form? In order to avoid the "2006 July" problem I just mentioned, you'd have to change the order around so it becomes "July 2006", and one could make the case how that could be just as confusing as writing the date with the smallest units in the middle. Interestingly, the reverse, "DD/MM/YYYY", doesn't have that problem, as both "26 July" ("DAY MONTH") and "July 2006" ("MONTH YEAR") make sense. It'd be the perfect format, if only it sorted lexically, too ("27-07-2006" < "27-07-2007" < "28-07-2006")...
Oh, and as for having the units not go from largest to smallest or smallest to largest, just look at how the time is written: 12:00 AM. Though it's not really an actual unit, the rightmost component (which side of noon you're on) actually has the greatest bearing on the value of the time being written. It seems like a more logical way to write it would instead be AM 12:00...except it's not, nor have I ever seen anyone suggest it should be. Granted, in some places the 24-hour clock is used, in which case it really does go from largest to smallest units, but the 12-hour vs. 24-hour clock argument isn't quite as clear cut as each has its advantages.
Also, as far as the "brillant" idea of the US switching to the metric system, how do you plan on doing that? You wonder why it is we don't use metric as if it would be a trivial task to accomplish. Do you have any idea what kind of massive undertaking that would be? Think of all the millions of road signs that would have to be converted from miles to kilometers. All the products in grocery stores that would have to be converted from pounds and gallons to grams and liters. All the documents on hard drives and on paper that would need to be updated. And it's not just the written text that people use every day that would need to be changed, but the people themselves, too. They need to know how the units of the new system translate to those of the old system that they're used to, so, of course, for a generation or two you'll have to express a given measurement both ways (there are countries in Europe that have at least some street signs that show speed and/or distance in both Imperial and metric, are there not?). You're obviously reading this site so conceivably you work with computers in some capacity, in which case I think you'd understand that making such a drastic change to something as well-established as this doesn't exactly happen overnight with the flip of a switch, particularly when your "user base" is nearing 300 million people and spans an entire continent.
...and, of course, even if you get all of that figured out you still have the question of who's going to foot the bill for all of this. You?
Admin
I agree. I grew up with metric and I resort to inches and feet when I'm building some things.
I worked for a time doing partitioning and shop fitting type stuff and the old timers would all talk about "3 foot" panels where the whipper-snappers would refer to "point 9" or "9 hundred". We all used the same language for fixings - eg one inch screws, half inch screws, etc. Much easier to say than 25mm and 12.5mm and easier for inexperienced people to work out which is which once you tell them what an inch is.
<rant>
The strange mix of bases used in older measurements, however, makes it really annoying to do calculations. I find it slower dividing 4 ft 3 inches into 5 than 1575mm. I have no idea what a gallon is, or a quart or an ounce, or the difference between a fluid ounce and an ounce, or a bloody farinhiegtht for that matter. I don't even know how to spell the word.
And what's with the pound? I've seen a 1 pound coin and a five pound note, and the note definitely weighed a lot less than the coin. WTF's with that, huh?!?
As for football fields, Australian rules is played on a cricket oval, and they're all different sizes and shapes, so when I hear "as long as a football field" I just tend to think whoever is saying it doesn't know WTF they're talking about. They may as well say "as long as a piece of string."!!!
And While I'm at it, WTF's with times and dates anyway? What's this bloody 60 seconds a minute, sixty minutes and hour, then suddenly it's bloody 24 hours in a day! At least the pattern here is that we're working with numbers that are divisible by 3 and 4 right? WRONG! 7 days in a week, 365 days a year except in leap years where it's 366, leap years occuring every 4 years except where the year is evenly divisible by 400!!!!!! Huh? Huh? WTF?!? </rant>
I do use pints when I'm drinking beer and a pot, midi or schooner is just too small - that's appropriate - although that German "litre" concept has some merit right now......
Admin
who decided mm/dd/yyyy was a reasonable (logical) date representation anyway?
Admin
i want a man that will stay a long time with
Admin
'tis called the reset button.