The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2014-02-14 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
12:00am refers to midnight, 12:00pm refers to noon, and anyone who disagrees with or is confused by that is simply a blithering idiot.

Not at all. You're right in as much as that does seem to be the current predominant usage, but it's a relatively recent change. 40 years ago the usual usage was the other way around.

Neither has anything intrinsic in its favour. Comments about "blithering idiots" just show what a narrow outlook you have.

2014-02-14 Reply Admin

FYI, the year 1600 one is probably related to the fact that the Windows epoch is 1/1/1600. In some ways this is rather more natural than 1970, because it falls right on a 400-year boundary, which is the length of the leap-year period.

(Of course, leap seconds presumably throw a wrench into that argument. :-))

John:
Neither has anything intrinsic in its favour.

I would dispute that, for the reason that someone said earlier. Noon as "12pm" means that the AM->PM change happens at exactly 12:00. Noon as "12am" means that it changes from AM to PM at 12:01PM. Oh wait, I mean 12:00:01PM. No, I mean 12:00:00.00000000000000000001PM. (All of which are pretty unequivocally "PM" IMO.)

That said, yes: use "noon" or "midnight" for clarity if possible.

("ullamcorper"? What kind of CAPTCHA is that?)

chubertdev · 2014-02-14 Reply Admin

John:
chubertdev:
12:00am refers to midnight, 12:00pm refers to noon, and anyone who disagrees with or is confused by that is simply a blithering idiot.
Not at all. You're right in as much as that does seem to be the current predominant usage, but it's a relatively recent change. 40 years ago the usual usage was the other way around.
Neither has anything intrinsic in its favour. Comments about "blithering idiots" just show what a narrow outlook you have.

So if someone treats those times as if it were 1974, they wouldn't be a blithering idiot?

2014-02-14 Reply Admin

Time Pedant:
Just a minor rant: There is no 12:00 AM or 12:00 PM. There's 12:00 Noon or 12:00 Midnight.
And for those who claim "it's obvious" I can easily find examples of signs where folks use 12:00 AM to mean Noon and 12:00 PM to mean midnight.

So by "There is no 12:00 AM or 12:00 PM," you mean "It confuses me, so everyone should do it my way."

chubertdev · 2014-02-14 Reply Admin

J:
Time Pedant:
Just a minor rant: There is no 12:00 AM or 12:00 PM. There's 12:00 Noon or 12:00 Midnight.
And for those who claim "it's obvious" I can easily find examples of signs where folks use 12:00 AM to mean Noon and 12:00 PM to mean midnight.

So by "There is no 12:00 AM or 12:00 PM," you mean "It confuses me, so everyone should do it my way."

Everyone should follow my standard!

Cue the XKCD...

DCRoss · 2014-02-14 Reply Admin

Rudolf:
Ah, but the problem is, strictly speaking time goes
11:59:59am (infinite number of intermediate times) 11:59:59.99999999am (infinite number of intermediate times) Noon (infinite number of intermediate times) 12.00:00.00000001pm (infinite number of intermediate times) 12.00:01

So actual 'Noon' is an infinitesimally short time period. During the second that your clock is displaying 12:00:00, most of the time it is 'pm', not Noon.

The problem with that is that eventually you run out of either philosophers or arrows and then you're right back where you started.

2014-02-14 Reply Admin

Rudolf:
So actual 'Noon' is an infinitesimally short time period. During the second that your clock is displaying 12:00:00, most of the time it is 'pm', not Noon.

Only "most" of it?

2014-02-14 Reply Admin

anonymous:
Rudolf:
So actual 'Noon' is an infinitesimally short time period. During the second that your clock is displaying 12:00:00, most of the time it is 'pm', not Noon.
Only "most" of it?

Yep, there's an 'instant' when it's noon, so not am or pm, but just m (which, apparently, used to be used - ie 12m was noon).

But for the other 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 etc % of the time, it's pm

(But then, I suppose that since 0.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 etc = 1, then you're right, so I apologise)

herby · 2014-02-14 Reply Admin

One simple comment:

If you have the time, We've got the beer.

This completes our news update, we now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

2014-02-14 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
Also, I can only imagine the code behind the first one.
public int GetBalance() {
   try
   {
      //stuff
   }
   catch (Exception ex)
   {
      return 0;
   }
}
Don't swallow your exceptions, kids.

You'd rather they spit?

da Doctah · 2014-02-14 Reply Admin

faoileag:
Quango:
What time is it Eccles?
"it's zero o'clock"...

Right
Great Nick Kamen song: "I promised I wait for you / The zeroeth hour / I know you'll shine on through..."

Schlocky Bobby Goldsboro song: "Mickey Mouse says it's thirteen o'clock/Well, that's quite a shock/But that's my boy." (Same "boy" says "BRLFQ spells Mom and Dad". Kid needs to get into a program.)

2014-02-14 Reply Admin

24 hour clock? Phhh? Who counts in 24s?

Replace it with a 20 hour day and you've solved all kinds of problems.

And noon will be 0. Why? Because it makes sense to count from the point when the sun is directly overhead instead of starting from the middle of the night when nobody knows what fucking time it is.

2014-02-14 Reply Admin

mara:
chubertdev:
Also, I can only imagine the code behind the first one.
public int GetBalance() {
   try
   {
      //stuff
   }
   catch (Exception ex)
   {
      return 0;
   }
}
Don't swallow your exceptions, kids.
You'd rather they spit?

You'd rather they just let it just spill out all over the place? It can be very difficult to clean up.

no laughing matter · 2014-02-14 Reply Admin

I forget:
The real WTF is 24 hour time. Freaky. As they say, "what time is 13'o clock?" "Time to get a new clock!". That, and the towel-wearing commie metric system will never happen here.

Thank got we have a strong military that will protect us from that commie 24 hour time!

Wait, what was military time again?

2014-02-14 Reply Admin

Anon:
24 hour clock? Phhh? Who counts in 24s?
Replace it with a 20 hour day and you've solved all kinds of problems.

And noon will be 0. Why? Because it makes sense to count from the point when the sun is directly overhead instead of starting from the middle of the night when nobody knows what fucking time it is.

If you want to replace the current system in favor of nice units, why stop with 20? Why not just use 10 or 100? There's no advantage to making a system that's kind of like the old one.

For that matter, why not just switch to Internet Time?

chubertdev · 2014-02-14 Reply Admin

Anon:
24 hour clock? Phhh? Who counts in 24s?
Replace it with a 20 hour day and you've solved all kinds of problems.

And noon will be 0. Why? Because it makes sense to count from the point when the sun is directly overhead instead of starting from the middle of the night when nobody knows what fucking time it is.

Screw that.

....................

2014-02-14 Reply Admin

Do you have it written on a piece of paper?

tin · 2014-02-14 Reply Admin

someguy:
For that matter, why not just switch to Internet Time?

I vote if we change the time units, we also change the word "time" to something else, and keep time zones. There's no way I'm going to work at 3 splortches past 5 in the morning just so the Europeans can start work at 9TM

Yeah - we'll need to change the whole AM/PM thing to simply "TM" because a large corporation with a fruity logo will inevitably patent it after "inventing" it 6 months after everyone else starts using it.

2014-02-14 Reply Admin

Zemm:
Time Pedant:
Just a minor rant: There is no 12:00 AM or 12:00 PM. There's 12:00 Noon or 12:00 Midnight.
And for those who claim "it's obvious" I can easily find examples of signs where folks use 12:00 AM to mean Noon and 12:00 PM to mean midnight.

They are wrong.

But by rights both 12am and 12 pm should be midnight: twelve hours before the "meridian" (noon). Hurry up and get rid of 12 hour time. Then we can have pedantic arguments over "24:00".

Time rolls from "23:59" to "0:00" so there is no "24:00" to argue about.

da Doctah · 2014-02-14 Reply Admin

someguy:
For that matter, why not just switch to Internet Time?

Is that they one they use when they say things like "a year on the Internet is like seven years in the real world"?

Screw that.

2014-02-14 Reply Admin

dnm:
There is actually such a thing as 24:00; it is defined in ISO 8601:2004 (Representation of dates and times). Per § 5.2.3, midnight may be expressed either as 00:00 (first instant of a calendar day), or 24:00 (last instant of the calendar day), e.g., 14-Feb-2014 24:00 and 15-Feb-2014 00:00 refer to the same instant.

Are you sure about that? Without buying the standard and only reading some stuff third-hand, it doesn't appear to me that ISO 8601 allows the middle endian format dd-MM-yyyy hh:mm.

2014-02-14 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
Also, I can only imagine the code behind the first one.
public int GetBalance() {
   try { //stuff
   } catch (Exception ex) {
      return 0;
   }
}

I don't think ints are involved because the current balance is -0.00 pounds. That's why they're demanding a payment of 0.00 pounds. Just a few days ago we were discussing (yet again) why displays of floating point numbers are only approximations of the values stored in a computer's memory.

2014-02-14 Reply Admin

Evan:
FYI, the year 1600 one is probably related to the fact that the Windows epoch is 1/1/1600. In some ways this is rather more natural than 1970, because it falls right on a 400-year boundary, which is the length of the leap-year period.
(Of course, leap seconds presumably throw a wrench into that argument. :-))

Leap days (leap years) throw a wrench into it too. The conversion from Julian to Gregorian occurred at different times in different countries and religions.

2014-02-15 Reply Admin

DCRoss:
The problem with that is that eventually you run out of either philosophers or arrows and then you're right back where you started.

On the contrary... if you start firing your arrows at philosophers instead of tortoises, the world becomes a much simpler place...

2014-02-15 Reply Admin

Norman Diamond:
dnm:
There is actually such a thing as 24:00; it is defined in ISO 8601:2004 (Representation of dates and times). Per § 5.2.3, midnight may be expressed either as 00:00 (first instant of a calendar day), or 24:00 (last instant of the calendar day), e.g., 14-Feb-2014 24:00 and 15-Feb-2014 00:00 refer to the same instant.
Are you sure about that? Without buying the standard and only reading some stuff third-hand, it doesn't appear to me that ISO 8601 allows the middle endian format dd-MM-yyyy hh:mm.

His examples are bad - it should indeed be year/month/day order - but he's correct about 24:00 being valid. It's just a convenience thing, and a common case would be for interval measurements - a period covering 23:30 to 24:00 on the 14th is easier to deal with than one that ends on a different date.

2014-02-15 Reply Admin

J:
Time Pedant:
Just a minor rant: There is no 12:00 AM or 12:00 PM. There's 12:00 Noon or 12:00 Midnight.
And for those who claim "it's obvious" I can easily find examples of signs where folks use 12:00 AM to mean Noon and 12:00 PM to mean midnight.

So by "There is no 12:00 AM or 12:00 PM," you mean "It confuses me, so everyone should do it my way."

I'm hardly confused. I just know Latin and time-keeping. 12:00 Noon is the meridiem, or middle of the day. Ante is before, post after. So 12:00 PM means it's the middle of the day, but after.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meridiem#Confusion_at_noon_and_midnight

Now, one might argue, "it's easier" to make 12:00 Noon = 12:00 PM. And I would tend to agree. And in a time when computers and displays had limited memory and display, it perhaps made sense to be a bit sloppy.

But neither of those are true today, so why not err on the side of accuracy (I can guarantee no one in their right mind thinks 12:00 Noon is in the middle of the night. Though as I understand it, some starry-eyed people do consider it the start of the day ;-)

CAPTCHA - damnum - DAMNUM it was easy to derail this thread!

2014-02-15 Reply Admin

David should really screw with them and submit a payment of £-0.01 - they'll go nuts trying to figure out what to do with he .01 credit on his account!

2014-02-15 Reply Admin

Why do people keep posting these? Retail stores will price a unit out of the market if it doesn't have any stock as no idiot will pay that price for it. Simple. Not and error and certainly not worthy of going on here.

2014-02-15 Reply Admin

Me:
Why do people keep posting these? Retail stores will price a unit out of the market if it doesn't have any stock as no idiot will pay that price for it. Simple. Not and error and certainly not worthy of going on here.

Because making the site just say "out of stock" is clearly unpossible?

2014-02-15 Reply Admin

Zemm:
Time Pedant:
Just a minor rant: There is no 12:00 AM or 12:00 PM. There's 12:00 Noon or 12:00 Midnight.
And for those who claim "it's obvious" I can easily find examples of signs where folks use 12:00 AM to mean Noon and 12:00 PM to mean midnight.

They are wrong.

But by rights both 12am and 12 pm should be midnight: twelve hours before the "meridian" (noon). Hurry up and get rid of 12 hour time. Then we can have pedantic arguments over "24:00".

Years ago, I wrote the first system used in the US to issue photo radar traffic tickets. If the infraction was recorded at noon (to the second), it was issued as 12:00:00 M with M meaning "meridian". One second earlier was 11:59:59 AM and one second later was 12:00:01 PM.

The one time the infraction was actually recorded as being at noon, the recipient of the ticket complained that it was obviously not midnight because it was clearly daylight on the photo. That prompted a quick call from the court for me to explain the 'M'. I guess the explanation sufficed because they never asked for it to be changed.

When entering the time in the system, you could enter a time of "12:00:00 M" by just entering "M".

2014-02-15 Reply Admin

Norman Diamond:
Evan:
FYI, the year 1600 one is probably related to the fact that the Windows epoch is 1/1/1600. In some ways this is rather more natural than 1970, because it falls right on a 400-year boundary, which is the length of the leap-year period.
(Of course, leap seconds presumably throw a wrench into that argument. :-))
Leap days (leap years) throw a wrench into it too. The conversion from Julian to Gregorian occurred at different times in different countries and religions.

Years ago, I wrote a system that used a calendar with Texas Independence Day as day 0. The reason was that it had to be able to show birth dates with no ambiguity.

The selection of Texas Independence Day was made because I thought it highly unlikely that anyone receiving a photo radar ticket would have been born on or before March 2, 1836. As far as I know, my assumption was entirely correct.

2014-02-15 Reply Admin

Evan:
FYI, the year 1600 one is probably related to the fact that the Windows epoch is 1/1/1600. In some ways this is rather more natural than 1970, because it falls right on a 400-year boundary, which is the length of the leap-year period.

The Windows epoch is actually 1601-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, which is why the date shown is 1600-12-31 16:00:00. This date is typically taken to mean "never", so HyperV is saying that it never saw the machine being created...

CAPTCHA: appellatio - Tempus autem est appellatio

2014-02-15 Reply Admin

The Philadelphia transit agency's paratransit service uses times greater than 2400. At one time I had a job where my shift was 4 pm to 2 am. For some reason the service's computers couldn't cope with an itinerary spanning more than one day. So my trip home from work was entered into the system as 2630.

2014-02-16 Reply Admin

Evan:
John:
Neither has anything intrinsic in its favour.
I would dispute that, for the reason that someone said earlier. Noon as "12pm" means that the AM->PM change happens at exactly 12:00. Noon as "12am" means that it changes from AM to PM at 12:01PM. Oh wait, I mean 12:00:01PM. No, I mean 12:00:00.00000000000000000001PM. (All of which are pretty unequivocally "PM" IMO.)

Yes, but you're looking at things entirely from the point of view of one using a digital clock.

Back in the days when analogue clocks were the norm, a different view prevailed. Times were expressed relative to the nearest hour, so any time after 11:30 you'd talk about "twenty five to twelve", "twenty to twelve" etc. (I rather liked the Austrian way of saying (and my spelling may well be wrong here) "Drei viertel funf" - which means three quarters of the way around towards five o'clock, or quarter to five.)

If you are thinking about your times this way, then exactly half the times which reference 12 are a.m. and half are p.m, with the one oddity being 12 noon itself which is neither.

The logic then seemed to go that the hours of the day were:

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12 a.m. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12 p.m.

If you don't think of it in terms of a digital display (and why would you, before they commonly existed?) it would be really odd to classify your hours as:

12,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11 a.m. 12,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11 p.m.

That's not how people count!

And when digital watches first appeared they were regarded as being momentarily wrong at noon because they showed 12 p.m. when it should have said 12 a.m. It was seen as lazy programming, but justified because they were only wrong for an instant.

As I said before, neither 12 a.m. nor 12 p.m. has anything absolutely in its favour for describing 12 noon. Both are wrong, but both have been commonly used for the purpose.

Evan:
That said, yes: use "noon" or "midnight" for clarity if possible.

Indeed yes.

2014-02-16 Reply Admin

devjoe:
Sebbe:
I must say, only needing 5.1618 * 10^-12 bits per log entry is pretty good.
Ah, but they are probably "compressed" by eliminating repetitions. I know Linux logs get things like "Last message repeated 11 times." (And these numbers can get large if something is REALLY spewing into the log.) Windows probably does it too. Except somehow this computer has been generating the event once per clock cycle, per CPU core, for several years, even assuming a high-end machine.

I doubt Windoze would be that clever

2014-02-16 Reply Admin

Zoom:
12am doesn't mean 12 hours before the meridian, any more than 11am is 11 hours before. 12am is the start of the hour between 12 am and 1am. So 12:01 is am, so unless you want chaos, 12:00 is also am by definition. Ditto for pm. And that is how they are defined. So 12 midday is 12pm, 12 midnight is 12am.
Examples of people using words wrongly don't change a thing.

That's so logical, except how do we know it's 12AM to 1AM not 11PM to 12PM?

2014-02-16 Reply Admin

Don:
Time Pedant:
Just a minor rant: There is no 12:00 AM or 12:00 PM. There's 12:00 Noon or 12:00 Midnight.
And for those who claim "it's obvious" I can easily find examples of signs where folks use 12:00 AM to mean Noon and 12:00 PM to mean midnight.
Must be American.. ie, there is no way other than the small minded way we know. Yes, there is a 12am, and a 12pm; my phone, alarm clock, pc, satellite tv, and even my watch tell me so.

Oh if they all tell you that, then that's quite final, innit?

2014-02-16 Reply Admin

Sociopath:
Let's count backward...
12:03 PM 12:02 PM 12:01 PM 12:00 PM 11:59 AM <== Notice that PM->AM when 12->11? 11:58 AM 11:57 AM

Now, consider the hour 11:00-11:59 AM. All minutes of the hour share the same designation: "AM". There isn't some weird off-by-one error where 59 minutes of the hour have one designation and 1 minute of the hour has a different designation. All 60 minutes of an hour always share the same designation.

From these principles, one can easily reason:

12:00 PM = Noon 12:00 AM = Midnight

We could (and have in the past) argue this all year.....

By equally flawerd logic, I could suggest that: 1AM, 2AM....11AM, 12AM, 1PM....11PM, 12PM, 1AM implies that midnight must be PM and Noon must be AM (and yes, that would mean the whole hour from noon would still be AM).

Also, for the dicks talking AM = Hours before noon and PM = hours after I think you don't understand how a clock goes... if that were really the case, we'd have: .....3AM, 2AM, 1AM, Noon, 1PM, 2PM, 3PM...... while AM=before noon and PM=after noon, it's not a count....

2014-02-16 Reply Admin

someguy:
Anon:
24 hour clock? Phhh? Who counts in 24s?
Replace it with a 20 hour day and you've solved all kinds of problems.

And noon will be 0. Why? Because it makes sense to count from the point when the sun is directly overhead instead of starting from the middle of the night when nobody knows what fucking time it is.

If you want to replace the current system in favor of nice units, why stop with 20? Why not just use 10 or 100? There's no advantage to making a system that's kind of like the old one.

For that matter, why not just switch to Internet Time?

What's everyonbe's obsession with 10s and 100s? 36 and 180 are the numbers that simplify things....of course, as they're too large, 12 and 60 will have to do (and we neatly divide the hour into halves, and thirds and quarters and fifths and sixths with no trouble at all.....) and we divide our days reasonably nicely too - the radio announcer before can have three halves to his day and all.....

but then to make life difficult, we decide a working day is 7.5 hours - that'll fuckj things up nicely, thank you very much (yes, that's a bit TIC - I know it's an 8 with a meal break).

2014-02-16 Reply Admin

[quote user="John"][quote user="Evan"][quote user="John"]Neither has anything intrinsic in its favour.[/quote]I would dispute that, for the reason that someone said earlier. Noon as "12pm" means that the AM->PM change happens at exactly 12:00. Noon as "12am" means that it changes from AM to PM at 12:01PM. Oh wait, I mean 12:00:01PM. No, I mean 12:00:00.00000000000000000001PM. (All of which are pretty unequivocally "PM" IMO.)[/quote] Yes, but you're looking at things entirely from the point of view of one using a digital clock.

Back in the days when analogue clocks were the norm, a different view prevailed. Times were expressed relative to the nearest hour, so any time after 11:30 you'd talk about "twenty five to twelve", "twenty to twelve" etc. (I rather liked the Austrian way of saying (and my spelling may well be wrong here) "Drei viertel funf" - which means three quarters of the way around towards five o'clock, or quarter to five.)

<snip> [/quote]

Indeed yes.[/quote]I think it's not just Austria - I think that's reasonably broad in Europe (read: I know at least one other small country that's similar).

It causes me some confusion, because my partner (whose origins are mainly English) uses "half three" to mean "three-thirty", whereas my European background thinks of "half-three" as "two-thirty" (ie halfway around to three)

I also agreed with most of the rest that you wrote, but it was long.

2014-02-16 Reply Admin

ASg:
By equally flawerd logic, I could suggest that: 1AM, 2AM....11AM, 12AM, 1PM....11PM, 12PM, 1AM implies that midnight must be PM and Noon must be AM (and yes, that would mean the whole hour from noon would still be AM).

I'm not really sure how "the hour following noon is AM" and "the hour followed noon is PM" can be considered "equally flawerd"....

2014-02-16 Reply Admin

secundum:
I'm not really sure how "the hour following noon is AM" and "the hour followed noon is PM" can be considered "equally flawerd"....

s/followed/following/, obviously *sigh*

2014-02-16 Reply Admin

I had to add a schedule to a monitoring program. Each event in the schedule had to have a start date-and-time and end date-and-time, to the minute, so of course specified 24-hour time. To resolve the end-of-day issue, their specification defined that each time could be in the range 00:01 to 23:59 "to avoid ambiguity", which of course put two minutes around midnight into limbo. Instead, I proposed slightly different definitions for the start and end times. The start time could be anything from 00:00 to 23:59. The end time could be anything from 00:01 to 24:00. That resolved the whole "beginning of the day" and "end of the day" issue - and all the users appreciated the lack of ambiguity.

2014-02-16 Reply Admin

John:
chubertdev:
12:00am refers to midnight, 12:00pm refers to noon, and anyone who disagrees with or is confused by that is simply a blithering idiot.
Not at all. You're right in as much as that does seem to be the current predominant usage, but it's a relatively recent change. 40 years ago the usual usage was the other way around.

Right or wrong, that's the way the President's daughter did things back then

2014-02-16 Reply Admin

We should all switch to NewPix

http://xkcd-time.wikia.com/wiki/Newpix

da Doctah · 2014-02-17 Reply Admin

Ben Peddell:
The Windows epoch is actually 1601-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, which is why the date shown is 1600-12-31 16:00:00. This date is typically taken to mean "never", so HyperV is saying that it never saw the machine being created...

Shades of "123199" as "no expiration date" for a credit card or "forever" for file retention. I realize most of you are too young to remember the very real panic when the people in suits were finally made aware of the Y2K problem, but still....

Steve The Cynic · 2014-02-17 Reply Admin

Minka:
It causes me some confusion, because my partner (whose origins are mainly English) uses "half three" to mean "three-thirty", whereas my European background thinks of "half-three" as "two-thirty" (ie halfway around to three)

I think you need to change "European" to "Germanic" here. The French are Europeans, too, and they would (if not using the 24-hour clock) say "deux heures et demie" (two hours and a half) for 2:30. But they'd more likely say "deux heures trente" (two hours thirty) or "quatorze heures trente" (fourteen hours thirty)...

Steve The Cynic · 2014-02-17 Reply Admin

da Doctah:
Ben Peddell:
The Windows epoch is actually 1601-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, which is why the date shown is 1600-12-31 16:00:00. This date is typically taken to mean "never", so HyperV is saying that it never saw the machine being created...

Shades of "123199" as "no expiration date" for a credit card or "forever" for file retention. I realize most of you are too young to remember the very real panic when the people in suits were finally made aware of the Y2K problem, but still....

You know the first whisperings of the Y2K problem occurred in the run-up to 1970, don't you? (i.e. the year when the last scheduled payment of a new 30-year mortgage would be in 2000). Saying that banks had inadequate warning / coping strategies for Y2K during 1998/9 is just silly. They had had nearly 30 years (25 in the UK because the common mortgage length is 25 years over there) to experience that pain.

Other industries, especially non-financial ones, might be able to evade this a bit, but it's worth looking back in history, specifically to the late 1850s / early 1860s in the UK. Forms (printed in ink on minced trees, so a bit harder to update...) were issued in the 1850s by UK government agencies that had to be altered when used in 1860, because they featured things like: "Date of ${event}: 185___".

Learning from our mistakes appears to be simultaneously our most valuable ability, and the one we make the least use of.

2014-02-17 Reply Admin

The whole AM PM thing is annoying, I always forget which one is which, just use morning and evening, atleast not abbrevations, or a 24 hour clock.

2014-02-17 Reply Admin

The Japanese have 25:00 up to about 30:00 in their TV schedules, to indicate programmes that are in the small hours after midnight on a particular night. (example)

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