• LZ79LRU (unregistered)

    The real WTF here is the use of AM/PM. Coming from a country in Europe where everyone uses 24h time on a continent where everyone uses 24h time having to constantly hit the brick wall of american time is maddening.

    Like just what is 12AM? Is it midnight? Noon? Pokemon? Nobody knows.

    It's like counting: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 0b, 1b, 2b, 3b, 4b instead of just saying 1 -> 10.

  • (nodebb) in reply to LZ79LRU

    Counting in AM/PM hours is actually more like: 5b, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1b, 2b, 3b, 4b instead of saying 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

  • (nodebb) in reply to LZ79LRU

    Counting in AM/PM hours is actually more like: 5b, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1b, 2b, 3b, 4b instead of saying 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

  • (nodebb)

    (Apparently, hitting the submit button twice in quick succession results in a double post).

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to LZ79LRU

    No, it is not.

    0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 0b, 1b, 2b, 3b, 4b does not do their system justice! It should be 4, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4b, 0b, 1b, 2b, 3b instead of saying 1 -> 10. 12AM is before 1AM and 12 PM is before 1PM!

  • (nodebb)

    With 12-hour time you really just need to realise that '12' (am or pm) is actually the zero.

  • Tim (unregistered)

    What I really like about the Dreamweaver one is that whatever you can decipher from the message and whichever of the 5 buttons you decide to click, you have only 12 seconds to make up your mind. Otherwise, who knows?

  • LZ79LRU (unregistered)

    I am glad we are all in agreement that the AM/PM cycle is bad. Encoding a value that naturally happens in cycles of 24 units in base 12 makes no sense whatsoever from any standpoint.

    The whole thing is a perfect reflection of the sorry state of humanities struggle with technical debt.

    It's an obsolete system that newer made sense in the first place that is only being maintained because of backwards compatibility with legacy mechanical systems and because so much cost has been sunk into training people to work around it.

    But because so many people are trained to work around it and that cost can't possibly be allowed to have been in vain we keep using it. And than we keep training new people to work around it because it is being used. And the cycle goes on forever.

  • Peter (unregistered) in reply to LZ79LRU

    Just because YOU don't know what 12AM is doesn't mean that nobody knows. It is a well defined to be midnight.

  • dpm (unregistered)

    Easy bet it was dated 1970

    No, it was simply never set at all, so it's still zero, and unix timestamps are calculated as a number of seconds since January 1st, 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC.

  • Pag (unregistered) in reply to LZ79LRU

    At least 1am corresponds to 0100. What if the 12-hour clock had put 12 last instead of first? We would have 1 o'clock for noon and midnight, and the 24-clock would probably run 0100 to 2459 to match. I think that's worse.

  • Brian (unregistered)

    As long as we're hyping our superiority over people who are different from us, let's talk about those pansies in the Northwest who think 95 degrees is "dangerously hot". Where I'm from that's an average summer day. (Yes, I know... feel free to make fun of us in the wintertime :P )

    Unless you're talking about 95 C, then you've got a problem.

  • Joe (unregistered)

    As far as AM/PM, my only real complaint is that it can lead to ambiguity in verbal or written communication, if AM/PM or morning/afternoon/evening isn't specified. I assume the Dreamweaver issue is just that someone is doing a text comparison on what should (behind the scenes) be a numeric comparison.

  • (nodebb)

    I can cope with am/pm times, but I do wish people didn't use 12am or 12pm, as both are ambiguous. The correct terms are midnight and noon - or the other way around, who knows what the original posting meant. But in general I agree that the 24 hour clock is so much better. When visiting the USA I always get a surprise when seeing a bus or rail timetable set out with 12-hour clock times, and have to double-check that I have the right half of the day. In all of Europe, and even here in the UK where we are so slavish in copying the USA in so many things like Imperial units, at least we use the 24-hour clock for everything that is important.

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to Clive Page

    The UK copies USA use of Imperial units? :-)

  • LZ79LRU (unregistered) in reply to Brian

    Personally I like to keep temperatures in the 288 - 298K range. Anything much outside that is mildly inconvenient because you either have to wear long sleeves or use the AC.

    Oh, and while we are at weather what is up with snow days? You know, that thing american cartoons peddle that when ever there is a bit of snow everyone gets a day off. Like, the very notion is just preposterous. Where I am from unless you live on a mountain or something where the snow plow don't go weather is absolutely no excuse to miss school / work.

    So what if the roads are blocked? So what if your eyeballs are liable to freeze off on the way there? Just man up, dress up and start your commute a hour or two early and go to school / work like the rest of everyone.

  • Jamieth (unregistered) in reply to Pag

    In Japan, TV program runs 04:00 ... 27:59. Nothing wrong with that.

  • OldCoder (unregistered) in reply to Clive Page

    "...copying the USA in so many things like Imperial units..."

    Ahem. You do know where those 'Imperial' units came from, don't you? Clue: it wasn't Coruscant.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Clive Page

    in copying the USA in so many things like Imperial units

    Wasn't it the other way around? Imperial units originated from the UK.

  • Barry Margolin (github) in reply to Brian

    95 Kelvin is also dangerously hot if you need a superconducting magnet.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Jonathan Lydall

    It seems that some people have trouble discerning the difference between reading a label, like "12" and the real value that it represents, like 0, respectively.

    So why visually, the labeling is "12", "1", "2", the real values are 0, 1, 2, respectively.

    With the 24 hour clock, the labeling and real values usually the same, where midnight until hour 1 is hour 0.

    Addendum 2023-05-12 14:00: Typo: s/^So why/So while/

  • Sou Eu (unregistered) in reply to LZ79LRU

    Snow day means different things in different parts of the country. In my city, if we get more than 15 cm snow overnight, the plows probably won't have the roads clear in time for school. In the past this would mean a break from school (and remove a day from spring break). Now, it could mean schools starting two hours later than normal OR do online learning. Since I'm a software engineer, my company encourages us to work from home if snow makes the roads too dangerous.

  • Randal L. Schwartz (github)

    I remember the delight with discovering that "(hours + 11) % 12 + 1" just works as needed to map hours to the time display digits.

  • Officer Johnny Holzkopf (unregistered) in reply to gordonfish

    While the typical clock's label is "12" at the top, it represents both midnight (0 o'clock) and noon (12 o'clock). For example, 12:10 (read "zwölf Uhr zehn") refers to 10 minutes after noon, while 0:10 (read "null Uhr zehn") refers to 10 minutes after midnight, respectively. With sufficient context around statements, "meet at twelve" can refer to midnight or noon, but providing 24 hour decimal notation, no misunderstanding is possible, because 0 and 12 are distinct points on a 24-hour time line. The fact that we represent those as a "12-hour time circle" (mapping of "is a" represented as "is shown as") doesn't actually matter. That's why around the world (except certain region) it's perfectly fine for a person to look at a 12-hour watch face and tell you "It's 15:45 right now." Nobody misunderstands. This also provides one single point for overflow: 23:59 - 00:00 (no "AM overflow" and "PM overflow" to be handled separately).

  • Barker Morth (unregistered)

    That 1970 date on AT&T's site is very suitable considering it existed back then and invented UNIX.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Clive Page

    When visiting the USA I always get a surprise when seeing a bus or rail timetable set out with 12-hour clock times, and have to double-check that I have the right half of the day.

    Even worse is when they don’t even put “am” or “pm” with the times but indicate which is which by formatting, as I once found out the hard way when a timetable had seemingly random times printed in boldface and others in normal type. Very tiny print below it said that “bold times are pm” or something to that effect, but I only noticed that when the time I thought the thing I was waiting for to happen, failed to. At least I also discovered I had 12 hours to spare rather than being 12 hours late.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Pag

    Well, just you wait. The "permanent summer time" idiots are working on it.

  • Graculus (unregistered)

    "This clock goes upto 12"

  • (nodebb) in reply to Joe

    Well the UK has very nearly metricated twice, once near the end of the nineteenth century when metric measure were made legal, but with an undefined period of parallel use. In fact parallel use extended for another 100 years or more. Nowadays nearly everything is metric here ecept for pints of beer and distances on roads. I think that would have changed, as it has in Canada and the Irish Republic, had it not been for all the road vehicles made by General Motors and other US headquarters companies which built cars with speedometers in miles. So maybe we haven't copied the US practice, but you sure have held back progress here.

  • Neveranull (unregistered) in reply to Brian

    Where I grew up in Southern California, people were shivering and complaining when the daytime temperature fell to a chilling 45 degrees Fahrenheit.

  • Andrew Klossner (unregistered)

    In David's "Severe Weather Alert", the "(undefined)" fields aren't days of the week. They're time zones. Have you set a time zone on this device?

  • LZ79LRU (unregistered) in reply to Sou Eu

    That's what I am talking about. 15cm of snow is something you can easily walk through. So over here they would simply expect me to do just that. Walk. And if that means school starts on time but I had to start walking a couple hours early sucks to be me. Same is true for rural areas where children are expected to walk a hour or more to school anyway. So adding another hour in freezing snow or something like that is not even considered a problem.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Anonymous

    This is painful.

    0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 0b, 1b, 2b, 3b, 4b does not do their system justice! It should be 4, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4b, 0b, 1b, 2b, 3b instead of saying 1 -> 10. 12AM is before 1AM and 12 PM is before 1PM!

    Nope. There's no zero in am/pm clock time. It's also continuous. It's a continuous number line 24 units long but the range is open at the top end. Mathematically it's [0,24). The unit graduations would sensibly be labelled 0 to 24 but with the understanding that the 24 is in the following day. However, in am/pm time, the labels go 12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. This is the same as having a 10 long number line where the graduations are labelled 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4.

    I do wish people didn't use 12am or 12pm, as both are ambiguous.

    No they are not. 12am is midnight and 12pm is noon. This is the sensible way to do it because any time, even a nano second after midday is pm. Similarly any time even a nano second after midnight is am. It seems sensible to keep the exact instant suffix the same as all the other times in the next hour.

  • (nodebb)

    Easy bet it was dated 1970

    It's not really a bet at all. You can calculate the year it was allegedly posted by subtracting 53 from the current year. 2023 - 53 = 1970.

    I think, what you meant to say is "easy bet it was dated 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z" since that is the zero of Unix time.

  • (nodebb)

    A 12-hour clock makes sense! You can count hours on your fingers since we obviously have 12 of them!

  • fintech guy (unregistered) in reply to nerd4sale

    Frist to spot the AI!

  • sparkle (unregistered)

    The last one is a bug (?) where Google is now showing the whole quota for an enterprise domain, instead of the quota for an individual user. I guess that makes it make slightly more sense but not really :)

  • (nodebb) in reply to jeremypnet

    Mathematically it's [0,24).

    ITYM (0,24] ?

    12am is midnight and 12pm is noon. This is the sensible way to do it because any time, even a nano second after midday is pm.

    Agreed. If your clock says "12:00" then that means the afternoon (or the new day) has already started.

    Addendum 2023-05-17 09:53: Oh never mind, [0,24) is right.

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