- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
How come there are two Error'ds for August 21 and none for August 28?
Admin
Inviting submissions for next week's Error'd
Admin
As we all know here: date handling is hard.
Admin
An email with no images means your email client is blocking remote content in emails by default. It's a common feature to prevent tracking of when you read your email.
Admin
Still better than Apple Mail in macOS ca. 11 or 12 (I don’t recall exactly), which sometimes claimed on its icon that I had −1 unread messages.
Admin
Worse than it just saying “link” is emails with lots of image outlines that have no alt attribute, which is a very common thing to see if you have images turned off. One that comes to mind is Netflix: “New on Netflix” followed by a bunch of “missing image” icons. At least I (want to believe I) got Dutch online retailer bol.com to start doing this right, by complaining that it’s unusable to the visually impaired. The next time they sent me a message about an order, it suddenly did have alt texts for the images.
Admin
No. Just no.
For starters, UK currency decimalisation happened around the boundary between the very late Sixties and the early-ish Seventies, so talking about "new pence" is mostly noise over fifty years later. ("New Pence" was removed from the coinage - in favour of "Pence" - thirty years ago.)
But also, "pence" is plural (the singular being penny(1)), so "new pence is" is grammatical hash.
(1) "penny" is one of those weird words that has two plural forms, "pennies" when talking about multiple penny coins (i.e. the coins themselves), and "pence" when talking about the amount of money involved. Yes, it's possible to have two pence without having two pennies.
Admin
The sort order thing actually is pretty common. Usually the results are sorted before they are localized and then you end up with a mess like that.
Admin
The language selection is a bit selective: It has "Türkiye" (for Turkey), but not "Polska" (for Poland). Also "Catalan (Catalan)" should probably be "Catalan (Spain)". It also misses "German (Austria)" and "German (Switzerland)" as well as "French (Switzerland)", "Italian (Switzerland)" or "Romansh (Switzerland)". At least it has "English (England)" and "English (United States)"...
Admin
It's also missing Parliamo Glasgow as an option. I'm expecting some folks to pop round any minute to gie him the malky.
Admin
I will never understand the US' insistence on miles and inches and shillings and pence and gallons. Calling them "freedom units" while they actually are (or were) the "oppressor's units". Even mourning when other countries move on to something sane.
Admin
(not so important, but "2×70g" is "140g", not "140G"). ((also on the right, it should be "380g")) (((but it's UK... for the international system of weights and measures it's hard to penetrate!)))
Admin
That’s a common mistake, certainly, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. For one thing, it doesn’t explain why the two flavours of Portuguese are separated by eleven other languages.
Admin
That’s because somebody followed Turkey’s official policy of spelling the country’s name as Türkiye in English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Turkey#Official_name
Admin
the USA introduced the US dollar 1792 and replaced the Spanish Dollar being used there for about 100 years already. So in that particular case they've been a bit faster in introducing a currency based on the decimal system (about 250 years earlier than the UK).
Admin
Is it normal for a country to dictate how another country localizes/translates/transliterates it's name? I always understood this to be a more internal matter. For an example, I don't see England nor America telling other countries to change how they say "English" in their respective languages, so it does seem strange.
Admin
*its
Admin
Kotarak, when something doesn't make sense, follow the money.
First, we don't use "shillings" or "pence." We haven't since the adoption of the Constitution.
Second, here's where the money is. At one point, we built a stretch of highway and did it all in metric. Km distance and exit signs. When people got frustrated with that little bit being metric while 10000 times more road was imperial, they looked into changing. The cost turned out to be prohibitive. Now try to flip that cost around and just turn all our roads metric. The USA is 9,833,520 km² big and has 6,586,610km of roads. The mere 102km of metric road was too expensive to downgrade to imperial. Think about the cost of making the other 6,686,508km metric.
Third, we're slowly making changes. A marketing ploy in the 70s selling liters of soda instead of quarts had a massive impact on at least one product. That's all metric now. A lot of products are sold in units of 2.24lb/1kg. Eventually we'll drop the lb. I personally cook in gram weights (flour by the cup is often a disaster) and design my 3D prints in mm. Someone just needs to try selling milk in liters instead of quarts, as the soda industry did. Then gallons might go up to 4l. Some things just take time. A lot of blood was shed in France to bring about a measurement revolution.
Admin
I'm pretty sure you're kidding, but to be pedantic, I think measurements were about #14 on the list of reasons for their revolution. (Disclaimer: I am not a historian.)
Admin
I never heard of shillings being used in the US? Is this some sort of old hold over in the New England regions that used to be colonies that never really went away?
Admin
Kidding slightly. The French Revolution was determined to overturn everything in the existing order: monarchy, church, traditions, etc. They attempted to reshape the clock (10-hour days and decimal fractions thereof), the calendar (10-day weeks, and renamed the months, which got parodied in English as Wheezy, Sneezy, Freezy, Slippy, Drippy, Nippy, Showery, Flowery, Bowery, Wheaty, Heaty, and Sweaty), and, of course, weights and measures, the only one that stuck since it was an actual improvement over the chaos that passed for measurements in France before the Revolution.
Admin
Austria had it long before the US did, they had Do laar and Do laar.
("here empty" while pointing to your left and right pockets).
Admin
I think they're referring to the practice of measuring aristocrats throats with a sharp metal rule.
Admin
Not AFAIK, but Turkey … sorry, Turks in the audience, I of course meant Türkiye, certainly tries to.
Maybe I shouldn’t make too much fun of this, though, as I’ve been trying to stop people saying “Holland” when they mean “the Netherlands” for decades …
Admin
Well, yes, obviously: the American dollar was the first decimalise currency, in modern times anyway. But what it really did was just take old conventions about money (each coin being worth a certain number of the next-lower type only) but changed all the steps to 10, so the USA basically adopted metric money. Oh, the irony :)
The reason you have a dime coin in the USA is because the system was originally set up like all existing European coinages at the time: a dollar was not 100 cents, it was ten dimes; a dime was ten cents; and a cent was ten mills. In effect this means one dollar is 100 cents, of course, but at least initially, people probably didn’t think of it this way, in the same way that British people before the 1970s didn’t usually think of a pound as being worth 240 pence, but as 20 shillings, each of those consisting of twelve pence.
Addendum 2026-09-01 05:44: “decimalise” should be “decimal”, of course.
Admin
To supercharge your singular/plural pedantry: "penny" is one of those weird words that HAVE two plural forms, not has. You're describing the class of words.
To add another thought: die/dies/dice follow a very similar pattern and the number of times I hear people say "a dice" is too high.