The Next Three Days are the x86 Days

Pinky wrote in to note that "Today, tomorrow and the next day are the only days we'll get dates like this: 2/8/6 3/8/6 4/8/6 like the x86 computers :-)" And yes folks, in the August news cycle vortex, even this strikes my fancy. In recent years we've seen numerical giants like 3/1/4, 6/6/6 and 1/2/3, but now really, what do any of us have to look forward to? Is our future dull and meaningless without cool numbers in dates? Oh the humanity of it all ...

Comments

what about the lucky sevens?

[metasecure]

In Canada, where m/d/y is more common we already experienced this on February 8, March 8 and April 8, respectively.

Life is good living three steps ahead of the taco.

Personally I look forward to the lucky 7's, 7/7/7, a day where CmdrTaco and I can celebrate our slot machine winnings together.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Murodese]

But would you rather a three-day celebratory holiday, or three one-dayers? :o

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[metasecure]

I don't think celebrating either will get me any action so...a moot point indeed =)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Moby Cock]

I've lived in Canada my entire life, and everyone I know uses dd/mm/yy.

In fact, I recall being taught to do it that way in grade 2.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cayenne8]

" I've lived in Canada my entire life, and everyone I know uses dd/mm/yy."

Ok...guess it is early...I was wondering what the hell planet these posts were from...

I looked at the date on my calendar and on my computer desktop, and it said 08/02/06...cobwebs cleared and I remembered that in other places, they switch the day and month around.

Just curious...how many places do it d/m/y vs. m/d/y. I'd never seen the d/m/y thing till a couple of years ago....

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Red Alastor]

Just curious...how many places do it d/m/y vs. m/d/y. I'd never seen the d/m/y thing till a couple of years ago....

Every place that speaks French use d/m/y. It's because it's the way it's naturally spoken in French : 2 août 2006.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[BitterOak]

I was born, raised, and live in Canada, and I use mm/dd/yy. I have lived in the States, and most people there also use mm/dd/yy. Is dd/mm/yy a European thing? I thought they use yyyy-mm-dd. Who uses dd/mm/yy?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[middlemen]

just curious...how many places do it d/m/y vs. m/d/y. I'd never seen the d/m/y thing till a couple of years ago....
Most places follow dd/mm/yy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DD-MM-YY>. Only places with USA influence follow the mm/dd/yy format. India for example uses dd/mm/yy. And yes, if you did not know this until a couple of years ago, i am shocked. In India, they taught us this when we were kids in school.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Cyberax]

Well, d/m/y is used in:
- Lots of European countries.
- Russia
- Japan
- China
- South Korea ...

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[metasecure]

I will cede the point that my bank cheques are dd/mm/yy. however, I do think it's entirely retarded.

Personally I support the yyyy-mm-dd because /no one/ in the world uses yyyy-dd-mm so it is impossible to get confused with this method.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is said that the last Harry Potter book will be released on 7/7/7. What could be more important?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[yfkar]

Dd/mm/yy seems to be far more common than mm/dd/yy.

Here's a list of used date formats in various countries. Looks like Canada has them all. ;)

m/d/y (month, day, year) is used by:

* Canada (Although most official documents use the y-m-d format, the m/d/y format is also understood due to influences from the United States.)
* Federated States of Micronesia
* Palau
* Philippines (formerly d/m/y. May still be found in certain contexts)
* United States (Although Independence Day is often referred to as "the Fourth of July.")

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[clickclickdrone]

>Just curious...how many places do it d/m/y vs. m/d/y. I'd never seen
>the d/m/y thing till a couple of years ago....
Me too except in my case I'd never heard of m/d/y until a few years ago.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cHALiTO]

Add to the list Argentina, and I guess also a fair number of other latin american countries ...

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Glen Ponda]

...cobwebs cleared and I remembered that in other places, they switch the day and month around.

No, we don't have to switch them. They're already like that.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[SamSim]

This is like the famous "interesting numbers" problem. If you stretch your interest far enough, you can't get away from them at this time of the millennium. Personally, I was a big fan of 8:02pm on February 20th, 2002 (20:02 20/02/2002), which is a pattern which won't repeat for another 106 years - and after that, not until CE 3003. Rarity is a good thing.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[rastan_saga]

Australia / New Zealand uses dd/mm/yy. Always got me, why America and other countries use mm/dd/yy. Why do you need to know the month first everytime you look at the date. Isn't the day of the month the most important thing you look at first, so it's written to the left first. Just seems logical, the day / month / then the year. It's in order :)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[rahrens]

I imagine it's like the poster said above - in english, when you speak the date, you say, "It's August the 2nd, 2006." Thus, compressing it into a shorter format, you write 8/2/2006, or 8/2/06. I rarely see the year shortened to a single digit, tho... unless you're trying to get a story posted on /. ;)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[carnifex0]

Maybe we should all use the "Official" ISO date format - YYYY-MM-DD and avoid confusion. I have a system that I administer that uses the ISO dates, and every single one of my users hates it.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[wootest]

I know most people here (Sweden) who *must* use xx/xx/xx use dd/mm/yy.

I don't see why we can't all just switch to YYYY-mm-dd. You can't confuse it with any existing format. It's logical (they all come in order). It keeps mm/dd/yy's only benefit (as far as I'm concerned; I don't see keeping the year at the back a benefit) by letting months come ahead of days. With AM/PM vs 24 hour, at least there's a valid argument in that people think "five in the afternoon", not "seventeen"; with YYYY-mm-dd there's no such factor.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[ben there...]

I prefer:

2 Aug 2006
2006 Aug 2
2006-08-02

The first 2 separate the numbers with letters, making it easier to read, and it's entirely unambiguous, at least to those who can read English.

The last is better for sorting lists, and makes the most sense when you're dealing with a set of information that spans several years, making the year the most prominent.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[znode]

Where'd you get that from? Most oriental nations, including and in particular Japan, China, and South Korea, uses Y-M-D.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[FST777]

777. My day, hear me? MINE!

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[amliebsch]

That's what the military and most "with it" government organization use. I've also adopted myself because (a) it is completely unambiguous and (b) I'm an asshole.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[kimba]

I am a native English speaker and have said "It's the 2nd of August, 2006" all my life. I don't think the English language has driven the order of the notation, rather the other way around. America is just odd.

I say it is half past 12, I don't say the time is "30:12" though.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[1u3hr]

Just curious...how many places do it d/m/y vs. m/d/y. I'd never seen the d/m/y thing till a couple of years ago....

Basically, everywhere except the USA. You don't get out much do you?

If you do plan on travelling, also note that in the rest of the world we use degrees Celsius for temperature -- 30 degrees is hot, not cold, so pack appropriately. But most surprising of all, not everyone in the world speaks English!

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[sholden]

Every place that speaks English does too, except the USA (and a handful of Pacific nations who caught it from the US).

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[mjpaci]

It sorts nicely in Excel when people enter dates as text...

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[kamapuaa]

China uses MM-DD - 8 moons 2 suns. I think the DD-MM is mostly used in Western Europe and India?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[grub]

YYYY-MM-DD is the best. I keep logs, pics, whatever named like that so a date sort by name is simple.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[teh kurisu]

In UK English, "It's the second of August" is common. I'm guessing this form is less used in America because American English has more of a tendency to drop prepositions (ie. the 'of'). For example, "he went Tuesday" rather than "he went on Tuesday", or "the kids are out back" rather than "the kids are out the back".

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Vlijmen Fileer]

Actually, yyyy-mm-dd is the /relaxed/ ISO format. The official ISO format is yyyymmdd.

The huge benefit of both formats over any other is of course the ease when sorting files that have dates in their names.

And on a sidenote, another improvement using yyyy insted of yy is that it prevent another month of useless extra work when the next millenium turn arrives ;-)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[mutube]

DD/MM/YYYY also makes it easier to speak the date in abbreviated format.

"5th of the 4th, 2005"

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[operagost]

Er... "the" is the definite article, not a preposition. I think you're missing "in".

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Ohreally_factor]

Just be sure you don't do anything like divide by zero on Friday the Penteemth. It's bad luck.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[operagost]

Apparently, most people in other countries are sarcastic pricks as well.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Raphael]

Description of the international standard date and time notation (ISO 8601):
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

Although I have been taught to use dd/mm/yyyy, I tend to use the standard yyyy-mm-dd whenever possible, especially in discussions with people coming from other countries because this standard date format is less ambiguous.

See also the List of date and time formats used in various countries. You will see that many countries use dd/mm/yyyy, while USA, Canada and parts of Asia use mm-dd-yyyy and several countries from Eastern Europe have adopted the ISO standard yyyy-mm-dd.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Ash Vince]

It just another case of the yankees not wanting to follow any sort of international standard.

Incidentally most of the rest of the world uses dd/mm/yy because it is european calendar system and everywhere in europe uses that format, so where the US got mm/dd/yy from in the firstplace is another question I would like to know the answer to.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[1u3hr]

I imagine it's like the poster said above - in english, when you speak the date, you say, "It's August the 2nd, 2006." Thus, compressing it into a shorter format, you write 8/2/2006, or 8/2/06.

You say "twenty past three" but write "3:20".

Anyway, the rest of the world is acutely aware of the US style, as it's embedded in so much software, and sometimes impossible to change.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[stunt_penguin]

Yea, in the UK and Ireland we use dd/mm/yyyy ; we say 'The twenty-ninth of july two-thousand and six' more than we say something like 'July twenty-ninth two thousand and six (unless we're talking along to the Daily Show intro.

Apart from that, doing it dd/mm/yy make logical sense, as the values are ordered in order of significance/magnitude like a numerical system (albeit in reverse order).

Also it makes ordering dates in a list via computer easy, as they'll naturally order themselves chronologically in a list if the list is sorted alphanumerically.

Crazy Americans ;)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Articuno]

In soviet russia, d/m/y uses YOU !!!

(sorry, i couldn't resist :-) )

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[MadJo]

I'm looking forward to 13 March 2007 :) (Go ahead, write it down in the dmy fashion) :)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[shinnie]

No kidding. This guy must of lived to close to the US border and was using their format. Remember the first time I crossed the border to legally buy beer in the US. The clerk looked at my ID and asked how I could have been born in the 13th month. I told her Canada has 13 months in its year as we have an extra month of winter :)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Vlijmen Fileer]

Actually, yyyy-mm-dd is the /relaxed/ ISO format. The official ISO format is yyyymmdd.

The huge benefit of both formats over any other is of course the ease when sorting files that have dates in their names.

And on a sidenote, another improvement using yyyy insted of yy is that it prevents another period of months of useless extra work when the next millennium turn arrives ;-)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cayenne8]

"I am a native English speaker and have said "It's the 2nd of August, 2006" all my life."

Ok, a native English speaker from where?

All my life, in my surroundings, if someone asked you the date something was going to happen, you'd say "August 22nd". Although you might occasionally hear date then month in conversaton, it is far from the norm where I've grown up, in the South and Southwestern parts of the US.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Tower]

The other, less ambiguous option is something along the lines of 02 August 2006. I know of a couple of friends who always dated things that way... come to think of it, they both had experience in the US Navy. In any case, using the month name and four digit year clears up some of that trouble.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[theguyfromsaturn]

most of the people I know use yy/mm/dd (in Canada still)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[teh kurisu]

'The' appears in both forms, I was referring to 'of'. And I'm not sure how the word 'in' can refer to outside.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Tower]

>I am a native English speaker and have said "It's the 2nd of August, 2006" all my life.

Well, then... congratulations - For the first time in your life, you are correct!

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Chas]

I'd rather have three one-dayers.

Because, done properly, I could stretch each of those into nearly two days of off-work time apiece. An old Army leave-maximization trick.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cayenne8]

I've wondered if this is because in other languages...they often put the description after the object. For example, in English you'd day 'red car'. In Spanish, it would be 'Coche rojo'...which is basically 'car red'.

I wonder if this might be similar to how we speak the dates differently. 22nd is the day...and the month is synonymous to the descriptive part of the date?

Sounds strange, but, was just trying to figure out why the difference. In Europe, the English speaking nations are close together with nations with other languages...that structure their languages as mentioned above, whereas in the US, well, we're pretty much to ourselves, and wouldn't have the influence of foreign languages...

Of course...that situation is starting to change...si

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Tweekster]

The month then day format is much nicer though. Every try to sort a list of files that are similar but have a different date. Good luck sorting them nicely by that date.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[araemo]

"The month then day format is much nicer though. Every try to sort a list of files that are similar but have a different date. Good luck sorting them nicely by that date."

Actually, neither m-d-y nor d-m-y are good for that. y-m-d is the simplest way to sort by date when you are naming files, that way they're all sorted by year first, then month, then day. d-m-y makes logical sense, but in america most people say/see august 2nd, 2006... so we get confused when we see 2-8-06. ;P

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[rahrens]

Ok, I'll post a correction - I did not mean to imply that any OTHER english speaking countries do it our way - I confess, I'm an ugly American, and often forget to add the proper qualifiers to my statements.

My apologies to the UK, Australia, and anybody else I may have inadvertently insulted.

But we do say it the way we write it, at least in the parts of the US I've ever lived in.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[jcrash]

Half past 12? Are ya daft? It's twelve thirty!

Everyone in the US says "August 2nd" or "December 31st."

If you get cut off, hearing "August..." is a lot more informative than "the second of..."

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cayenne8]

"Maybe we should all use the "Official" ISO date format - YYYY-MM-DD and avoid confusion. I have a system that I administer...that uses the ISO dates, and every single one of my users hates it."

Well, when I write scripts to put logfiles out, I'll often use that for sorting purposes, but, that's just for computer stuff. In conversation, or things I'll be doing, I'd rather use notation that is how I speak, mm/dd.

Now, one thing that does kill me, I know it is useful, but, I hate is...military time. I cannot think quickly in terms of a 24 hour clock...if someone says 21:23...I have to stop and thing to subtract 12...etc.

I much prefer 12 hour clock notation....with am or pm.

I guess everyone has their own pet peeve...

:-)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[IngramJames]

Here's a list of used date formats in various countries. Looks like Canada has them all. ;)

And it looks like those blaming the USA for the nefarious spread of m/d/y have been shown to be wrong.

Quite obviously, it's the blasted Federated States of Micronesia again, exerting their subtle yet vast power.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cayenne8]

"Good luck sorting them nicely by that date."

Well, it is one thing to do things on a computer...for example inserting dates into logfile titles. I often do that in yyyy-mm-dd. But, that isn't how I think...or use dates in conversation. Like I mentioned in another post, I HATE military 24 hour clock time...but, it is useful in sorting on a computer, but, I can't deal with it in normal human activities and conversation.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[ReplicantSD1]

All my life, in my surroundings, if someone asked you the date something was going to happen, you'd say "August 22nd"

Wow, what a boring place. What did you guys do for the other 364 days?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Falkentyne]

WTF part of the USA do these people live in where they DONT do the MM/DD/YY scheme? I've been doing it all my life and I'm in California.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cayenne8]

"You say "twenty past three" but write "3:20"."

Nope, in the US, if you asked what time it was, you would most likely get the answer "three-twenty".

Occasionally you'll get it the way you mentioned (twenty after three), but, most of the time I hear it hour-minute.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except I've never seen the date written like 2/8/6. I've always written the year in two digits, 2/8/06.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[ultrafunkula]

I agree with yyyy-mm-dd for naming files. In most of the world it's more common to say "the second of August 2006", starting with the smallest unit first, than "August 2nd 2006". "August 2nd" would be like saying a price is "99 cents and 1 dollar" in my mind...

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Bryansix]

a) It is not completely unambiguous (you can still switch the month and day positions) b) You are an asshole.

The prefered way that the military uses (you will see this on official orders etc.) is DDMMMYYYY as in 02AUG2006. Each month has a three letter truncation like JAN, FEB, MAR, etc. Any english speaking country will understand this very easily.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[webrunner]

Actually you need to do YYYYMMDD for it to sort alphanumerically (as you said, ddmmyyyy is in reverse order of magnitude whereas numbers are not)

DDMMYYYY would sort by tens of days first, then single days, then tens of months, etc, so it'd go like:

01122006
02061999
03112007

Etc.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

just think of the children born on 7/7/7 !

my birthday is 8/8/81 and that was bad enough!

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Chosen Reject]

Why does doing something backwards make logical sense? It should be done yy/mm/dd. That's how I do anything on that needs to be organized by date. I have lots of folders and files named that way, journal entries, newsletters, image folders, etc. Actually they are yyyy_mm_dd but the idea is the same.

The same is true for time. We don't write 41:07, we write 7:41. So the same should be true of dates.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[jandersen]

It is also, incidentally, the system they use in China, which means it must be evil...

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[DarkSarin]

Here's your sign....

(if you don't get it, hit google)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[1u3hr]

If you knew how much hassle I've had with American software that always defaults to MDY dates, and somtimes can't be changed, you might excuse my getting a dig in. If Americans spent a few minutes to consider that their way isn't the only way of doing things, a lot of problems could be avoided, and I'm not just talking about software.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cayenne8]

"Basically, everywhere except the USA. You don't get out much do you?"

I've travelled some outside the US, but, for the most part, I'd dare say most Americans don't travel outside the US that often. Heck, many people here don't even see that much of the US, it is such a large country, as opposed to Europe where you can get in a car, and drive across 3-4 countries in a day. Hell, it takes nearly 3 days to drive across Texas alone.

The US started off isolated, and that's probably a reason our measurments and notations developed the way they are now, and being ingrained for some many years, not easy to change, and really...noone here has really seen a compelling reason to change.

I know I'd have a hard time about it...I can easily know how to dress if I hear the temp. outside is 33F or 101F. I'd have no clue what to do with 30C. It has to do with what you were raised with...and being such a large country, with a population that all thinks in the current terms, it would cause a good bit of turmoil to just stop and change all the units of measurement one day...and really...for what?

I'd think the harm caused by it would offset any good from it not to be realized for decades to come.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[1u3hr]

Nope, in the US, if you asked what time it was, you would most likely get the answer "three-twenty".

Okay, how about "half/quarter past three". Not to mention "quarter to four"?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[isorox]

'The' appears in both forms, I was referring to 'of'. And I'm not sure how the word 'in' can refer to outside.

Welcome to the world of America. When most people read "the kids are out [the] back", they immediatly think of kids playing in the back garden. In naughties America, you're more likely to hear "The kids are in [the] back [of the car]", as there are terrorists outside the confines of the armoured vehicle.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Date then month seems mostly confined to "The Fourth of July" in any other context it seems out of place. When writing out dates in full though I prefer to write "2 August 2006". I can't say why.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Chosen Reject]

You may be a native English speaker, but from where? In the US I rarely hear people say 2nd of August. I hear August 2nd. A few posts up someone said that in England it is said the way you say it. Thus, English influenced places do it differently than US influenced places.

And concerning the 12 o'clock hour...the 12 hour clock needs some fixing. I am constantly getting my AMs and PMs mixed up. I really wish people would ignore AM and PM at noon and midnight. I have made it a habit to say noon thirty or midnight twenty-five or whatever to make sure people know what I am talking about.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[sasdrtx]

Well, I'm surprised Canada does it that way. I thought m/d/y was uniquely American.

As for the lucky 7s, that happens to be Robert A. Heinlein's 100th birthday. A good cause for celebration. Even though he's reportedly dead.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Doggan]

dd/mm/yy makes logical sense: days make months, and months make years.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Chosen Reject]

MM/DD/YYYY is also easy to say.

4th 5th, 2005

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cayenne8]

"If Americans spent a few minutes to consider that their way isn't the only way of doing things, a lot of problems could be avoided, and I'm not just talking about software."

What if you turned this around:

If Europeans spend a few minutes to consider that their way isn't the only way of doing things, a lot of problems could be avoided, and I'm not just talking about software.

What makes your way any better than ours? There's differences....we have to deal with how others do things differently in the world....I mean it is like you're complaining that some other countries have different spoken languages. Damned China, if they all spoke Spanish like the rest of us, we'd have a whole lot less problems.

Just because some do things differently doesn't make it wrong and your method correct.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Vlad2.0]

In my experience (and I suppose, opinion), "twenty past three" is a colloquialism. The vast, vast, vast majority of people will simply say "three twenty," certainly anyone my age (20s). With the exception of things like "half after" and other relativisms (a quarter till, etc), which are still fairly unused, the hour-minute format of speech dominates.

I think it's largely a question of what's implied. When I ask someone the date, for example, it's usually said "the second" or "the fifteenth," with the month being implied. For proper dates it seems that "the fourth of July" and "the fifth of November" are the dominant format. Because I learned MM/DD/YY format in school, I was immensely confused when I first say the date written DD/MM/YY.

In any case, since using Linux/UNIX, I almost exclusively use YYYY/MM/DD - `date +%F`. Way easier for sorting files.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[tha_mink]

This make me miss binary day. I had a friend who used to call every "binary day" and be a well-wisher.

01/01/01
01/10/01
Etc. You get the idea.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I've never heard a US-American say "9/11".

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cuyler]

China, which makes up a good porition of the world, always does dates (and most things) in the order of more general to more specific. So for a date it's always year, month and then day.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Burgundy Advocate]

It also works perfectly when sorting logs that start out with a date stamp. And yes, this is imporant to me... and every single app I write uses this format.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cayenne8]

"Okay, how about "half/quarter past three". Not to mention "quarter to four"?"

You will occasionally get half past three, or quarter till four...I think it depends on if the person you are asking is wearing a digital or analog watch.

I think it would be more common to get an answer of three-thirty, but, if you were to get the minutes then hour answer, it would almost only be on times past :30.

If I had to think about it...I'd still say I'd pretty much always give my answer as hour:minute....four-forty.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[wagemonkey]

If you get cut off, hearing "August..." is a lot more informative than "the second of..."

Not really. "The 2nd of" narrows possible dates in a year to 12, August only narrows it down to 31 possible dates. "The 2nd of" is 12/31 less ambiguous than "August" :-)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[billdar]

I've been brainwashed in california to use ddMMMyy (eg. 02Aug06) for all my dates. They do that in the international Pharmacuetical/BioTech industry to cut down on this exact confusion.

Now whenever I see or have to write "Normal" dates I can't ever remember which goes first, month or day.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Jaseoldboss]

I'm sure I've heard US Americans say "The fourth of July". Doensn't Will Smith say it that way at the end of Independance Day or have I imagined it? I'll have to check later...

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Three-thirty is more common than half past three, in my experience. Quarter past and quarter to are both common, though.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[james_orr]

Plus, it's real easy to sort in that format.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[jandrese]

The US uses mm/dd/yy because that's the way it's spoken in English: August Second Two Thousand Six. Saying "The Second Day of August Two Thousand Six" sounds clunky to American ears.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[yanos]

But most surprising of all, not everyone in the world speaks English!

Completly OT, but I happen to be quite bored these past couple of days. In a moment of pure curiosity, beign more of an atheist and all, I decided to open the bible. I was reading the preface, where the most popular passage of the bible is translated in 28 languages. What surprised me is that it goes on to say that with all those translations, you still "only" reach 3/4 of the earth's population. Can you think of 28 languages, on the top of your head???

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Mr. Shiny And New]

If you're going to go to the trouble of writing the year first, why on earth would you transpose the month and day? I don't think I've ever heard of anyone, anywhere, using yyyy-dd-mm... that is truly nonsensical, at least for any date format I've ever heard. It doesn't sort, it's not in numerical order, it's not convenient to speak, and nobody actually pronounces dates that way that I know of. I think it's pretty safe to assume that if you see a date in the 4digits-2digits-2digits then you can infer yyyy-mm-dd.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Why do you need to know the month first everytime you look at the date. Isn't the day of the month the most important thing you look at first, so it's written to the left first. Just seems logical, the day / month / then the year."

We say the date out loud like this: August Second, Two Thousand and Six. Month, Day, Year. (In Spanish, for example, they Two of August, 2006.) Some places go for numerical logic, some places go by how it's actually said out loud. Logic in this case is a matter of perspective. Do we favor computer logic or intuitive logic? Depends on the situation, which probably explains why some countries are different from others.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[rolfwind]

Most European countries us dd/mm/yyyy. It makes more sense as it is going from the smallest unit to the largest. For instance, we use hh:mm:ss for time, it would be nonsensical to use mm:hh:ss though some "Englishisms" work this way (quarter after six instead of six - fifteen).

Us Americans are peculiar though anyway:) We still burden ourselves with the standard system despite the much more sensible metric system for one.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

The UK uses dd/mm/yyyy. It's because of the way we say it, "Second of August 2006".

Other countries say "August second 2006" and therefore use mm/dd/yyyy.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cylcyl]

Interesting how the your post indicating that you're an asshole was modded as informative. I guess a lot of people didn't know ;)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[rtyall]

I understand the irony of me replying with this, but shouldn't we just ignore this /. article? I know it's a slow news day, but come on, what's next? A post as soon as the time reaches 13:37?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Americans spent a few minutes to consider that their way isn't the only way of doing things, a lot of problems could be avoided, and I'm not just talking about software.


I think you've misinterpreted the U.S. We realize there are many other ways of doing things and that our way is the best.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[WedgeTalon]

Only two days? C'mon, you just move the holiday to a Monday so it's a three day holiday. Then you'll want to leave on Friday to take full advantage of it. But everyone's leaving on Friday and everyone wants to beat the traffic, so leave on Thursday. And if you're leaving on Thursday, why not Wednesday night? And you can't come back on Monday, that's still a holiday. And you can't come back on Tuesday, cause everybody comes back on Tuesday, so you outsmart everybody and you come back on Wednesday. So now you're leaving on Wednesday and coming back on Wednesday and suddenly a one day holiday is now a week! (Apologies to Scott Adams)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[WelcomeToTheFallout]

And if they're in string format, you don't have to cast them to compare them. '2006-02-08' > '2005-08-02' (YYYY-MM-DD) returns true as either a string or a date. Can't say the same for '02-08-2006' > '08-02-2005' (MM-DD-YYYY)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[rramdin]

Just wait until 2010!

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[(A)*(B)!0_-]

"Actually, neither m-d-y nor d-m-y are good for that. y-m-d is the simplest way to sort by date when you are naming files, that way they're all sorted by year first, then month, then day."

You're correct but your explanation doesn't come even remotely close to being a reasonable argument. You stated that yyyy-mm-dd is the most simple because...wait for it....it is then sorted by year, then by month, then by date. THis isn't a reason as to why that is simpler, it is merely a description of the mechanism of sorting the described structure.

You can make just as invalid argument for mm-dd-yyyy - "that way they're all sorted by month first, then day, then year."
Your logic needs some work.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[lbmouse]

How do you successfully sort the dd/mm/yy format? yyyy-mm-dd is much more logical.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[noamsml]

Isreal uses mm/dd/yyyy

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[noamsml]

nononono! stupid me! I meant dd/mm/yyyy!

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Arcaeris]

"Just because some do things differently doesn't make it wrong and your method correct."

He is not saying that there is anything wrong with our US system, but that in programs he uses from Americans, that there is no way to [b]change[/b] the variable to his system.. This is a jab at American arrogance.

If every European programmer allowed shifting from the European date format to the US one in their programs, then he's be right.

What is wrong with allowing the date format to be displayed differently, or expecting programmers to put that in for non-US users? Why is that something that many US programmers do not do?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[name*censored*]

Nah, its just because 'mericans like to be different.. or cbf spelling out words in full? See: colo(u)r, thr(o)u(gh), neighbo(u)r, program(me), etc

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[rainman_bc]

Actually, there's no accounting for taste.

d/m/y -> smallest unit to largest unit.
m/d/y -> reads from left to right as you would read a date. Februay 1, 2006 = m/d/y.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[ros0709]

Japan does.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[ElecCham]

Oh, but What about those of us who like yyyy-mm-dd? None of the others sort properly...

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[BattleApple]

That's only clear if you're familiar with the standard. If I saw that format anywhere, I wouldn't know if the year is 2002 or 2006. 02Aug2006 would make more sense to me.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Insightfill]

I've also adopted myself because (a) it is completely unambiguous...

Let me get this straight; you've adopted yourself to avoid amiguity?

Sorry - couldn't pass it up.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget aluminum. It's aluminium outside of the USA (and I hear in some parts of the USA too). It was a nice surprise to see that Civilization 4 uses the word aluminium.

In the end it doesn't really matter though - the only time it's mildly annoying is when software comes with both English and American English, but labels the American English version as English, then treats English as though it's a weird other dialect and specifically labels it UK or British English.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Zelbinian]

Indeed, much like only the US (and the places it thereby influences) pronounces the letter 'z' as 'zee' or uses feet and pounds. What a wacky bunch we are.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[ThinWhiteDuke]

You don't get it.

It's not US and EU in a pissing contest over whose method is better.

It's 200 countries trying their best to accomodate different formats, and the US (and parts of Canada) not even realizing that other formats exist.

Read the threads, it's amazing. Half of Slashdot seems sincerely surprised when they learn that dates could be written dd/mm/yy. Hilarious.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cvdwl]

I've been brainwashed in california to use ddMMMyy (eg. 02Aug06) for all my dates. They do that in the international Pharmacuetical/BioTech industry to cut down on this exact confusion.

Which begs the question: is 02Aug06 the 2nd of August 2006 or the 6th of August 2002. Are my pills just expiring or 4 years out of date? Any possible format that leaves ambiguity WILL be misunderstood. Two digit years are an abomination!

And, to reply to a previous poster, do you alphabetize your dictionary by last letter of the word? yyyy-mm-dd is, by systems of ordering that have been around for millenia, the most logical.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[badbrownie]

We've been getting 'cool dates' and 'cool' dates and times for as long as I can remember. There's Always some Once In A Hundred Lifetimes event to coo over. Comets, fancy dates, super novas. If a billion events happen every month, then you shouldn't be surprised that a One In A Billion event is always in the news. Sorry for being a curmudgeon. It's not as if I don't have the streamers up to celebrate the 3 days of micro-processors. It's just that I like to piss on people's chips.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[altanic]

I ended up using the yyyymmdd format because it sorts so nicely whether it's seen as a date or a string.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[VJ42]

Here in the UK it's just as (if not more) common to say: "the Second of August two thousand and six", hence we use dd/mm/yyyy. Also I'm sure you Americans say "the Fourth of July" don't you?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

yyyy-mm-dd is preferred because it sorts files in chronological order.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[slapout]

"excuse my getting a dig in"

Wrong website, dude.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re military time.. I set my wristwatch to 24hr time, and after a few months I was used to it. 21 - 9pm! 24 - midnight! 13?, obviously, 1pm!

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[BattleApple]

How is the day most important? For example, you come across an article on the web, and you want to know when it was written. The first thing I'm going to look at is the year. I guess it depends on the situation, but I see the order of significance as year, month, then day.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Off the top of my head...
english, french, german, cherokee, spanish, portuguese, dutch, russian, thai, chinese, japanese, vietnamese, korean, swedish, finnish, norwegian, italian, greek, czech, polish, turkish, armenian, swahili, urdu, choktaw, algonquin, hawaiian, Samoan

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[kimvette]

That's only because you want to be part of Europe, and not be known as "America, Jr."

If I were Canadian I'd probably have that attitude as well, given what's been going on under our current administration. ;)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[kimvette]

It theoretically "simplifies" spelling, however it results in our butchering pronounciation as well. Here in America we bastardize the English language. Perhaps the real reason was to thumb our noses at the crown after the American Revolution?

The extra "u" is necessary. The "or" the word "or" and the word "colour" are pronounced differently, and the (Correct/British) English spelling just seems more accurate/correct. The "-ise" vs. "-ize" thing makes slightly more sense, but that kind of thing only results in spelling "errors" in things like term papers, when the "-ise" spelling is actually more correct than our bastardization of the language.

$.02 and then some. ;)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[HRH King Lerxst]

Of course, everybody here knows the real date format.... yyyy-mm-dd.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think everyone else thought it was fairly obvious why it would make sense.

Maybe your common sense just needs some work?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cayenne8]

"This is a jab at American arrogance...What is wrong with allowing the date format to be displayed differently, or expecting programmers to put that in for non-US users? Why is that something that many US programmers do not do?"

What arrogance? Could it be that most US programmers are programming for US users? Could it be that quite often, we wouldn't have a clue that someone in another country does it a different way? (Honestly, I didn't have exposure to a different date format till just a few years ago), in light of not knowing, perhaps no one spec'ed out the application to do dates in a different fashion?

What arrogance is here? We happen to use that here. If someone was making thermometers in the US, for US useage...and he only put degrees F, would that be arrogance?

Geez...I wouldn't get software from an European company, that displayed the date at mm/dd/yyyy and think it was arrogance that drove that decision...they might find they get a lot of support calls asking why the job scheduled for 3/2/2007 fired off in Feb. rather than March...and need and explanation, but, far from arrogance.

Let's face it...you program, and create things based on your knowledge, experience and what you are used to.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[LinuxHam]

Personally, I was a big fan of 8:02pm on February 20th, 2002 (20:02 20/02/2002)

I, too, enjoy linking times with dates for interesting patterns, and was surprised your comment was this far down. I enjoyed 01:02:03 on 04/05/06 for instance.

And for the 24-hour clock comment way up the stack, it doesn't bug me as much anymore, as I've been playing around a lot with AO-51 amateur radio satellite lately, and have to back up 4 hours (often across midnight) in my pass calculations. After a month or so, you'd quickly adjust to not only the 24 hour format, but UTC as well.

--LH in FN20me

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Also I'm sure you Americans say "the Fourth of July" don't you?"

Um, yeah, we call one major US holiday the Fourth of July. We also say July 5th. I've got 363 more examples, if you're curious.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cayenne8]

"I'm sure I've heard US Americans say "The fourth of July"."

Yes, you do hear that...and that is pretty much the only exception from the rule...

I mean think of the World Trade Center date, we in the US all refer to it as 9/11 or Sept. 11th...I dare say you would find it rare to see any report in the US listing it as 11 Sept, or 11/9.

For that matter, since it did happen in the US, I think I've seen European reports and stories referring to this date in the US terms...9/11, etc.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[psicic]

I suppose that's where our nations differ again.

When talking about a date here in Ireland at least, it's more common to read and say dates '2nd of August 2006' - fitting in perfectly with the dd/mm/yyyy scheme.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do all Americans think the 24 hour clock is a purely military thing? In the UK we use the 24 hour clock all the time. Although we say it like 12 hour clock. 17:30 is "half past five" not "seventeen thirty hours".

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[mpe]

In the end it doesn't really matter though - the only time it's mildly annoying is when software comes with both English and American English, but labels the American English version as English, then treats English as though it's a weird other dialect and specifically labels it UK or British English.

Or insists on using Webster's spellings, whilst claiming to be in English. Even though they are specific to US English

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[kimvette]

In software one should sort using this date format:

YYYYMMDD-HHMM

Also: HH should be military/24-hour time, NOT HHMM(a|p)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[dubbreak]

But dd/mm/yyyy makes so much sense. It is in order of decreasing accuracy! Although I vote for changing to yyyy/mm/dd/hh:mm:ss. So I don't have to read the entire date if I don't need all the accuracy. For example I might only care the year something happened in and then don't have to read any further. Kind of like just reading the submission and not the article.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[(A)*(B)!0_-]

See where I said, "You're correct." I understand why yyyy-mm-dd works better. The poster to who I was responding tried to explain why it worked better and it was nonsensical and foolish - never even coming close to being the actual reason why yyyy-mm-dd sorting is more valuable.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[lixee]

Anyone noticed the devil's been around a few weeks ago on June, 6th?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[VJ42]

Can you think of 28 languages, on the top of your head???

Yes:
English
Scots
Scottish Gaelic
Irish
Welsh
French
German
Spanish
Portugeese
Italian
Latin
Polish
Czech
Greek
Norwegian
Finnish
Swedish
Estonian
Latvian
Russian
Swahili
Arabic
Urdu
Hindi
Punjabi
Gujarati
Tamil
Bengali
Sanskrit

OK, so I included 2 dead languages, but I could go on and replace them with others; those just happen to be the first 28 off the top of my head, I have an advantage though, I live in the UK where we have English Welsh, Scots and Scottish Gaelic and Irish all spoken in various parts, plus being Europian, each country has its own language, so I just pictured a map of Europe and tried to remember the language each spoke. I just noticed on preview that I forgot Dutch and Flemmish, I hope those Belgians and Dutch will forgive me ;p. Also you have to remember countries like India has around 800 languages all on it's own, with a huge numer of regonal dialects, so thinking of 28 languages wasn't that hard really.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Bloater]

Hopefully I'll still be alive when we get to 8/02/86, 8/03/86, and 8/04/86 (though I seriously doubt it) - I was alive last time they came around, but they didn't hold the same significance for me then (and the 80486 hadn't even been released).

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[quizzicus]

In America, we'd tend to say "three twenty".

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Gnavpot]

Here's a list [wikipedia.org] of used date formats in various countries. Looks like Canada has them all. ;)

I wonder if that list is correct. I am a European, and a lot of European countries uses the (much more logical) order of "dd mm yyyy" or "yyyy mm dd", but to my knowledge they use dots or dashes as a separator. So I see a lot of dd.mm.yyyy, dd-mm-yyyy, yyyy.mm.dd and yyyy-mm-dd, while dd/mm/yyyy is quite rare.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Citizen of Earth]

Every place that speaks English does too, except the USA

In Canada, today is August 2nd, 2006. I don't know why most Canadians would use dd/mm/yy when it is spoken mm/dd/yy. Of course, I just use yyyy-mm-dd and all is clear.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[mpe]

The US uses mm/dd/yy because that's the way it's spoken in English:August Second Two Thousand Six.

You may well be putting the cart before the horse here. With the change to putting the month first affecting how things are said in the US.

Saying "The Second Day of August Two Thousand Six" sounds clunky to American ears.

I'm not aware of anywhere using that variation. You'd either have "The second day of the month of August, two thousand and six." or "The second of August two thousand and six." (Possibly "twenty oh six" for the year.)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Rob Kaper]

Sure, but likewise I hate European software/devices that won't let me use a 12-hour clock.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[EvilIdler]

Over here in Scandinavia, we use military time. We don't call it that, though.
It's just our way of showing the time. AM and PM is the "silly English system",
and I always have to think hard to figure out what time it translates to.

15:00 is pronounced "three". You may want some ice for that brain now ;)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Gnavpot]

All my life, in my surroundings, if someone asked you the date something was going to happen, you'd say "August 22nd".

... and one day every year, your answer would be correct.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Gnavpot]

Half past 12? Are ya daft? It's twelve thirty!

Rubbish. It is half one. (At least when translated directly from Danish or German.)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Firehed]

For the most part, that's the exception to the rule. Though it really depends who you're talking to. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say "July fourth" in America, simply because it's just how we refer to our independance day; likewise, it's very uncommon to hear "the eleventh of September" - those two notable dates are pretty much driven into our American heads as "fourth of July" and "September eleventh" respectively. Most other days are interchangable, but it tends to be "Month day" rather than "the day of Month".

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[forii]

Because Zed's dead, baby, Zed's dead.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[arcade]

Without a problem. It's basically just thinking of the european map and start spitting out the languages.

The Philippines have 171 different languages, alone.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[idontgno]

Nope, in the US, if you asked what time it was, you would most likely get the answer "three-twenty".
Occasionally you'll get it the way you mentioned (twenty after three), but, most of the time I hear it hour-minute.

And that raises a couple of interesting points.

• Brevity. "Three twenty" is less of a mouthful than "Twenty past three". "August 8th, 2006" is somewhat shorter than "The 8th of August, 2006" (no possessives or articles; their function is implied in the shorter pharaseology.) Are we Americans hasty?
• The "decline" of the analog clock. Does anyone in the US say "A quarter till 4 PM?" A quarter of a what? The notion of an hour as a divisible entity (vice an integral entity, accompanied by an integral entity called the minute) is most intuitive if you can see the quarter-circle of the full-circle hour, as marked by the "big hand". I'm middle-aged; I was taught to read the classic analog clock, but now I have to think about it because the digital "hour:minute" format dominates. I wonder if my babies, as they grow up, will be taught in school to read analog clock faces at all? (I'll see to it that they learn, but I wonder if it won't fall out of public school curriculum.)
• The format of shortcut dates in the US verus elsewhere. I think it matches the syntax of the abbreviated US spoken date. That's speculation, but I find it fascinating that some of our English correspondents in this topic tend to speak out dates in ISO (or traditional European) numerical date format order, even if it requires the use of syntactic glue words. ("the 8th of August, 2006." I guess you could drop the glue, but it would sound funny and a bit spastic to me. But maybe that's how we 'merkans look to y'all anyways.)
• So, what of the notable US exception, the Fourth of July? I think it stopped being just a date a long time ago. If, God forfend, the government here in the US tries to make this holiday another "federally observed on the Monday of the week it falls on" holiday, it'll still be called "The Fourth of July" even if it's observed on the 30th of June.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[VWJedi]

What surprised me is that it goes on to say that with all those translations, you still "only" reach 3/4 of the earth's population.

I can believe that 1/4 of the earth's population is not a native-speaker of one of those languages, but it's hard to believe there are that many people who do not have some level of understanding of any of the world's 28 most common languages. Are there really 1.5 billion people who don't communicate with the rest of the world (except through translation)?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it be that most US programmers are programming for US users?

Then stop trying to sell that shit to the rest of us then.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Aellus]

"August 2nd" would be like saying a price is "99 cents and 1 dollar" in my mind...

I always thought of "August 2nd" as a shorthand version of "the 2nd of August", or simply "August's 2nd (day)". The analogy to "99 cents and 1 dollar" doesnt make sense, because the 99 cents dont belong to the one dollar, they are not subsets in a heirarchy. 99 cents is 1 cent short of a dollar, any dollar, where as the "2nd day" needs to be the 2nd day of something in particular. Its all about the grammar when writing the date out in words. "2nd of August" and "August 2nd" both make perfect sense, where as "2 August" and "August 2" both make the same amount of nonsense.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Bryansix]

Coming from the standpoint of never seeing a date written out it is not self explanatory. That is the point I am getting to here. If some kid sees this date format they are going to be confused. If they see the 02AUG2006 date format though they will understand it automatically.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Omestes]

Its frightening, I agree. And I live in the US, so I'm even more frightened. How can people here not even know something as fundamental as how Europe writes their date/time/temp? I'm not sure if that is sarcasm, or genuine disbelief. I'll get back to you.

I have tried setting up my computer to be more "european", and found it impossible to adapt, with everything in the US system around me, there was no frame of reference. Though I did keep my computer in 24 hour (military) time, it makes more sense, and gets rid of that odd feeling you get when napping, and waking at 7:00 when the sun is rising/setting and having no clue whether you should be off to work, or should get more sleep. But even this is difficult to pick up, how do you tell a friend who grew up on 12-hour, that you will meet them at 14:00, what are they to make of this? Same problem with the more sane Celsius and Metric system, right now it is 33c outside, what does this mean? (that was rhetorical) Granted in a perfect world the US would join the rest of the world and drop the archaic measurment systems, but I don't see it happening.

As for MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY, or even YYYY/MM/DD... Who cares? None of them are really more sane or logical than the others. Either way today is not 2/8/6 (or even 8/2/6) since this isn't the year 6, it is 2006, which is truncated as "06".

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[idontgno]

Take a seat, Bucko. I'm about to drop a bombshell on your psychic landscape.

Ready?

Here it comes:

Sorting of timestamps in computer data is actually not important, in the entire domain of "things people do with dates". Ask 100 people on the street, or a thousand; I betcha a grillion dollars (or euros, or maybe 100 times that many yen, or 10,000 times that many lire) that "sorting timestamps in my computer" won't be in the top ten. Or top 1000.

You're a software developer, aren't you? The mental habit of assuming the needs of the computer outweigh the needs of the user is distinctive. Sadly, many coders never outgrow it, as evidenced by most user interface design.

People write dates the way they customarily do. It makes a programmer's job harder, but that's just the way it is. Dates written by the computer, for the use of the computer (for instance, computer sorting of computer logs)--fine, use the computer-friendly date format. Joe Normaluser won't be looking at those dates anyways. But arguing the superiority of one date format over the other on the basis of the convenience to the computer is weak.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[setirw]

No, because it is the 24th of November. November the 24th just sounds weird.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cdep_illabout]

I perfer the YYYY-MM-DD format because it gets sorted correctly chronologically if you sort by the ascii code of the numbers.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[brarrr]

as an american, I heartily agree. then again, i'm one of the few 20% or so who even have a passport, let alone have used it.

my roommate, for an even odder example, has traveled the world but still says "i only vote in the important elections"

guess we're all just a bunch of jackasses.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Omestes]

Actually it is American English, a seperate dialect from British English. It isn't bastardized, its just different to relfect culture. I'm sorry, but the English have no claim to the master dialect (whatever that means), they speak flawless British, and we flawless American. The term "bastardize" is meaningless.

Sorry, I got in massive fights with my british friends in college over this, with them arguing the sepremacy of their tongue (they are called the english, and speak english, therefore their language must be pure!), and me making fun of their inferiority complex.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

being canadian, I'm going to have to correct, or in the very least amend what metasecure said. the federal standard in canada is actually YYYY-MM-DD and has been since 1989 (CSA Z234.5 is the standard name if interested) and ultimately if you work for a multinational company (or at least one that complies with some ISO standards) you follow ISO 8601 which is the same as above. if MM/DD/YYYY is still used it's because your headquarters is in the USA, or perhaps because one never enjoyed the simplistic DD/MM/YYYY nomenclature thats so easy to understand. (ascending numberic groups and so forth)... ANYWAYS being so wildly off topic as I seem to be... aweasome dates... but your all wrong. no one uses d/m/y nomenclature anymore.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[chipotlehero]

Well this is America. If you don't like it you're free to geeeeeeeeeeeeeetttt out!

... oh, wait..

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[chrish]

I'm Canadian, and my memory is shot... I can never remember which format is the "right" one. Being a tech writer doesn't help, since I need to shift in and out of American mode all the time anyway...

I usually use yyyy-mm-dd for things I need to put dates on (or write it out, "Aug. 2, 2006") so they'll sort sanely, since computers are too lazy to sort dates properly. ;-)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Cecil]

Actually I believe The English Language was released under an Apache-style licence.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Omestes]

Everyone in the US says "August 2nd" or "December 31st."

Er.. You have proof of this? Luckily I have counterproof, I often say "It's the second of August" (Or DD of MM), interchangably with "Its August second" (or MM of DD). So thus I have one case to disprove your universal statement.

And if I ask what day it is, I find the actual day more informative. Wednesday is more important than "the second", which is more important than "August", which is more important than "2006".

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Shawn is an Asshole]

I'm also an asshole and prefer yyyy-mm-dd.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cayenne8]

Wow..not sure why this got modded into oblivion...

""If Americans spent a few minutes to consider that their way isn't the only way of doing things, a lot of problems could be avoided, and I'm not just talking about software."

What if you turned this around:

If Europeans spend a few minutes to consider that their way isn't the only way of doing things, a lot of problems could be avoided, and I'm not just talking about software.

What makes your way any better than ours? There's differences....we have to deal with how others do things differently in the world....I mean it is like you're complaining that some other countries have different spoken languages. Damned China, if they all spoke Spanish like the rest of us, we'd have a whole lot less problems.

Just because some do things differently doesn't make it wrong and your method correct.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cayenne8]

"I'm guessing this form is less used in America because American English has more of a tendency to drop prepositions (ie. the 'of'). For example, "he went Tuesday" rather than "he went on Tuesday", or "the kids are out back" rather than "the kids are out the back".

Ok, well, here's a UK one that puzzles me. I often see people from there saying something like "When I was at University" or at Uni...that sounds wrong to me.

I'd say, when I was at the Universite or when I was in college....why do ya'll leave out the "the" in front of University?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[teh kurisu]

Erm, well the examples you gave would mean "I was on campus". "At university" would apply to your entire term of enrolment. In my case, I've been "at university" for five years now (undergrad and postgrad), but I haven't been "at the university" for five years, because I go home every night to eat and sleep. Does that make sense?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are dumb.

The parent poster does not complain about the format but not being able to change the format.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[LittleBigLui]

Just my two cents: d/m/y or y/m/d seems much more logical than m/d/y. As in, the numbers are ordered by their significance. y/m/d with leading zeores is practical because it makes alphabetical order the same as chronological order.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[larien]

Yup, especially good with log files. We have some at work which are dd-mm and I keep having ls -lart them to find the latest. With ISO formatted dates, a normal ls will order them correctly.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop clamoring to buy it.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[LittleBigLui]

I don't know why most Canadians would use dd/mm/yy when it is spoken mm/dd/yy.

In germany, the number 23 is spoken as, literally, "three-and-twenty". Accordingly, the number 123 is spoken as "one-hundred-three-and-twenty"; 1234 is "one-thousand-two-hundred-four-and-thirty". Imagine the insanity that would ensue if germans wrote those numbers as 32, 132 and 1243 just to make them fit the way they say those numbers. [1]

Dates are similar, in that the position of the number determines its order of magnitude. In d/m/y and y/m/d, the magnitudes are ordered. In m/d/y, they aren't.

[1] On an unrelated note, if you need even more insanity, imagine if the french did a similar thing, so instead of 99 they wrote 420109 ("quatre-vingt-dix-neuf").

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[La Fortezza]

As a fellow USian, I hate American software/devices that won't let me use a 24-hour clock.

I bet the Thai hate everyone though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6_hour_clock.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[LittleBigLui]

Um, yeah, we call one major US holiday the Fourth of July. We also say July 5th. I've got 363 more examples, if you're curious.

In soviet russia, a beowulf cluster of leap years would have shown korean old people another example.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[djp928]

This is a jab at American arrogance.

It's not arrogance. It's almost certainly ignorance. Most Americans don't even know other countries write dates in a different format. I'm sure the programmers who do know this (and who think about it at the time they're developing) put in the option for different formats.

-- Dave

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[assassinator42]

I don't think I've ever seen a digital clock mounted on the wall. Kids without watches/cellphones/etc. will have to learn to read analog clocks to know how much time is left until they get out of class.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[jipis]

Wouldn't that be 'bastardi s ation', then?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was told the USA changed to m/d/y to spite the English when they broke away. Australia uses d/m/y as well as most of Europe and Asia. I think it makes more sense because the part that changes most is on the side opposite the part that changes least instead of in the middle. And when you say "The second of August" it sounds different from "August, the second." Far as I know, there have been more than one August in previous years...
The only time month belongs before day is when year comes before month, and then only in programming. That way with y/m/d you can stamp h:n:s to the end of it and get something that acts very much like one long number.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[scrote-ma-hote]

There's 366 possible dates in the calendar right? Which other date goes the "wrong" way round?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[dcam]

Every place that speaks English uses d/m/y. Most of the places that speak American use m/d/y.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[dcam]

In Australia (which has a sane date format), people tend to say either "The second of August two thousand and six" or "August the second two thousand and six".

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[dcam]

Don't forget SI units. How many chains was it to the hogshead again?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[That's Unpossible!]

Planning.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[bigbadwlf]

As a Canadian, I find that everyone I know says, "August 2nd, 2006." When I was in school, (I'm 35) I was taught mm/dd/yy. Now the government seems bent on dd/mm/yy, which personally I can't stand.
Businesses seem to use either format, depending on the preference of whoever makes policy.
Quebec will use dd/mm/yy since that's the way the francophones speak.

Personally I think everyone should use yyyy/mm/dd hh:mm - makes the most sense to me. It needs to be standardized in order to avoid confusion.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Midnight is 24:00? In the UK, at least, midnight is 00:00.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes your way any better than ours?

Yours isn't in a reasonable order?

It's not biggest to smallest (the most reasonable way to write dates, and the only way that won't confuse the US method with the rest of the world), like YYYYMMDD.

It's not smallest to biggest, like DDMMYYYY.

It's middle, smallest, biggest. Putting the middle first is out of order no matter which way you look at it.

That's why it's wrong: it's wierd, non-standard, and it's not distingishable from the normal international standard in many cases.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[bigbadwlf]

in english, when you speak the date, you say, "It's August the 2nd, 2006."

I sure don't. I only speak English, and I say, "August 2nd, 2006"

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[rahrens]

I think that what this thread shows is that there is no particular common format. I also use that format, leaving the word "the" off. My point is in how we *order* the month/day/year in shortened formats.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[M1FCJ]

Not only it is easier to sort, it is also an ISO standard. ISO 8601 to be specific.

It is easy to process in a substring and if the filename contains it, it always can be sorted correctly. Just pure simplicity.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[rediguana]

Our business has adopted this for including version information in document filenames. It took a little convincing, but they soon saw how well it worked and everyone uses it happily now. The benefit of being able to easily sort the different versions of a document in correct time order in a folder is all it takes to show the benefits (and filesystem metadata is not always right, so last modified date doesn't always work). And variants for monthly documents work well too - say a monthly timesheet becomes 'Timesheet 200608.xls'.

I'd guess that the main reason your users 'hate it' is because they don't understand the reasons for it. I explained why I wanted it done this way, didn't force it initially, but used it in all the documents I used with my colleagues, and over time they all changed and use it without fail now. They just had to acclimatise and understand the system. Once they saw the benefits there was no turning back.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cammoblammo]

I always thought of August 2 as my wife's birthday.

Oh, crap...

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[kayditty]

we say 'The twenty-ninth of july two-thousand and six' more than we say something like 'July twenty-ninth two thousand and six (unless we're talking along to the Daily Show intro.

Actually, we don't say "and" in America, either (well, we're not 'supposed' to). The correct way to speak this number is: Two Thousand Six.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[TekPolitik]

It needs to be standardized in order to avoid confusion.

It has been.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[kayditty]

I also hope that you meant 'Israel,' unless you're trying to convey something to us in some sort of newfangled ebonics.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[uthus]

Even Windows Explorer is smart enough to sort dates in this format.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[noamsml]

Well, it is real, I'd think, but yeah, I kind of tend to mistype that one for some reason.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[paedobear]

OK - we speak English, you speak American. Stop fucking using our name for your language. ("British English" implies that there's no difference in the language spoken by say, a Glaswegian and a Londoner. I can categorically assure you this is not true.)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[paedobear]

Well, a quick answer is that "the" is definitive, and there's far more than one university in the UK. As for myself, I'd say (to give where I went in full) "When I was at Strathclyde University", or "When I was at the University of Strathclyde" - so "when I was at Uni" could be taken as a short form of the first expression, not the second.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[mjwx]

Its faster to count the nations that use the mm/dd/yy system.
US
done.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Mantrid42]

In Soviet Russia, dd/mm/yy uses YOU!

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Old Wolf]

I think it's because dd/mm/yy is the sensible option: each entry is in chronological order. mm/dd/yy has a bigger index, then a smaller one, then an even bigger one. It is sort of like writing $105 instead of $150.

Cf. how the rest of the world uses metric measurements and America still uses illogical unwieldy measurements.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bryansix, leave the trolling to those who are good at it, you facking fuck! You facking ... what's funny? WHAT'S FUNNY?! You FACKING COCK-ASS!!

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you were being even more logical about it, you'd use year-month-day. More significant digits should come first, as they do in virtually every other situation.

Also, yyyy-mm-dd is much less likely to cause confusion - if I refer to 03/08/2006 you don't know whether I'm talking about the third of August or the eighth of March, but there's no confusion about what data 2006/08/03 refers to. You can't rely on where the correspondent is as an indicator either; a lot of non-Americans will still use mm-dd-yyyy when corresponding with an international company because they think English Language == American standards (including degrees farenheit as well, ugh).

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Mortlath]

That's why we say "November 24th" in the US. "The 24th of November" takes too long to say.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Pyroja]

I've been in the Air Force for about a year, and from day one was taught to write the date like so: DDMMMYYYY, though goin' with a two digit year was acceptable. Thusly, today would be 02AUG06 or 02AUG2006.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Mr. Shiny And New]

I suppose, if you've never seen a date written in shorthand before, then no date format is truly intuitive, but yours is better than yyyy-mm-dd. But frankly, considering how much sense yyyy-mm-dd makes, and how unambiguous it is to most people, it's the better format. After all, cursive handwriting is confusing to children, but we teach it to them and then take it for granted. I think we can do the same with the date format: teach children one standard, that is least ambiguous while being most useful, and then take it for granted that everyone knows yyyy-mm-dd. But I suppose there will be some people who refuse to admit that this date format is superior (once you understand it, which isn't hard)... just as I refuse to admit that any other date format is superior :)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[diamondmagic]

That is the "international" standard. Though it isn't very international if europe and the US don't use it. Still, for that very reason, it is the recommendation for all web documents

It is important that the year is always at least four didgets, even for a year like 0003.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Mozk]

People here (Nebraska) say November 24th. I'm always confused when people write dates here because I'm a dick and always write in the internation format of YY/MM/DD, and now I'm so used to seeing that. :P I don't even know what the standard in the US is.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

yyyy-mm-dd is even more sensible. It's in chronological order and useful for sorting.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[DavidRawling]

What the hell world do you live on where you have more than one August in a year!?

"No no, it was the 1st of the SECOND August, not the second of the FIRST!"

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[DavidRawling]

I wonder if my babies, as they grow up, will be taught in school to read analog clock faces at all? (I'll see to it that they learn, but I wonder if it won't fall out of public school curriculum.

No need to wonder. My step children could not read an analog clock until I taught them (at the ages of 12 and 15, respectively). No help from either of the school systems they've experienced (WA and NSW, Australia).

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Omestes]

I miss this fight. Many a time getting drunk with my british friends picking on each other dialect, but then drunkedness makes us all equal incomprehensable. Good times.

Actually there are different names for each dialect, from American standard, to British standard, and all points in between.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[1u3hr]

In my experience (and I suppose, opinion), "twenty past three" is a colloquialism.

"Colloquialism" implies slang or informality, and I assure you that "twenty past three" is quite formal, in Australia and most Commonwealth countries at least.

The vast, vast, vast majority of people will simply say "three twenty," certainly anyone my age (20s).

Quite likely. But still, in this discussion you need to distinguish between "people", and "people in my country". I wore a digital watch for about 20 years and that does influence how you refer to time. But a couple of years ago I got an analog watch as a gift, and now I think in a more analog fashion....

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also the way it's naturally spoken in English. 3rd August 2006.

Funninly enough, Americans often say "August 3rd" and *that* is because they write it 8/3.

They also say things like "Eight forty" instead of "twenty to nine".

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Luscious868]

USian isn't a word. American is.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Luscious868]

What is wrong with allowing the date format to be displayed differently, or expecting programmers to put that in for non-US users? Why is that something that many US programmers do not do?

Perhaps it because most US programmers, myself included, are writing software with US users in mind and thus it would be a waste of our time to include various options that, while useful to people in other countries, would be a waste to 99% of the users in our target market.

If users from other countries find US software usefull that's great. If not then they are completely free to use some other piece of software produced somewhere else. Nobody forces them to use US software so they really should shut up.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[lbmouse]

"The mental habit of assuming the needs of the computer outweigh the needs of the user is distinctive. Sadly, many coders never outgrow it, as evidenced by most user interface design...People write dates the way they customarily do...But arguing the superiority of one date format over the other on the basis of the convenience to the computer is weak."

That is exactly the type of attitude that has kept the US away from the metric system. People get in their comfort circles and won't change even when there are more efficient/logical alternatives. Arguing the superiority of one format over the other on the basis of human laziness and ignorance is also weak.

I understand your complaints about UI design and creating applications that are user friendly (I use to write software for insurance agents for god sake), but we should search for the most efficient and logical routes when dealing with measurements.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[KageKonjou]

Simply put, that was an extremely insightful and well-put comment. I applaud you, very well done.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[gbjbaanb]

and specifically labels it UK or British English.

Yeah, the Welsh, Irish and Scots might have something to say about that (they won't but bear with me). We obviously need it labelled as English English.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[gbjbaanb]

yyyy-mm-dd-hh-mm-ss is even better for sorting by date/time values. I understood the military use this format, but I have no references for that (so look it up on Wikipedia :) )

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its short for "the 24th day in the month of November". "November 24th" is really just meaningless and shows how stupid and lazy you americans are.

It's funny. Laugh.

[linvir]

Behold:

It's funny. Laugh.

Stay your flamethrower, thou saucy fellow. Nay, let us instead rejoice in the most accurate story in the history of this fine website.

Re:It's funny. Laugh.

[Roody Blashes]

Hmmm.... that last sentence is also probably the most insightful thing ever posted on this "fine website".

How fitting that the most accurate story and comment ever on Slashdot were both entirely pointless.

Re:It's funny. Laugh.

[andrewman327]

If you notice there is no "+1 Integrity" or even "+1 True"

Re:It's funny. Laugh.

[linvir]

I just noticed that all four zoo.pl icons appear next to your name from my account. It looks like a military decoration.

Re:It's funny. Laugh.

[AcidLacedPenguiN]

I must inform you that there is no need for the flamethrowers now, but they will be required tomorrow when the dupe hits the frontpage :P

Re:It's funny. Laugh.

[andrewman327]

I guess there is a "-1 Offtopic." Touche' mods.

I personally think that Intel and AMD are missing out on a great marketing ploy. Considering how close the competition is right now, they could gain publicity through some special event for the days.

Re:It's funny. Laugh.

[linvir]

It won't be a dupe, it'll be an "update". It'll tell us that 4/8/6, 5/8/6 and 6/8/6 are coming up, and it'll even link back to this story to prove that it's really not a dupe.

Re:It's funny. Laugh.

[AcidLacedPenguiN]

oh. clever.
Then afterwards we'll have a backslash about it?

Re:It's funny. Laugh.

[WilliamSChips]

There are actually six zoo.pl icons that can appear. But only four can appear at a time as you can't simultaneously be friend and foe, and same with fan and freak.

Except..

[VirtualAdept]

Unless of course you're live in a place that uses the MM/DD/YY scheme for recording dates. Then you already encountered these dates in February, March, and April.

Re:Except..

[Pharmboy]

Like the USA? I thought Slashdot was unappologetically US centric.

(insert "We don't use dates like that, you insensitive clod" comment here)

Re:Except..

[jo_ham]

We covered this story back then.

This is the obligatory dupe.

Re:Except..

[Anonymous Coward]

But then again, that scheme is so retarded, it boggles the mind that anyone can accept it without a lobotomy

Re:Except..

[dfn5]

Unless of course you're live in a place that uses the MM/DD/YY scheme for recording dates. Then you already encountered these dates in February, March, and April.

You mean like in America? Nobody from there reads Slashdot.

Re:Except..

[polar red]

something i always found peculiar : generally the choice of format depends on language; in dutch you say something like this : 7 juli 2006, so we have DD/MM/YYYY ... english countries generally have MM/DD/YYYY. But this strikes me as odd; why wouldn't it have been based on ascending(smallest unit/day first) or descending(largest unit/year first) order ?

Re:Except..

[oliverthered]

And for those people living in japan the dates passed in 2003, 2004 and 2005

Re:Except..

[Hrodvitnir]

Please... any place that uses that date format doesn't have the attention span to celebrate three related dates each a month apart.

Re:Except..

[MindStalker]

Because we like to write the way we talk. English speakers prefer to say July 7th instead of 7th of July.

Re:Except..

[Ollierose]

England itself uses the more euro-centric dd/mm/yyyy format, for what thats worth. The only country I've heard use mm/dd/yyyy has been the US, although my experience certainly isn't comprehensive on the matter.

I think MM/DD/YY comes from the English way of speaking dates, which would be August 2nd, 2006 (although 2nd of August, 2006 is an equally common longhand form).

Oh, and another peeve here - it's not 6, its 06 or 2006. The year /6 was 2000 years ago, well before even the 8086 processors were released. Maybe in 6000 years, we can celebrate that anniversary. Even the Motorola 68000s seem a long way away on that scheme, never mind the Intel 80286.

Re:Except..

[fbjon]

Actually, this is a dupe from way back in '86.

Re:Except..

[Anonymous Coward]

nah - that's *American* speakers.

Re:Except..

[lovebyte]

That's rich coming for a dutch person (if you are dutch!)! Dutch and Germans use this weird way for numbers. To say 86 (and thus stay on topic) you say in Dutch 6 and eighty. So for 286, you say two hundred six and eighty. If that's not confusing, what is? Oh yes, I know, the way Dutch and Germans say the time! for 5h30, you say "half six"!
Every culture has their idiosyncrasies.

Re:Except..

[Intron]

Everyone on /. knows the correct way to write the time and date: 1154526200

Re:Except..

[linvir]

Nuh-uh! They ran a story about this back in 6 too, but back then we were still pretty bummed about jesus' death, so we didn't really celebrate it much.

Re:Except..

[plumby]

English speakers prefer to say July 7th instead of 7th of July

American English speakers might - I don't know anyone who says July 7th (maybe July the 7th though). Anyway, I say "half past six", but I wouldn't write that time down as 1/2 - 6 (or even 30:6).

MM/DD/YYYY as a numeric representation makes no logical sense. DD/MM/YYYY is small/medium/large date units, whereas MM/DD/YYYY is medium/small/large. Who orders things by putting the smallest unit of measurement in the middle? Do you write your time as hh:ss:mm?

Personally I prefer YYYY-MM-DD - large/medium/small as the largest digit (e.g., the millenium) is to the left as well - makes organising/sorting documents using their name much easier.

Re:Except..

[CableModemSniper]

Jesus died when he was 6 / 7 years old? Really? (Yes I know Jesus wasn't born 1 AD, but neither did he die as early as 6 AD or even 6 BC.)

Re:Except..

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here.

Re:Except..

[Henneshoe]

something i always found peculiar : generally the choice of format depends on language; in dutch you say something like this : 7 juli 2006, so we have DD/MM/YYYY ... english countries generally have MM/DD/YYYY. But this strikes me as odd; why wouldn't it have been based on ascending(smallest unit/day first) or descending(largest unit/year first) order?

Well if you want to remain consistant to most other numbers you would start with the biggest unit first. YYYY/MM/DD would be the same as the number...lets say 109, where the 1 is in the hundreds place and therefore the largest unit.

Re:Except..

[gedhrel]

..and what year, exactly, was Jesus born, according to your calendar?

Re:Except..

[bohemian72]

Who orders things by putting the smallest unit of measurement in the middle?

It's the junior hamburger method.
You start out with the bottom bun. Then you put a smaller beef pattie on it. Last you place the top bun which is larger than either the bottom bun or the beef.

I guess we can blame Ray Kroc for our date conventions.

Re:Except..

[linvir]

Okay, you caught me. I was being a complete poser. I'm not a proper fan at all.... for shame.

Re:Except..

[ggzeama]

Does this matter? I mean, we generally end up in getting it right, don't we?
But yes again, we have something to discuss, so I will just go back to my books ...

Re:Except..

[1u3hr]

Dutch and Germans use this weird way for numbers. To say 86 (and thus stay on topic) you say in Dutch 6 and eighty.

If that freaks you, try French. 95 is "quatre-vingt-quinze", literally "four twenties (plus) fifteen". And let's not go into Roman numerals, though in the early years of the millennium they're nicely compact, in this year MMVI AD, compared to my birth year of MCMLVIII.

Re:Except..

[troels]

Well, assuming you want to remain consistant with numbers, it still depends on how you look at it. Numbers are written with the most significant part first. Is the year really the most significant part of a date? Of course it can be if you are planning a long time ahead, but for day to day things, it probably is not. Also if you abbreviate a number you normally get rid of the last part, where as if you abbreviate a date you would often get rid of the year, and maybe even the month.

Another argument for not writing dates with the year first is that you will have to read it backwards to pronounce it. Or at least i would not say that today is 2006 August 2nd.

Of course the americans are not the only ones having weird pronounciation of things, in danish you would pronounce 1234 as "one thousand two hundred and four and thirty"

Re:Except..

[Anonymous Coward]

"you say in Dutch..."

The usual way of writing that in English would be "in Dutch you say...". The other way isn't actually wrong, but English speakers wouldn't do it that way. But then I guess you don't have English as a first language...

Re:Except..

[camperdave]

I suspect it is from the old manual/paper based days of business. You'd keep separate years in separate filing cabinets, so the year becomes irrelevant. Thus using month/day makes it a lot easier to sort.

Re:Except..

[IngramJames]

And for those people living in japan the dates passed in 2003, 2004 and 2005

My mother, having been born as a PoW of the Japanese in Singapore in 1942 has a birth certificate which is fairly rare. Written in English, on an official British Government-issued Birth Certificiate, by a British doctor, her year of birth is recorded as "31st July 2602", as it was the year according to the Japanese Imperial calendar, whose use was manditory on all official documents under the occupation.

This led to many a merry jape when renewing her passport, as her obviously geniune birth certificate was equally obviously faked. And badly. Some public officials took a fair bit of convincing that she was old enough to even apply for a passport, since she wasn't due to be born for a little over six centuries yet. In the end, they gave her a new one, but I believe that she still has the original filed away somewhere.

Re:Except..

[sasdrtx]

According to most followers of Jesus, he lived until AD 33 or so, and only stayed dead for 3 days. Due to various circumstances, few were bummed.

I really should stop commenting on trivial tangents to stupid stories.

Re:Except..

[tonyr1988]

Actually:

1) The only reason that it would be the year 6 is through the Gregorian Calendar, which wasn't around back then. So it wouldn't be 6, and

2) Jesus died around 30ish AD. He would've been born around 6.

Still, funny joke. I just couldn't resist putting a damper on it.

Re:Except..

[VWJedi]

The fact that you had to wait nearly two thousand years to get an x86 processor probably put a damper on it as well.

Re:Except..

[GoulDuck]

To say 86 (and thus stay on topic) you say in Dutch 6 and eighty

I'm from Denmark, where we use the same way to pronouce it ("six and eighty"). We do, however, have have a shorter way of saying "eighty" .. "firs" (where the i is said like the i in ice). That was the defence speach... here comes the ugly part:
1 = en = one and 10 = ti = ten
2 = to = two and 20 = tyve = twenty
3 = tre = three and 30 = tredive = thrity
4 = fire = four and 40 = fyrre = forty
5 = fem = five and 50 = halvtreds = fifty
6 = seks = six and 60 = treds = sixty
7 = syv = seven and 70 = halvfjerds = seventy
8 = otte = eight and 80 = firs = eighty
9 = ni = nine and 90 = halvfems = ninety

As you can see, no smart pattern with these numbers in the danish system. How should a person know that "seks"(6) x 10 = treds(60)?

With that said, we also have a smarter system, that works like the English one:
1 = et and 10 = ti
2 = to and 20 = toti
3 = tre and 30 = treti
4 = fire and 40 = fireti
... and so you can see, like the English, we just add "ti" behind the number - "ti" like 10, so the system is complete (fem-ti = 5 x 10). This system is known by many, but its not used that much because it semes like something old people use. And have to admit that I don't know wich of the two systems where the first one, but i like the last one better, but use the first one because every one else use it.

Re:Except..

[Anonymous Coward]

english countries generally have MM/DD/YYYY

Ummm... NO. Only one English-speaking country that I know of writes it like that, and that is the USA.

All other English-speaking countries use MM/DD/YYYY like almost everyone else in the world.

Holy crap!

[Demon-Xanth]

This is either a very slow news day, or the OP is way too bored.

Re:Holy crap!

[Alfred, Lord Tennyso]

Welcome to August. The US Congress is out of session, grinding one of America's main news sources to a halt. France basically shuts down, and much of Europe follows its lead. August is vacation time, and nobody makes news, at least in the West.

If it weren't for those hard-working Middle Easterners busily killing each other, the presses would have to shut down entirely.

Re:Holy crap!

[IngramJames]

I wouldn't be too sure that even any of that news is being reported at the moment.

What?

[UbuntuDupe]

Where's the link to an article? Oh, this was just some guy rambling about something while high.

Februrary, March and April

[TobascoKid]

"today, tomorrow and the next day are the only days we'll get dates like this: 2/8/6 3/8/6 4/8/6 like the x86 computers :-)"

That all depends on your locale settings - other people had thier x86 days several months back

Re:Februrary, March and April

[iamjoltman]

Or even years back, ie 2/8/6 (2002/August/6), 3/8/6 (2003/August/6) and 4/8/6 (2004/August/6)

Re:Februrary, March and April

[KodeSlut]

of course, here in sweden the year is written first, so these dates have been hit in 2002, 2003 and 2004 respectively.

Re:Februrary, March and April

[rahrens]

But in the midst of all this, what country uses just a single digit for the year? Before y2k, we used two digits, since then, it has become common to use four to be able to differentiate between the 20th century and the 21st.

Sounds like someone wanted to use single digits to get a story posted... cause using two or four digits, there is no similarity to the processor names.

Saturday

[The G]

Instead of getting dates of their own, Saturday and subsequent days will be known as "Pentium", "Pentium II", "Pentium IV", "Pentium 5", "Pentium 6", and of course "Xeon".

Re:Saturday

[ToxikFetus]

Of course, Itanium already had its day on April 14, 1912.

Re:Saturday

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

shouldn't that be more like Pentium IV, Pentium IV Northwoods, Pentium IV Extreme Edition, Pentium IV D, Pentium IV Extreme Edition D, Pentium Core Duo

Please excuse the accuracy of this post, I don't actually have all of the core codenames remebered, or the versioning thats part of the joke: who on earth can? In Haiti, the kids knew about pentium IV andthat it cmae out a long time ago so they assume tha we are on Pentium 7 by now. Why would we be stuck on Pentium IV for six years?

Re:Saturday

[CellBlock]

Why would be stuck on Pentium IV for six years?

Because Intel keeps adding 1 to 4 and getting 4.9999056489, so it isn't quite 5 yet.

Re:Saturday

[nodrew]

Please excuse the accuracy of this post, I don't actually have all of the core codenames remebered, or the versioning thats part of the joke: who on earth can?

I can !!

I would think you are looking for something more like this:

Sunday - Pentium 4
Monday - Celeron
Tuesday - Pentium D
Wednesday - Centrino
Thursday - Core Duo
Friday - Pentium 4 Extreme Edition
Saturday - Core 2 Duo

The Core Duo is not a Pentium, as the Core series is supposed to replace the Pentium line. Pentium D was a replacement for the Celeron, but not part of the Pentium 4 line.

Re:Saturday

[Enzo the Baker]

Beware the Ides of Pentium!

Re:Saturday

[Tower]

You left out the Pentium M, the predecessor of the Core - 3 parts P!!!, 1 part P4... I'd use that where you have Centrino, since that isn't a CPU... just a chipset.

Re:Saturday

[Short Circuit]

I refuse to celebrate the Pentium days!

I'll be happily enjoying K-5, K-6, Athlon and Athlon XP days, thank you. Though K-5 day will have to fall on Sunday; you're not supposed to do any work then.

Re:Saturday

[ConceptJunkie]

Didn't they just discover proof that Centrinos have mass? I hear they've got some neat experiments set up for the Large Hadron Collider when it comes online.

Re:Saturday

[VGPowerlord]

I take it that you didn't like the Pentium III? Or is there some other reason that it's missing from the list? :D

Re:Saturday

[Anonymous Coward]

pentium = 586
pentium II = 686
pentium III = 686
pentium IV = 786

the pentium II and III were both 686 procs. They just upped the name to make people buy it more. ;P

Actually, anyone ever notice how stupid the pentium names are? Pent means 5. Hence the Pentium being 586. So shouldn't the Pentium II really have been called the Hexium?

Re:Saturday

[Physician]

So what will the third day of the week, Tuesday, be known as?

Psht!

[Anonymous Coward]

A real nerd uses a logical date format - yyyy/mm/dd. What kind of a date format puts the 1st of February before the 2nd of January when sorted?

Re:Psht!

[sk8king]

Some ISO standard that no one else seems to want to use. mm/dd/yyyy is just silly. Most significant to least significant makes the most sense by far.

YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss is the way to go.

Re:Psht!

[digitrev]

And people who write the way they talk use a MM/DD/YYYY format. But I agree with the coward, YYYY/MM/DD is a superior format when sorting dates.

Re:Psht!

[csplinter]

What kind of date format puts the number your most unlikely to need first (the year) and the one you will most likely want to know last.

Re:Psht!

[Anonymous Coward]

I myself marked a special occasion recently: May 4th, 3:02:01 am of this year: 06/05/04:03:02:01

Re:Psht!

[tolan-b]

I think you're making some assumptions about how people talk ;)

I'm from the UK (dd/mm/yyyy) and I would say today's date like this: "The 2nd of August, 2006";

Re:Psht!

[octaene]

http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime

Concur.

Re:Psht!

[MindStalker]

a computerized one duh. 20060802 is on day less than 20060803 the same as 1000 is 1 less than 1001.

Re:Psht!

[struppi]

Yes, of course, i usually use this date format too. But OTOH, when you use a date format which is quite common here in Austria (DD.MM.YYYY) there are pretty cool dates in the next few years like 20.07.2007, 20.08.2008, ...

Re:Psht!

[HaydnH]

"A real nerd uses a logical date format - yyyy/mm/dd. What kind of a date format puts the 1st of February before the 2nd of January when sorted?

While I agree with the yyyy, mm & dd order, a real nerd doesn't use path seperators in dates! What kind of date format uses /'s?? =P

Re:Psht!

[rahrens]

Ah! Now *those* dates are cool!

Now when they do occur, be sure and submit a story to /. and we'll see if it gets accepted...

Re:Psht!

[digitrev]

I'm a Canuck. It's August 2nd, 2006 (for me, anyways). It makes more sense in my brain to have the month before the day, and throw the year at the end, as I assume you know what the year is. Of course, I still always do a mental check to see what the date actually is. When you get dates like 06/04/05, it gets confusing.

Re:Psht!

[ben there...]

What kind of date format puts the number your most unlikely to need first (the year) and the one you will most likely want to know last.

It depends what you're using it for. If you're using a set of data mostly within the same year, especially consecutive days, you should probably put the day first (dd-mm-yyyy). If you're using data that spans many years, where the most important part is the year, and especially when you want easy sorting, put the year first (yyyy-mm-dd). The only format that doesn't make any sense and serves no useful purpose is the one Americans use.

Re:Psht!

[heinousjay]

Yeah, but it makes you sound effete.

Come to think of it, I'm sure that helps you fit in.

Re:Psht!

[turly]

Date format "Endian wars" on Slashdot! I've seen it all now.

Re:Psht!

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of stupid software can't recognise dates properly?

Re:Psht!

[nstlgc]

What kind of nerd sorts dates using an alphabetical/numerical sorting algorithm? With MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY you just need to read the first 4 characters, since the year basically stays the same all.. year.

Re:Psht!

[Vlijmen Fileer]

*Sigh*

YYYY-MM-DD /is/ the (relaxed) ISO standard.

Apart from that, youi're right about the only way to date filenames etcetera:
YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss (or perhaps YYYYMMDD hh:mm:ss, which uses the ISO standard)

Re:Psht!

[tolan-b]

What the fuck? Because I don't use an Americanisation I sound effete? Has it occurred that saying 'August 2nd' is actually just bad English?

Re:Psht!

[Anpheus]

A date format you don't know how to properly sort? Hint: Sorting doesn't have to go left to right.

Re:Psht!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, it changes after December 31st.

For sorting, you would want to put the year first.

for conversation, you almost never need the year, so put it last.

There is no need to put the month befor the day, unless you aren't using the year, and even then it is silly.

Re:Psht!

[VJ42]

Indeed, I'm also from the UK, and I can confirm that saying "the second of August" is more common than saying "August 2nd"; though "August the second" is somtimes used

Defcon?

[yamamushi]

Defcon starts Friday, 3/8/6. Coincidence?

Re:Defcon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just Defcon, but Assembly as well.

ISO 8601 Please!

[Optic]

Abolish weird date formats!

Re:ISO 8601 Please!

[Timesprout]

Whats ISO 8601? Here in Europe we use ISO 0186 for date formats.

Re:ISO 8601 Please!

[MindStalker]

Damn you for making me google just to realize there is no spoon.

Re:ISO 8601 Please!

[nitio]

Yes! because if I say right now it's 2006-08-02T11:01:51.35-0300 it's waaaay much simpler than just saying Aug 02 2006, 11:01 here in Brazil.
...

For Christ's sake... unless it's for computational purposes I don't see any reason why we must all use the same format.

Re:ISO 8601 Please!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because if someone writes 05/06/2006 I have no idea if they mean the sixth of may or the fifth of june. Not to mention silly people who just write things like 030405 and expect us to guess which of the six possible permutations they mean.

Re:ISO 8601 Please!

[sasdrtx]

So Europe is little-endian?

Dear Fidel...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you feel the flames lapping at your feet? See you soon, buddy!

Love,
Adolf, Joseph, and Mohammed

Re:Dear Fidel...

[WilliamSChips]

May you burn in the holy flames of Celestis, unbeliever. Hallowed are the Ori.

its not the only time

[iduno]

by the way it will happen again in another 100 years. and who cares about MM/DD/YY ;-), only in america do you have everything backwards, the date, the side of the road you drive on, the light switches, the imperial system.

Re:its not the only time

[kernspaltung]

What's wrong with our light switches?

Re:its not the only time

[LaughingCoder]

!taht tneser I ,yeH

Re:its not the only time

[Anonymous Coward]

>What's wrong with our light switches?

"Up" is on, "Down" is off.

In Europe, "Down" is on, and "Up" is off.

This is all by convention. It doesn't have to be that way, it's just what an electrician in each country will do by default.

And I think "Down" being off is smartest. The most likely position for a broken switch is down. And the most likely thing to happen to a light switch is to be accidentally toggled down. The preferrable thing is to turn off the power when faults and accidents happen.

Slashdot Captcha: "orgies" LOL

Re:its not the only time

[twistedsymphony]

I'll give you the date and the imperial system. But are you telling me you move your switch down for on and up for off? That makes no sense at all. Also driving on the right side of the road makes more sense; it places the driver on the left side of the car meaning the right hand (since most people are right handed) can be used for performing more articulate tasks such as shifting, tuning the radio and adjusting the HVAC. You're living in a world of left-handed drivers!

Re:its not the only time

[k-sound]

Based on your 'side of the road' remark I am assuming you are most likely british (or living in a Commonwealth country). FYI the left side is not the right side (no pun intended). The British were very late in adopting the metric system and were the one's that came up with the imperial system in the first place.
The reason the US refuses to use the metric system is probably because it's originally French. They refused to use a few great invetions, such as scart, which is why they were stuck with analog crap for years.

Re:its not the only time

[chaim79]

only in america do you have everything backwards, the date, the side of the road you drive on

What are you talking about? We drive on the Right side of the road.

Re:its not the only time

[mangu]

you move your switch down for on and up for off? That makes no sense at all

Actually, it makes a lot of sense to do the opposite. Electric switches should be made so that they are not turned on by accident. Imagine you are on a ladder, fixing the light socket, and drop a tool. If it hits the switch and turns it on, you are toast. Of course, in a home that kind of accident will not happen very often, but in industrial environments engineers are always looking for Murphy's law.

About driving on the right or left side of the road, those laws were made before automobiles existed. I have read somewhere that in England the law made people ride horses and drive carts on the left side so they wouldn't hit pedestrians with the whip.

Re:its not the only time

[rahrens]

There is an interesting article on Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_hand_drive

Look about mid-page for historical references as to the why's and wherefor's about the history. There is a very good chart of advantages of each system, and a world map of who drives which side.

It's worth a side trip.

Re:its not the only time

[Anonymous Coward]

So why is the US anti French in its stance on the metric system, but happy to follow them in driving on the wrong side of the road?

Re:its not the only time

[Mattintosh]

The reason the US refuses to use the metric system is:

1) Switching from one arbitrary measurement to another arbitrary measurement is pointless. Making a "metric system" that isn't arbitrary would fix this issue.
2) People are lazy. They've learned imperial measurements and see no benefits to switching (see #1), and therefore are loathe to expend time to learn a new system.
3) Imperial units are more "organic" than metric units. The tip of the thumb is about an inch long. The forearm is about a foot and a half. The foot is about a foot (surprise!). This makes them easier to "eyeball" when working with things that don't have a tight tolerance (read: most stuff normal people work on).

I'm sure there are more reasons, but these seem to be the ones people cite the most. I don't think most Americans even know the metric system is French. We tend to blame England for that sort of tomfoolery.

Re:its not the only time

[Ohreally_factor]

Well, there will be math coprocessor day next year, at least.

Free clue.

[pair-a-noyd]

Get a life.

Advice to Taco

[dwalsh]

what do any of us have to look forward to? Is our future dull and meaningless without cool numbers in dates? Oh the humanity of it all...

Take a vacation.

A slight oversight it would seem

[A Dafa Disciple]

"today, tomorrow and the next day are the only days we'll get dates like this: 2/8/6 3/8/6 4/8/6"

Ummm... you mean this century right?

I'm still surprised this made the front page. I mean, I'm a geek, but even I think this is lame.

Re:A slight oversight it would seem

[Anonymous Coward]

you made me wish so hard there was a second page crap like this could go.

BTW- I believe Tacos goal by posting this was to troll for new "geek dates" to put in his calander

Re:A slight oversight it would seem

[Frankie70]

"today, tomorrow and the next day are the only days we'll get dates like this: 2/8/6 3/8/6 4/8/6"

Ummm... you mean this century right?

Note the "we'll".

None of us reading slashdot today will be alive when x/8/6 happens again.

Re:A slight oversight it would seem

[Anonymous Coward]

not true

Re:A slight oversight it would seem

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, don't you mean this Millenium instead of century?

Bah -- ancient history

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I bought my first IBM PC on August 0th, 1988 (8/0/88 for the numerically challenged).

A long wait until

[Stephen Tennant]

11/11/11 It's the number eleven for Christ's sake!

Re:A long wait until

[Daniel Dvorkin]

When I was carrying a radio in the Army, my call sign was "November one one." Not too many of my fellow infantrymen understood the morbid humor in that, but those who did enjoyed it.

Later, when I went over the the Air Force, my original ETS (expiration of term of service, i.e. the day you get out) was also November 11th. Alas, I re-enlisted -- although that worked out well in another way, since my new ETS was my birthday. But getting out of the service on 11/11 (perhaps I could have stuck around until 11:00, then covered myself with mud and plodded off base?) would have been even cooler, at least from a history geek's POV.

What about yesterday?

[bcat24]

The 80186 was also an Intel processor, wasn't it?

Re:What about yesterday?

[gatkinso]

It still is, and is still popular with the embedded crowd.

Re:What about yesterday?

[guruevi]

It was dubbed the 8086 and it's predecessor was the 8088 and the mathematical coprocessor was the 8087 for desktops you insensitive clod. The 80186 is the embedded (later enhanced) version of the 8086 processor and was not (or hardly) used in desktop computers.

586 and 686 were actually Cyrix' processor just so you know.

Re:What about yesterday?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was dubbed the 8086 and it's predecessor was the 8088 and the mathematical coprocessor was the 8087 for desktops you insensitive clod. The 80186 is the embedded (later enhanced) version of the 8086 processor and was not (or hardly) used in desktop computers.

The 80186 was never mass-market, but it did have significant presence in many general purpose computers. It was NOT designed as an embedded processor, but was later adopted for use that way due to steep discounting. It never gained much popularity as a CPU because it was introduced at almost the same time as the more advanced 80286.

You probably weren't around banks or other Unisys shops in the 1980s. Thousands of banks, credit unions, and financial institutions were equipped with Unisys systems, powered by 80186 processors when competitors were selling 80286 systems. Back then, Unisys had a proprietary modular system that appealed to financial geniuses who didn't then appreciate how fast technology was changing. To expand the system, you'd screw on a "block" to one side of your system case. Want to expand some more? Screw another block to the side. It was very much like large computing Lego blocks, but didn't always function as simply nor upgrade as smoothly as advertised.

I'm pretty sure that Nixdorf (now part of Siemens) sold a lot of 80186 systems in that time frame as well.

Of course, these were usually (but not always) set up as shared Unix computers serving dumb terminals, so you're also right; they were used to power desktops, but they were hardly used in desktop computers.

Re:What about yesterday?

[gmby]

They also make good Gold plated case badges. Fit just right too.

we will always have 4/20

[Bluude]

For those of us who partake of the ganja, we will always have 4/20 once a year. The man can't take that away from us! Ok, some little bastards in columbine tried, but it is still the national pot holiday no matter what they did on that day.

Re:we will always have 4/20

[OzPeter]

Under the fear of having Godwin invoked .. you do know that April 20 is Hitler's birthday?

Re:we will always have 4/20

[Ohreally_factor]

From what I can tell, those of you that partake of ganja celebrate 4:20 twice a day. At least twice.

Re:we will always have 4/20

[AgNO3]

From the pot heads I know the clock is stuck at 4:20 all day long.

e Day

[andphi]

What about 2/8/8 (e Day)? Or 10/6/6 (Norman Conquest Day)? If pi gets a day, e should too.

Re:e Day

[mopslik]

What about 2/8/8 (e Day)?

e=2.71828183, so this would have happened long ago, say 2/7/2 or 2/7/18.

Re:e Day

[andphi]

My apologies. I thought e==2.88. My college algebra class was a long time ago.

Go eat pie

[hrieke]

3/14 of course

Re:Go eat pie

[Anonymous Coward]

7/22 is closer...

SORRY!

[rockytriton]

Eh, Sorry Pinky, but here in America, where these computers were born, we put the month first, so today is 8/2/6!

Re:SORRY!

[Spad]

Sorry, but here in Europe, where the current calendar system was invented, we put the day first, so today is 2/8/6!

Re:SORRY!

[HaydnH]

"Eh, Sorry Pinky, but here in America, where these computers were born, we put the month first, so today is 8/2/6!"

Why do Americans think they invented everything? The computer was thought up by Babbage in the 1800s, and the first computer with electronic memory was invented at Manchester uni in 1948 and was called "The Baby" - although you could probably claim any nation had the first working computer depending how you define a computer right back to the Chinese/Babylonians with the abacus.

Re:SORRY!

[rahrens]

Really? My wife is German, and there, they use *two* digits for the year, as in 2/8/06. (and sometimes, these days, four) I don't recall an Intel processor with that number.

Re:SORRY!

[karot]

I look at it differently again, so perhaps we have to agree to disagree...

2006/8/2 is I agree then "best" way to represent a date - The majority of human-use number systems put the least-significant information to the right hand side. This has the bonus that sorting on a computer (mechanical or electrical) is simplified. Systems that include this are HH:MM:SS and good 'ol decimal numbering Hundreds-Tens-Units.

An alternative in the LSB/MSB world is 2/8/2006 - Computers can be (and are) architected to deal with this type of reversal. Humans can deal with the LSB being at the left hand end of the information. This is still "useful" as processing left-to-right and right-to-left are not really that different. I consider this to be "next best" as it retains a certain amount of logic.

The final option is to ignore whether your data has an order or significance, and just jumble it up. How is MM/DD/YYYY differnt to YYYY/DD/MM ? Would you consider YYYY/DD/MM valid or useful? I am afraid that I personally would not, and but the same token consider MM/DD/YYYY to be not-useful. Perhaps we should just switch to MM/YYYY/DD for fun? :)

I would be seriously interested to know where/why the different system in the USA originated, and by what measure you determine the USA system to be next-best and the European system to be "Fucked up"

Re:SORRY!

[atomic-penguin]

First computer was built by Turing and his associates at Bletchley Park, during WWII. It was classified for some time, so history books may not actually reflect this bit of trivia. It is a matter of debate, as others have claimed ENIAC was the first.

Re:SORRY!

[JohnG307]

It doesn't matter where neither the calendar system nor the computer was invented. It's simply differing convention. If you want to get technical about which format Slashdot should use, it should probably be by where Slashdot servers are located, or where the site was founded. Or if we're a democracy, by which demographic makes up the larger portion of Slashdot visitors.

Re:SORRY!

[Short Circuit]

I don't recall an Intel processor with that number.

It was symlinked in the docs.

Re:SORRY!

[roystgnr]

2006/8/2 is the only logical and correct format.

Close, but it doesn't sort alphabetically, and the / character has a double meaning on Unix systems and in URLs. 2006-08-02 is better, with the added bonus that it's part of the ISO standard.

Of course, it's harder to get interesting date numbers when you've got 8 digits to work with, two of them can't take many values and two or three more only change values very infrequently. 2011-11-02 20:11:11.02 is coming up, I guess.

Re:SORRY!

[insomniac8400]

Your nuts, the month always goes first and the year is 06 not 6.

Re:SORRY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. First digital electronic computer was built in Ames, Iowa: http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml

Re:SORRY!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am SO TIRED of the euro-centric bias on this website!!!

(Hey, you do that to us...)

Re:SORRY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because we say "May 2nd" instead of "2nd of May," and we write it out as we would say it.

Re:SORRY!

[nullgel]

Ask the Stonecutters.

Re:SORRY!

[zerocool^]

Of course, it's harder to get interesting date numbers when you've got 8 digits to work with, two of them can't take many values and two or three more only change values very infrequently. 2011-11-02 20:11:11.02 is coming up, I guess.

2011-11-02_20-11-11_02

Or something. I don't usually deal with fractions of a second (as most of the shell scripts that I have the mangle the date command into fancy-schmancy variables don't run more than once per second). But I always dealt with a logical division in DATE vs TIME by using an underscore. It's a perfectly legal character in Linux, Solaris, and Tru/64 at a minimum, plus Windows I guess. Anyway, I always followed the idea LARGEST-TIME-INTERVAL.....SMALLEST-TIME-INTERVAL, as in YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS.

~X

Re:SORRY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your nuts, the month always goes first and the year is 06 not 6.

No, first it's my nuts, then the year, then the month.

Re:SORRY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because in US, we don't care which year it is. Because every year (for the last several years) the president is the same! Not sure when he will leave. So we gave up counting the years for elections to come. So all matters is Month and then day of the month!

Re:SORRY!

[FrostedWheat]

In the UK you'll hear both ways being spoken, but it's always written DD/MM/YYYY.

Re:SORRY!

[niXcamiC]

By European, you mean everywhere but the USA right? Funny thing is, last time I checked, I wasn't in europe.

Re:SORRY!

[karot]

You probably don't realise it but that is also a "local" feature. In Europe you can use either, so that "My birthday is on December [the] 20th" or "Christmas day is on the 25th of December" are both equally valid.

And why not? They both convey the same information perfectly clearly.

Like I say, agree to disagree :)

Re:SORRY!

[karot]

What I actually meant by European was European :). I have only experienced US and UK/European systems, so I was intentionally limiting the scope of the comment.

No harm meant...

Some more?

[Barny]

Really 5/8/6 and 6/8/6 should be there, they were the designations on some of the "other brand" (then, amd and cyrix) CPUs, of course 8/08/6 should be noted too as should the year 4004... will anyone remember a humble lil adding machine then?

Re:Some more?

[Overzeetop]

Sadly, 6/5/02 has already passed, as that was the computer I learned my first high level language (basic), low level language (assembly) and machine code on.

Re:Some more?

[fbjon]

I'll have a party on 6.12.8, for my old Amstrad.

Re:Some more?

[idonthack]

And with those two added, QuakeCon falls on 386 through 686 :)

3/8/6 ? Bah, humbug!

[Willeh]

Never mind 3/8/6, I'm still baked from celebrating 4/2/0 !

It may be awhile, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Set your calendar for Opteron day: 8/6/64. Some of you young kids may still be around for that one.

Arbitrary Date Schemes

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to cut off the two most significant digits of the year field, why not just cut off the three most significant figures? For that matter, why not cut off the most significant digit of the day and month as well? Then you could have all the x86, 6-6-6, 1-2-3 dates that you wanted.

Well, those schemes aren't very useful without a lot of context, so why not make up new 'year 0's? For example, if you wanted next Tuesday (2006 August 08) to be 8-8-8, all you need to do is find some interesting event in 1998 and just say, "1998AD was so important, it's the new year 0 ACE". Then this year translates to year 8, and you're all set.

The Best Day Already Was...

[Snowcap557]

I still remember 12:34 pm on May 6, 1978 as the best such thing of all time. It was 1234 on 5/6/78!

Re:The Best Day Already Was...

[Apotekaren]

The Finnish alcohol prohibition law was lifted at 10am on the 5th of April 1932. Which in DD/MM/YY hh is 5/4/32 10

Re:The Best Day Already Was...

[rtaylor]

I wasn't around for that one but I did get to celebrate 12:34:56 August 7th, 1990.

I do day before month. Reverse those as you see fit.

Re:The Best Day Already Was...

[Guy.Gregory]

I wasn't born then, so I guess I'll have to wait till 12:34 pm on May 6, 2078...

Re:The Best Day Already Was...

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean 12:34 on the 5th of June 1978?

Re:The Best Day Already Was...

[meowsqueak]

Does anyone know why North Americans use the format month/day/year? It seems completely illogical and counter-intuitive to me. I'm also not a great fan of the European format either (day/month/year) although it is slightly more understandable.

I use YYYY-MM-DD format almost everywhere. Has a nice advantage that you can sort by chronological order easily.

Re:The Best Day Already Was...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know why North Americans use the format month/day/year?

Because they want to be wacky and different. It makes no sense to have the month, then the day, then the year. It's going from medium-term to short-term to long-term. There is no ordering there. Short-medium-long (dd/mm/yyyy) makes sense, so does long-medium-short (yyyy/mm/dd). In the US they said "Let's be different and write our dates in a nonsensical format. Just to be different from those British (and everyone else in the world too)!".

That's nice.

[Minwee]

Except that tomorrow is 2006-08-02, followed by 2006-08-03 and 2006-08-04.

Re:That's nice.

[Hymer]

Better yet... so it is a Motorola 68K days instead of Intel x86 days ?

Unless of course one speaks hungarian

[szo]

In this case one write and talk the same way: YYYY/MM/DD. And I'm sure there are plenty of other languages does that too.

thank god

[Pliep]

Thank god for this newsitem. I had been wondering the past few weeks why I visit Slashdot anyway.

Re:thank god

[paralaxcreations]

Why, to read people bicker about which date format is the best, of course!

Pah! Freeze me

[91degrees]

Thaw me out for 8/02/86. Then freeze me again until the year 6502.

I think you have too much time on your hands...

[citizenklaw]

Please step away from the keyboard slowly. Go get a very stiff drink. Repeat often. Do not post on Slashdot until September.

8/2/6 Brighton MetroBus

[digitaldc]

Today we celebrate the Brighton 826 MetroBus.

Yes, I realize it has the route number 273 on it, but really it is the 826!

Let's all celebrate the wonders of mass transit!

Re:8/2/6 Brighton MetroBus

[AberBeta]

Today we celebrate the Brighton 826 MetroBus.

We ought to fix your locale too.

Re: It's funny. Laugh. (offtopic)

[KURAAKU Deibiddo]

Obviously Slashdot needs this addition to the source:

StephenColbert++;

Just think what can be added to Wikipedia's Slashdot entry! @.~

More dates to come...

[Anonymous Coward]

It turns out that there are always more dates. Ignoring anniversaries and birthdays, there are some interesting dates still coming.
There is the 2038 32-bit seconds wrap around.
There is also March 14, 2015 = 3/14/15 (pi ~ 3.1415).

What about the 586?

[eno2001]

The i586 DOES exist. Same as the i686. I don't care what Intel marketing pushed down people's throats, I still call them 586 and 686 systems. So does the Linux kernel...

Re:What about the 586?

[cnettel]

The instruction sets implemented by different i586s differ (MMX added some real niceties even to common code), and for i686 even more so. (MMX? Not on PPro. SSE? Only on Pentium III and up. SSE-2? Only on Banias and up, if you consider them i686s. And... what the heck is Netburst? i786? What's Core 2?)

Re:What about the 586?

[RosenSama]

I don't care what Intel marketing pushed down people's throats, I still call them 586 and 686 systems. So does the Linux kernel...

I think you've stumbled onto something. It's much preferable for you and the kernel to shove something down my throat. I believe as a team this opens up some interesting careers in adult entertainment for us.

Re:What about the 586?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh do tell. Do tell. I'm assuming you're female, have brown or red hair, brown eyes, about 5'7"-6'0" tall and weigh between 120-140 proportionate to height. You will have a waist that is narrower than hips or chest to provide the wasp-like body I prefer. Breast size is irrelevant, but I do prefer a round rear. Areolas must not exceed 1.75" and nipple length should be between .25 and .75 inches. Otherwise, it probably won't work out.

Re:What about the 586?

[theonetruekeebler]

The i586 DOES exist

The problem is that there's no date for 5/8/5.99996546

Date formats

[Rik Sweeney]

It's all well and good people saying the correct date format is yyyy-mm-dd, but how do people actually pronounce it?

I for one certainly don't say it's 2006, August the 2nd. I'd either say it's 2nd August 2006 or August 2nd 2006...

Re:Date formats

[Hymer]

well, and where is the logic in the Germen and Danish way of saying nine and twenty instead of twentynine ?
...and you don't even want to know the logic behind 50, 60, 70, 80 and 90 in Danish... they are based on 20 instead of 10 so 70 = 3½ x 20 except we say 4/2 x 20, (halvfjerds = half four [times twenty]) and yes, times twenty is optional...
--
No Sig.

Oh dear

[martinmarv]

It's sad that these are the only kind of dates we have to look forward to :o(

d/m/y?

[Digital Vomit]

"today, tomorrow and the next day are the only days we'll get dates like this: 2/8/6 3/8/6 4/8/6 like the x86 computers :-)"

Has Y2K taught you nothing? Using a single digit to store the year? You are among programmers! Hang your head in shame!

Re:d/m/y?

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, nobody really expects Slashdot to still be in use when the Year 2010 problem strikes.

Re:d/m/y?

[TopShelf]

Shhhhh... it's a top-secret IT job-creation scheme!

Re:d/m/y?

[Larry Lightbulb]

Does the 2010 problem refer to bad sequels?

Re:d/m/y?

[HRH King Lerxst]

Yes, but it is more well known as the Gungan syndrome.

Best graduation year ever: 1961

[RobertB-DC]

My father is especially proud to be a member of the Class of 1961. His class ring reads the same right-side-up or upside-down!

The usual suspects note that the condition won't happen again until the Year of our Lord 6009 (that is, if man is still alive, if woman can survive...).

Unix time

[MerrickStar]

But I thought that today was 1154520000 - 1154606399

Re:only if you use a faggy date system

[clickclickdrone]

>If you use a real date system, then this is 8/2/06
We do, you're the oddballs. Poxy 'mercans, always convinced their way is the only way.

Next Palindrome Day...

[GuruBuckaroo]

January 2nd, 2010 (01/02/2010) for Americans, February first for the rest of you. Last one was October 2, 2001 (10/02/2001) here - I threw a party (any excuse, really).

Numerology

[NetOgre]

The human mind will always seek out patterns in the numbers. So no fear in a great abyss in cool number combinations. My upcoming favorites are (including the time of day): 12:34:56 7/8/9 and only a bit more than five years until 11:11:11 11/11/11

Psht! Psht!

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Real Nerd? hardly, you've just reordered the numbers. Anyone can do that. We need it more obscure, nerder way of doing it. Check the following out:

Todays date is:

114415202

Plus, I think we should all just refer to all dates as a stardates.

But you'll never have 13/3/7!

[Animaether]

In all the sensible word, 'leet' day will be on the 13th of March, 2007.

You would have had it on the 33rd of January or the 3rd of the 13th calendar month... -if- they existed.

Re:But you'll never have 13/3/7!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in mm/dd/yy land, we need only survive until 1/3/37

At least we have something to look forward to.

Re:But you'll never have 13/3/7!

[diesterne]

Hey, we can even have the FULL version! 31/3/37

in 31 years...

[lcde]

we can have 1/3/37

heh.

Re:in 31 years...

[Gleng]

We can have 13/3/7 way sooner over here in the UK!

More dates to look forward to

[tobiasly]

In recent years we've seen numerical giants like 3/1/4, 6/6/6 and 1/2/3, but now really, what do any of us have to look forward to? Is our future dull and meaningless without cool numbers in dates? Oh the humanity of it all...

3/1/2104, 6/6/2106, and 1/2/2103. Humanity will be OK.

Useless data

[mangu]

What kind of date format puts the number your most unlikely to need first (the year) and the one you will most likely want to know last.

By your reasoning, the number which you are least likely to need, the century, shouldn't be used at all, right?

co-processor days

[pci]

I'm waiting for next year where the unappreciated chips finally get there days.

387 and 487 chips were the bomb.

March 10th

[NekoXP]

So okay, this is news?

Every year March 10th comes around and we don't get a bunch of news posts from Nintendo fans because it's MAR10 day yet again.

It can't be that slow on a Tuesday in August. What is the world coming to?

Re:March 10th

[mindtriggerz]

Hey, that's my birthday!

I can hardly contain myself

[ACQ]

This is almost as exciting as the recent news of British Telecom cebrating traffic lights. Or yesterday, 8/2/06 (i.e. yesterday).

Donald Becker quote

[DragonHawk]

In a discussion involving both 3Com's 3C509 and 3C905 network cards, Donald Becker came up with this gem:

"3Com only purchased rights to the numbers '3' '5' and '9'. Intel
owns '4', '8', '6', and '2'. '0' and '1' are still in the public
domain."

Re:Donald Becker quote

[BabyDave]

Not true any more, of course.

Re:Donald Becker quote

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell happened to 7?

Re:Donald Becker quote

[Anonymous Coward]

9 eight 7

Re:Donald Becker quote

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't speak of s-ven.

And to think...

[Short Circuit]

...next year, we'll get floating-point coprocessors!

What about Fibonaci day?

[Limburgher]

11:23:58 13/21/34? Oh, wait, that's unpossible.

Re:What about Fibonaci day?

[Aladrin]

11:23:58 1/3/2134

Don't hold your breath waiting for it, though.

Re:What about Fibonaci day?

[Anonymous Coward]

not really, if we can push the earth to a much longer orbit around the sun and we still define a year and the current months we have the same we'll eventually get to a long enough orbit to need 9 more months...

Re:What about Fibonaci day?

[Anonymous Coward]

11:23:58 13/21/34? Oh, wait, that's unpossible.

11/23/58 13:21:34 would work though

There are lots of dates

[RyoShin]

We can achieve greater pi on March 14th, 2015. (Only if you use the m/d/y format; the Brits won't get this day until January 3rd, 2415.)

There's also e day, on either January 7th or July 2nd in 2018, depending on which version you use.

And, of course, there's the rapture, or as I like to call it: i day.

Re:There are lots of dates

[decadre]

2016 actually

Pi goes: 3.14159... (and so on), so you would round up to 3.1416

Even better was...

[mr_rangr]

12:34:56 pm on July 8, 1990, since it was 12:34:56 7/8/90. Now *that* was the best such thing of all time.

My daughter lucked out

[Just Some Guy]

My oldest daughter was born on February 2, 2000: 02/02/2000. She turned 2 on 02/02/02, and her 20th birthday will be on 02/02/2020 (or 2020-02-02).

Beats the heck out my birthday: OJ was found "not guilty". Oh, and Germany was re-united, but I'm an American and we don't get much news from Asia.

Y2K!!!

[camperdave]

yy? YY! It's because of people like you that we had the whole Y2k issue. It wasn't because computers didn't have space, it was because people are too explitive lazy to write out a 4 digit year, or even think in terms of 4 digit years.

I dislike numeric months because you never know if the person is using day/month or month/day. 144 days out of the year are ambiguous because of this. Unfortunately we're also in the middle of 12 years where the (<shudder>two digit</shudder>) year number can be confused for a day number or a month number.

I personally use dd-MON-yyyy, ie 02-AUG-2006. It's nice, and completely unambiguous. <psycho-rant> Unfortunately, the banking system in my beloved country is forcing me to use ddmmyyyy. Cheques now have pre-printed field indicators instead of a simple line. Screw them! I just won't use cheques anymore. HAHaHa! </psycho-rant>

Yawn...

[davmoo]

While this is fun and all that, in reality I don't know of anyone outside of the Slashdot community that would write the year as simply '6'. 99.99 percent of real people are going to write it as either '06' or '2006'.

Sensible sort orders, sane celebrations

[cffrost]

Those of us who prefer numerical dates to sort in chronological order already celebrated these chips in 2002, 2003 and 2004. Plus, we attended two-day festivals, ALU Day and FPU Day. You M/D/Y yokels have to wait another year for all three FPU Days? Crazy I say, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

month notations

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never seen little endian month notations used before. I've seen big endian and middle endian, but not little.

Anyway, it's not really even 2/8/6, it's 2/8/2006. You'll always find random relationships between dates and other things, no matter what.

News you might be interested in.

[thegnu]

I bought a freaking Sansa e250 (not to be confused with the non-freaking model) using my Best Buy gift cards, and it works under linux in MSC mode! w00t! w00t, w00t!

Nathan Curry's firt mp3 player guys, this is big. Bastard /. mods rejected the story, though. Also, Rockbox devel is beginning on the e200 series, which means someday I'll be all in Linux and 1337 again.

It plays some video you can hardly see, but at 15fps max and ~200 x ~145 resolution, I can store massive quantities of pr0n. You know, if I ever have any trouble getting any, BECAUSE MY MP3 PLAYER'S SO F*&$#ING COOL IT'LL GET ME LAID AT THE DROP OF A HAT!!!1111!!!111111./1/.111

Now all I need is an appropriately cool hat....

Re:News you might be interested in.

[NekoXP]

No thanks.

Binary

[jaweekes]

No, the real nerd uses Binary 1000/100/110 (8/4/6) (and no, I didn't use Calc to figure that out.)

I can't wait until 1000/1000/1000 (8/8/8). It works the same in all time zones (OK, North Korea is just strange) and has to be one of the geekiest dates out there (1/1/1 was good too!).

Re: d m y

[Malfourmed]

we say 'The twenty-ninth of july two-thousand and six' more than we say something like 'July twenty-ninth two thousand and six

About the only case the month is put before the day in my (non-US) experience is when talking about "September 11"...

ISO date vs DoD date

[DragonHawk]

"That's what the military and most "with it" government organization use. I've also adopted myself because (a) it is completely unambiguous and (b) I'm an asshole."

You don't say whose military or government. The US DoD, at least, is large enough that there are multiple "standards". I've seen MM/DD/YY (08/02/06) and YYYY-MMM-DD (2006-AUG-02) most often, I think. The ISO date form is YYYY-MM-DD (2006-08-02) or YYYYMMDD (20060802).

Personally, I find the mixed number/letter forms like "2006 AUG 2" and "2 Aug 2006" work best when dealing with other humans who speak the same language. It's unambiguous -- there's only one sane way to interpret it -- and the letter/number distinction stands out more than dashes. For computers and other kinds of filing, though, the ISO form definately wins. It makes sorting so much easier.

Re:ISO date vs DoD date

[kabocox]

The ISO date form is YYYY-MM-DD (2006-08-02) or YYYYMMDD (20060802).

Personally, I find the mixed number/letter forms like "2006 AUG 2" and "2 Aug 2006" work best when dealing with other humans who speak the same language. It's unambiguous -- there's only one sane way to interpret it -- and the letter/number distinction stands out more than dashes. For computers and other kinds of filing, though, the ISO form definately wins. It makes sorting so much easier.

I think that our schools should switch and start teaching the ISO YYYY-MM-DD. It's all in what you were taught in what makes sense. For everything that I personally do, it's in YYYY-MM-DD. I hate encountering files that are DD/MM/YY or MM/DD/YY, it's just difficult using them for files. I wish governments would switch to YYYY-MM-DD and then filing could be made so much easier.

Re:ISO date vs DoD date

[zerocool^]

When I worked at a computer store (in the US), we did a lot of recovering people's data from an otherwise dead-ish machine. We'd pull the hard drive out and plug it into a machine that existed for this purpose (well, for backups, virus scans, and driver downloads). Anyway, I always stored data I'd backed up in the format D:\CustBackups\YYYY-MM-DD because if you store it day first, or even month first, and sort alphabetically, it gets to be a jumbled mess.

YYYY-MM-DD sorts alphabetically into chronological order. If you use dd-mm-yy, sorting alphabetically is going to put 04-08-2006-blahblah right next to 04-07-2006-blahblah when these files were created a month apart. At least mm-dd-yy solves this problem 330 days at a time, but YYYY-MM-DD is the way to go.

~X

Re:ISO date vs DoD date

[jafac]

My military customer demanded DD/MMM/YYYY.

The funny part is - they keep going back and forth on whether they want the time in 12 or 24 hour format, in GMT or local time zones.

Re:ISO date vs DoD date

[jafac]

You've gotta fucking be kidding, right?

In the 1970's, in grade school, I was taught metric measurements, in anticipation that the US was going to switch to metric, like the rest of the world.

Then Reagan got elected.

Now I live in a country that uses this byzantine system of weights and measures, and I'll be damned if I'm going to learn how many furlongs are in a hogshead.

And now you want to mess with dates?

They're going to brand you a French Spy and burn you in effigy.

Re:ISO date vs DoD date

[kabocox]

You've gotta fucking be kidding, right? In the 1970's, in grade school, I was taught metric measurements, in anticipation that the US was going to switch to metric, like the rest of the world. Then Reagan got elected. Now I live in a country that uses this byzantine system of weights and measures, and I'll be damned if I'm going to learn how many furlongs are in a hogshead.
And now you want to mess with dates? They're going to brand you a French Spy and burn you in effigy.

I doubt that the US will ever move away from feet/inces/miles. Feet and inches are just easier than metric units for the construction industry. Metric doesn't offer any advantages. Yard/Feet/inches offer practical advantages over units that you can only evenly divide by 2, 5, 10. Miles and KM are about the same thing. What advantage is there for switching from miles to km? Oh yes we become SI friendly. I like our temperature scale better because it is more useful for weather measurements than the other. Most people only use temperature for cooking and noticing the weather. I'd think that the SI units are actually used in industry, but I could be wrong there. But come on YYYY-MM-DD makes everything easier! I was taught MM/DD/YY in school. I had to write it below my name on everything. The YY was just and after thought and really didn't matter much in a school environment where you threw way all those school papers at the end of the year. Out of school though keeping things. Everything is in MM/DD/YY like it is supposed to be easy. Well, it is pretty easy for sorting within a year, but once you start keeping years of data is starts to become unfriendly. Sorting things in the computer is trivial with YYYY-MM-DD as well.

Re:ISO date vs DoD date

[1u3hr]

I doubt that the US will ever move away from feet/inces/miles. Feet and inches are just easier than metric units for the construction industry.

Australia switched in the 70s. In construction you just spec everything in mm. Much simpler and more precise. Though you might still talk about a "two by four" (inches) plank.

I spent many hours in primary school doing calculations with inches, feet, yards, chains, furlongs, miles and really you can't be serious if you think that was easier. Traditionalists bitched about it of course, but in a year or two it was all over.

Re:ISO date vs DoD date

[jafac]

Australia switched in the 70s. In construction you just spec everything in mm. Much simpler and more precise.

Maybe that's why the lumber industry doesn't like it.
I have a hard time finding quantities of lumber where significant quantities of studs aren't warped or knotted, or barked, or otherwise munged up. Imagine if they were held to a "mm" length. Hell, a 2x4 is more often than not more like 1 3/4" x 3 1/2". I have no idea how professional construction guys cope with this crap.

triangles

[mjjw]

We.ve had 3/4/5 but in the next few years we have a few more of the nice triangle numbers coming up. Not really computer related, but geeky.

other dates of import....

[phlegmofdiscontent]

You could celebrate 27/1/8 or 27/1/81 in Europe, or you could celebrate 2/7/18 in the US (for the non-math geeks, that refers to e). Again, in Europe, you could celebrate 31/4/15 and in the US you could celebrate 3/14/15. Quite frankly, except for dates like 6/6/6 or 7/7/7, you could have different celebrations for the same number on different continents and in many different combinations.

Re:other dates of import....

[guhvanoh]

You must be the only person whose April as 31 days...

Re:only if you use a faggy date system

[rahrens]

Actually, even in your way of saying it, the date is really either 2/8/06 or 2/8/2006, neither one of which would really rise to the level of deserving an article on /.!

I'm a Mac user...

[Blakey Rat]

I'm a Mac user, how long do I have to wait for 6/80/40?

Re:I'm a Mac user...

[Anonymous Coward]

While you might think your Quadra 950 is still an awesome box, what you should be waiting for is 5/16/0 ... which might get announced on 8/7/06.

Re:I'm a Mac user...

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm a Mac user, how long do I have to wait for 6/80/40?

The 80th of June, 1940???

I don't think 3/8/6 is a big deal, because it's an abbreviation. My big day to celebrate was 8/03/86! The '386 was brand new then...

Re:I'm a Mac user...

[r00t]

Being a Mac user, your day will never come.

Pi day

[aniefer]

I've always appreciated 3/14. Especially since at university it meant free pie and ice cream at 1:59.

This is the stupidest article I've ever seen on /.

[kmhebert]

And also, the max length of the subject line is too short. Anyway, this is really a meaningless article and a waste of time. You can find significance in any numerical combination on the calendar if you try hard enough. There was no reason to put this article on the front page, and to put it in the "Funny" category is an insult to the concept of humor.

numbers as dates

[paughsw]

dates as numbers are interesting

Re:The trouble with 'AUG' or 'SEP'

[Thundarr Trollgrim]

The trouble with 'AUG' or 'SEP' is that these make no sense in many languages, whereas the numbers translate well. YYYY-MM-DD makes the most sense. Most significant digits first, just as in the rest of our entire number system.

Re:what about the lucky tens?

[javalizard]

10/10/10

After all that is 42 in binary.... What was the question?

Luckiest day in a hundred years coming up

[ahg]

Personally, I'm looking forward to the luckiest day of the century next year - 7/7/7 :) Works for both Americans and Europeans too.

"(albeit in reverse order)"

[interactive_civilian]

stunt_penguin said:

Apart from that, doing it dd/mm/yy make logical sense, as the values are ordered in order of significance/magnitude like a numerical system (albeit in reverse order).

Just a random peice of useless information, but in Japan, they do yyyy/mm/dd. Even when they are speaking, (if they are saying the whole date), they say ####nen, ##gatsu, ##nichi (generally, with variations on the words used for the first 10 days).

This always made more sense to me, and that is how I write dates shorthand for things like blog and journal(as in dead tree) entries.

314?

[glwtta]

Never thought my geek card would be in danger, but what's the significance of 3/1/4?

Re:314?

[KmN]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi

Yanky Doodle

[Anonymous Coward]

To all those people using the MM/DD/YYYY. Can you not see that your counties logic falls flat on it's arse?

Best to keep things in order largest to smallest or visa versa. The person that came up with the MM/DD/YYYY was smoking his socks.

The best system is to use YYYY/MM/DD, as when sorting directorys/folders/files they will be in the correct order then.

yyyy/mm/dd and sorting on computers

[Quevar]

As a "crazy American" who has lived overseas, I get completely confused by this and never can remember how I am supposed to write it when I sign documents.

As for sorting in a list, I think dd/mm/yy would be really confusing, you'd end up with the following list:
10/11/03
11/11/01
12/11/06
13/11/97

Since I'm cunfused about how to write it anyway, on the computer, I write the date as yyyy/mm/dd, which will actually sort to a chronological list. It's confusing to others who see it, but it's my documents, so at worst it will confuse people who shouldn't be looking at them anyway.

Interesting side note about sorting on computers. Some OSes will actually ignore the leading 0 and treat the number as a whole number, while some don't. Compare the two following lists:
8.jpg
9.jpg
10.jpg
11.jpg
                      or
10.jpg
11.jpg
8.jpg
9.jpg
The second list is comparing only the first number while the first looks at the whole number and then compares it.

Re:yyyy/mm/dd and sorting on computers

[mugs_oh]

The do that because the number is a text character; there is no leading zero in a file name unless you actually type in the character 0, as in 08.jpg 09.jpg 10.jpg

Yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

But will Slashdot also announce x86 days for POSIX time?

What? How are you not waiting for 11/11/11?

[Xshare]

On 11/11/11 (noone actually writes dates one-digit-at-a-time anymore anyways), at 11:11:11. You can actually have a hole date/time stamp without using anything but the digit 1.

Re:What? How are you not waiting for 11/11/11?

[pontifier]

I'm a fan of all of the times I can look at my watch and see only ones and zeros. It happened a lot in 2000/2001, and 11/11/11 is the end of that for the next 89 years. March forever on, you crazy counter.

Re:What? How are you not waiting for 11/11/11?

[xenn]

Yeah, but I'll be turning 36 that day (if I make it). It was better when I turned 11 on the 11th of the 11th.

My mother tells be I was born at 11am as well. So whenever I hear that speech for dead soldiers, "On the 11th hour of the 11th day we gather to remember those gave their lives...blah...blah...blah", I think of her.

MOD PARENT UP

[voxel]

Mod the parent of this parent DOWN... Gosh, what an IIDIIOOT.

Also, Happy Orignial-Name-For-The-Pentium day!

[GDI Lord]

As I recall it, "586" was the name the Pentium was supposed to be known as, but then Intel changed it for marketing and copyright reasons. Geeks of the world, unite for our babies' ancestors' birthdays!

Re:This is the stupidest article I've ever seen on

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD PARENT UP Fvcking lame....I'm done with this dumb site.

Off by an order of magnitude

[goodben]

It will next occur in the following millenium.

Re:Off by an order of magnitude

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope.
Now its 2006 - abbreviated to '06
Next century it will be 2106 - abbreviated to '06.

He got his order of magnitude right.

What about time for pi ?

[Asprin]

3/14/15 9:26:53

Mmmmmm.... pi...

See, there's still stuff to look forward to!

Re:What about time for pi ?

[ElephanTS]

Sorry, there's a rounding error - should be 3/14/15 9.26:54.

This is the most geeky thing I've ever done - please believe me.

Pi=3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399 37510.....

Re:What about time for pi ?

[bk4u]

1/3/37

Re:What about time for pi ?

[AK Marc]

Sorry, there's a rounding error - should be 3/14/15 9.26:54.

Except when actually typing it into a calculator, I never round. Pi is best left truncated. It makes it easier for those that don't know it very far to at least have the digits they do know be right. I would go with the original truncated number, not yours. But, being separated by a second, I don't think anyone will notice the difference.

Re:What about time for pi ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fourteenth month of 2015? Are you mad?

11/3/8

[RobbieCrash]

THX anyone? November third, or March eleventh whichever.

Politicically Correct Endianness

[camperdave]

That's what the Americans were doing. They were being Politically correct. By being both little-endian and big-endian in their date format, they try to offend nobody.

BACKSLASH

[zenray]

I can't wait for the BACKSLASH summary of this article. Maybe I'll understand dates then.

y/m/d

[gullevek]

the rest is just not logical.

only with y/m/d you have a perfect sort order everywhere. Everything else is just screwed up.

We still have the poor man's 3/1/4

[blonde rser]

In a couple of years we'll have 27/1/8. Kind of weak really. What I'm looking forward to is 3/14/15. That'll be pretty sweet.

Only for Y99 Eurpoean Dates.

[GodWasAnAlien]

We should really stop using Y99 dates, Okay?
It's embarassing that geeky slashdot uses Y99 dates:
  article.pl?sid=06/08/02

We should really all be using International dates:(IS0 8601)
It is the most constistient format:
  Date components are most to least significant order.
  Time components are most to least significant order.
  Digit components are most to least significant order.

Good example, international date:

Most to least components being AA-EE
AAaa-BB-CC DD:EE
2006-08-02 10:30

Bad examples:

Y99 US Date order:

BB/CC/aa DD:EE
08/02/06 10:30

European Date order:
CC-BB-AAaa DD:EE
02.08.2006 10:30

Y99 European Date order: (what this article is about)
CC.BB.aa DD:EE
02.08.06 10:30

Y99 International dates: (what slashdot uses in uris/db?)
aa-BB-CC DD:EE
06-08-02 10:30

don't forget

[gullevek]

that in Japan they do the little twist that on official papers you have to write the japanese year. Which dead confuses me, because I always forget in which japanese year I was born. I just know that we are now in H and before was... S? Showa? Now _thats_ damn confusing :)

Dresdon Codex

[asam bashir]

Maya knowledge, the present age also lasts 13 baktun, the current cycle of the long count will be completed when the count again reaches 13.0.0.0.0, in 2012. http://members.shaw.ca/mjfinley/calnote.htm

Faster and hotter?

[Roadkills-R-Us]

Does that mean each day we'll work faster?

Not only that, each day we'll get hotter! Yow!

But alas, a day later we'll all be obsoleteexcept for a few niche lives...

The Boeing Days

[turdinthegrowler]

Thanks to this timely post, we can begin planning in earnest for the upcoming Boeing Days festivities next year which will be celebrated on the seventh of every month from February to July.

Just Wait

[L053R]

In a few years we will have (in US date style) 7/7/7, 3/14/15, 1/6/18 and 2/7/18.

Yes, ISO 8661

[GodWasAnAlien]

Yes, ISO 8661 dates.

I live in the US, and I use international dates, unless a form forces an order.

Some europeans like European dates over US dates, but European dates are reverse significant order (while times are in significant order).

KDE uses international dates.

The date/time rollover is more natural, using interational dates. I think you may be less likely to write a 13th month check if you use international dates:

As a time rolls from:
10:59:59
to:
11:00:00

A date rolls from:
2005-12-31
to:
2006-01-01

But whatever the order you want to use, please stop using Y99 dates: 01/02/03.

Re:Yes, ISO 8661

[dastrike]

Now that doesn't sound quite right...

ISO 8661
Caprolactam for industrial use -- Determination of volatile bases content -- Titrimetric method after distillation

ISO 8601 is a bit closer to being relevant to the matter at hand.

ISO 8601
Data elements and interchange formats -- Information interchange -- Representation of dates and times

Re:Yes, ISO 8661

[Omestes]

The problem is relavence. The most important feature of the date is the day, followed by the month, only rarely does the year confuse us. With YYYY-MM-DD, the first feature is the year, which is the least useful.

The European system makes the most sense, but I really could care less, it never has lead to much more than momentary confusion.

Agreed, boycott euro/us formats.

[pavon]

I refuse to write any date in mm/dd/yy or dd/mm/yy format, because I can never remember which way people are going to interpret it. For technical work I use ISO format (2006-08-02), which is sortable and unambiguous to anyone who has encountered it. For non-technical use, like anything I have to sign, I use "Drafting" or "Military" format (2 Aug 2006) which is completely unambiguous. I have never once had a single person complain, and it saves me all sorts of headache.

Sortable Dates

[scovetta]

ISO is nice because it sorts nicely:
  2006-08-02 < 2007-07-07

I got used to it working with Peoplesoft and now it feels more natural than the oft-confusing 2/8/06 (8/2/06)?!

For visual dates, I'd like to see more "6 July 2005"-style, but we Americans would rather adopt the metric system than give up our date format.

Re:Sortable Dates

[ros0709]

The US did once use the dd/mm/yy form. This is still evident in "4th of July".

Re:Sortable Dates

[mpe]

The US did once use the dd/mm/yy form. This is still evident in "4th of July".

The US likes to be different from elsewhere. Soon after independence some things were changed from the English was of doing things very deliberatly, but since then the meme has become a lot more subtle.

Replacing code dates with international dates

[GodWasAnAlien]

Again, don't confuse international dates (ISO 8661) with European dates.

Sometimes when I am updating some code documents with dates, I will replace the US Y99 dates with international dates,

So:

01/02/03 - code creation

becomes:
2003-01-02 - code creation
2006-08-02 - fixed a bug

International dates are significantly in order, as times are.

No, the year is the most important for context)

[goldfndr]

Isn't the day of the month the most important thing you look at first, so it's written to the left first. Just seems logical, the day / month / then the year. It's in order :)

The year puts everything into context - for example, hearing 1943 first can trigger memories of WW2 before you hear the date. While the month can put the others into a bit of context (by season), the day really doesn't. More here. Did you actually think about this before posting?

OTOH, you ended with a smiley, so maybe you were being sarcastic.

Long live the UNIX timestamp

[toofast]

Today is 1154536012. None of this mm/dd/yy bullcrap.

Re:Long live the UNIX timestamp

[rsun]

At least until 2038 or so that is...

Re:Long live the UNIX timestamp

[Ruie]

Today is 1154536012. None of this mm/dd/yy bullcrap.

So, I guess you are caught in the time loop.. How are things going to be in 2037 ?

Re:Long live the UNIX timestamp

[toofast]

Bah, they'll think of something. They always do. I'll be 65 then, so time won't matter when I'm retired.

This century

[jackelfish]

I think that in 2106 we will also write 2/8/6. If not in 2106, 3006 for sure. What was a computer anyhow?

Another way to look at things...

[dokhebi]

Don't forget August 8, 2006 can be written as 8/08/6, and in 2008 as 8/08/8.

Just my $0.02 worth.

9/8/7 6:54:32.10

[with_him]

September 8th of next year the world will end, and I know the time. Luckly I plan on sleeping through it. I mean it will only last for a 10 ten of a second but I will still be waiting for that exact moment in time. It I wasn't an American I would be excited by August 9th that I for the rest of the world.

You are a traitor..

[ModernGeek]

..there is no way you are from Europe. In the EU, mainly UK, fag means cigarette, and is not used as a derogatory term (afaik). You say that the American date system is faggy, and then go on to say that the European one is better. You must be an American-hateing American. Traitor.

Re:You are a traitor..

[Anonymous Coward]

I personaly find it fasinating that a oppinion "not-of-the-party-line" is concidered tratiorious, so tell me again how the states is ment to be "more free" than the former USSR was.

Reasoning for USA

[anglozaxxon]

12/31/2006 = December the Thirty-First, Two Thousand Six. Same ordering as language. Makes sense to me.

Look for this story again next year...

[Shotgun]

except then it will be for 1/8/7, 2/8/7, and 3/8/7.

You can add that story to this one now, but it will add faster if you wait till then.

Re:Look for this story again next year...

[4D6963]

except then it will be for 1/8/7, 2/8/7, and 3/8/7.

I think 1/8/7 will rather be celebrated by gangsta rap fans ;-)

Re:Look for this story again next year...

[4D6963]

Oh and by the way there's never been a 80187

Moreover

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were born in 1942 and your birthday is in the next three days, that makes you x86-64.

What about 6/5/02?

[joetheappleguy]

What about 6502 day? That came and went whitout any notice, you heartless bastiches!

Bender and the Apple II deserve better than that.

Ok Rush Fans!

[Tripledub]

Anyone looking forward to 2/1/12?

Re:Ok Rush Fans!

[dmnic]

so, um are you referring to feb 1, 2012(usa) or jan 2, 2012(rest of world)?

omg LEET

[Anonymous Custard]

I can't wait for March 13th, 2007. ... or 13-3-7 :)

Re: d m y

[quizzicus]

An oddity that just occurred to me is that we Americans tend to say "fourth of July" more than "July fourth". Any guesses why we're inconsistent here?

oops, ISO 8601

[Anonymous Coward]

I am confused(x2), being an AC to note this. So sorry for those that were trying to represend dates using a titrimetric method after distillation.

A reminder

[Bugs42]

Regarding the extensive debate over its m/d/y or d/m/y or d/m/yy or whatever the hell your calendar prefence is: WHO FETHING CARES? The entire point of this is that, by one particular format, the next few days are 286, 386, and 486. PERIOD. Yes yes, everyone here is perfectly aware that there were other days that fit, and that these days don't work out in some formats, but for Christ's sake does it matter? In one format, the upcoming days remind us of CPUs. Can't we just leave it at that?

Re:A reminder

[assassinator42]

Who cares that the dates remind us of CPUs? What format people use for dates is much more interesting. Slashdot seems to use the American way, unless it changes based on where you're accessing it from.

Re:A reminder

[Kredal]

Slashdot uses their own way... they don't even care what YEAR something was posted in. If you look back at old stories, there is no way to tell exactly what year something was posted in. This is a poor data scheme if I've ever seen one.

Y2K Incompliance

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

All these little date games rely on people's persistant non-compliant use of two-digit years.

You know, when Y2K rolls around, you all are SO gonna regret this.

Rush, Feb. 1, 2012

[I'm a Mime]

Any fan of Tom Sawyer is looking forward to International Rock Day when we all tell of our love of Rush. 2/1/12

Slashdot - news for nerds

[GotNoSauce]

And stuff that REALLY matters.

You call it being pushy; we call it a standard

[raddan]

We Merricans have to be pushy every now and then. Shoot, without us, you smelly Europeans wouldn't have ASCII. Now you're trying to force Unicode down our throats like you do with your cheese and pate. Well, we'll just take our characters home with us, and what will you be left with? Only accent characters! Ha ha! Take that, frog!

Re:You call it being pushy; we call it a standard

[MaxInBxl]

Well, we'll just take our characters home with us, and what will you be left with? Only accent characters! Ha ha! Take that, frog!

fíñë é

euler

[daevt]

2/7/18

80501, not 80586

[Kaseijin]

Pentiums were designated 80501-80503. Subsequent chips have been 8052x-8055x.

That's what's great about Open Source

[mr_mischief]

If you want a formattable date function, you can write it your damn self! This isn't a dig against people with other date formats. It's a way to point out a smallish programming project someone of middling skill can do to help a project that's open to broad collaboration.

One argument people always give against Free Software and Open Source software is that not everyone can code, and that not all coders can code well enough to do what every app takes. Chances are, though, that if an Open Source program suits your needs well enough except for one small but important feature you can probably find someone who will add the feature for you. If you can't do it, a friend might do it for free or someone might do it for very little money since it's not a major project. They can't do that nearly as well or as easily if they don't have access to the code.

Instead of paying a bunch to get a clone of a closed-source program with an added feature or having to have an add-on program that fixes details like this, you can pay once and use it in-house. If you release it back into the world, then more people can use it. If the project maintainers include it in new releases, then you've scratched your own itch and made the project better.

I know it may seem a stretch to go from talking about dates to talking about how software handles dates to talking about Open Source, but this is still /. right?

Re:That's what's great about Open Source

[1u3hr]

If you want a formattable date function, you can write it your damn self!

It's not a "date function" that's the problems, it's closed source accounting programs that have no options to change their input or output formats; for which I DID write little scripts to connect and convert things, all by my own damn self; and had to remember to revise them every time we needed to do something new. Admittedly, this was more a problem with DOS apps than modern apps, but there are still a lot of DOS accounting apps running in the background. I'm sure there are lots of mainframe apps running that are just as inflexible -- remember the billions spent updating code to deal with Y2K?

Re:That's what's great about Open Source

[mr_mischief]

I'm certain you are right about mainframe apps. Unfortunately, this also tends to happen even with currently developed programs on micros when people don't stop to think about where a program might get used.

I'm still waiting

[Delusional]

I'm waiting for January 23, 2058

6/6/6

[blueforce]

comes every 100 years. Our (great^n) grandparents survived it. Time to move on.

Re:6/6/6

[Kredal]

Actually, it comes every 10 years, since you're ignoring the leading "0" anyways.. so the next one will be 6/6/16, then 6/6/26...

At last it happened

[sunny256]

So this means that Moore's Law is finally blown into pieces?

Re:At last it happened

[Shadyman]

Only if you run it without the heatsink ;-)

Re: d m y

[Scurra UK]

As at the time of independence you used the English style (unsuprisingly). Check out this wikipedia article.

I know I'm looking forward to the future

[SamTheButcher]

Specifically, my birthday, two years from next Tuesday. :D

It was also cool twenty years before that.

Then I get to look forward to dying, or my 118th birthday.

Grandpa Simpson (Obligatory)

[DragonHawk]

"I'll be damned if I'm going to learn how many furlongs are in a hogshead."

"My car gets fifty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it."
  -- Abe Simpson

No problem

[fubarific]

I was born on 8/8/88 so it makes no difference to me

Crossing cultures complicates calendars

[DragonHawk]

"The trouble with 'AUG' or 'SEP' is that these make no sense in many languages..."

That would be the "who speak the same language" part of my post. ;-)

A bit more seriously (but only a bit): There are many cultures who don't use the Gregorian system of months and years, although most do tie into our host planet's orbit and the phase of the moon in some way. Reconciling their calendars to "ours" is even trickier. And then there is the Maya calendar, which does things like incorporate the orbit of the planet Venus.

Re:Crossing cultures complicates calendars

[1u3hr]

A bit more seriously (but only a bit): There are many cultures who don't use the Gregorian system of months and years

Thailand uses a Buddhist calendar, where it's 2549. In Taiwan they date from the (1911) Revolution, so it's year 95; you see these dates on coins, documents, etc, but increasingly also the AD year is used. Both however use the same Gregorian months, with different names. And there are several lunar calendars in use, the Chinese mostly for religious festivals, (this is year 4704) the Muslim, (now year 1427). Lunar calendars use 12 or 13 lunar months per "year", neither of which add up to a solar year, so have various ways to compensate for that. The Muslim calendar just ignores it and shifts 11 days a solar year.

News for Nerds???

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy mother of god - get a frickin' life, will you? How does this qualify as 'news for nerds, stuff that matters'?

And to all those who have posted here - that's 30 seconds of your life that you'll never get back, you know.

Ahem...

[anupamsr]

Why do I think this was submitted by a girl?

When you think about it...

[Richard Steiner]

...the 8th of every month this year is x86 in the US (where X = 1 to 12). :-)

Extend your thoughts

[satanami69]

Should your post show as 07:09 AM since minutes make hours?

all the haxx0rz still have their day coming

[noahthegreat]

13/3/7 is what all the little haxx0rz are waiting for! And if you're pulling the "Eh, Canada" card, then you're waiting another 31 years for your 1/3/37! Sorry. -_-

Real flaw with this is no one says the year is 6

[kinglink]

It's 08/02/2006. I might be 02/08/2006. 2006/08/02 and so on. However the shortest form normally excepted is 8/2/06. I can't think of one place that uses only a single digit, especially after the whole Y2K debaticle.

m/d/y = verbal

[the_mushroom_king]

Most people say dates like "August second two thousand six". Since the m/d/y format mimics this, it may be the reason why the format is so popular.

Being a programmer, I perfer ISO dates (yyyy-mm-dd) because as they sort correctly as string values.

My Personal Favorite

[bozendoka]

My daughter was born on 2/3/4. (m/d/y, but that's how I roll)

insane...

[sum1]

"pinky and the brain, pinky and the brain, one is a genius.. the other insane" -- i'm pretty sure pinky's the insane one...

anyway, maybe i just need to get more sleep, but i think what pinky's getting at is that the next wave of computing will be here very soon - as in sometime between next month to next year... i already discovered the new video cards with a gig of memory built into them... pretty sad when a modern day video card is more "powerful" than the computer i'm running - ah well...

One word: of

[hotdiggitydawg]

Easy conversion... just add the word "of", and it all makes sense again: "Wednesday 2nd of August, 2006". It's always made sense to me though as everywhere I've ever lived (half a dozen countries and counting) all use the dd/mm/yyyy format.

Once you're used to it you can even drop the "of" from long-format written dates, and simply add it back in when reading it aloud, IE: "Wednesday 2nd August, 2006" reads aloud exactly the same as the previous example.

Obligatory Pentium FP joke

[InterestingX]

Of course 5/8/6 will be 27.73412 hours long. Long live the 585.99999 !

13/3/7

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not so long from now...

Re:Yes, ISO 8601

[GodWasAnAlien]

Perhaps for short term events the most relevent feature is the day.
"Lets meet on the third next month"...
But for the long term, documents, software and historical things, the most significant thing is the year. /* This malloc function was first written 1991-07-16 */
The date in which we should complete the moon station is 2023-05-03.
The Stationers publishing monopoly started at: 1557-10-15.

Over time, the month and day become trivia.

So perhaps European dates make sense for speech, or appointments.
But for anything written or stored for long term access, ISO dates are presented in more more relevent and significant order.

With that, I would add for long term documents, more important than all of this is that the year is actually written, and not in Y99 form.

Making sense

[Frightening]

One of the greatest controversies of modern American literature is whether to use dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy.

The reason the article is correct is that America is wrong. dd/mm/yyyy makes a lot more sense for a simple reason: days are a subset of months which are in turn subsets of a year. Either use the ISO version YYYYMMDD or the version used by the rest of the world.

Of course neither that nor the switch to the metric system will ever happen.

Re:Making sense

[DrBobcf]

The military has used the d/m/y format since the 50's A lot of ex-military still use it.

S is Showa

[interactive_civilian]

Right now, in Japan it is H for "Heisei", and the previous was "Showa". I was born in Showa 53, and right now is Heisei 18.

Yes, it is a confusing as hell, but these days in Japan, you can generally get by with the 4 digit year (i.e. 1978 for my birthyear or 2006 for now), even on official documents... at least, as a foreigner. Cheers. :)

Re:S is Showa

[gullevek]

cool, you are born in the same year like me :) now I know where to search if I do not know my birth year in Japanese ;)

big oceans in the way

[r00t]

Europeans buy groceries in other countries.

I'd probably fly a plane to visit another state. Crossing an ocean is just out of the question.

Remember: in the US we get 2 weeks of vacation per year if we are lucky. (very rarely, old dudes get as much as 5 -- it's mostly theoretical)

No time, no money, no travel. It's that simple.

The USA is big enough that normal people really don't have to care about the outside world. They'll never see it unless they join the military. European life is about as real as hobbit life.

sure

[r00t]

You can see the logic by looking at things like 9/11. We commonly skip the year, especially in speech. The ordering is thus like ISO and Japanese as long as we don't care about the year.

Notation follows speech. Saying "9th August" means something entirely different from "August 9th". It would be counting 9 months called August... in other words, 8 to 9 years ending on an August.

Sometimes we do want the year though. We're not about to put it on the front or stuff it in the middle. Thus, sadly, it gets tacked onto the end. Oh well.

Where are my mod points?

[s-orbital]

Yup. I know that all too well...

Re:Yes, ISO 8601

[Omestes]

This is true, but I was thinking in the more immediate human terms. For all my stored documents and files I do keep them in the ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD) but I know these are useless in normal day-to-day life. If I ask a freind to meet me at the bar, they would be very confused by "Meet me at Twenty Oh-Six, Oh-Eight Oh-three".

Though I have run into the MM-DD / DD-MM problem before, it would be nice to standardize normal speech too. Sadly this will never happen.

not always ... like in Dutch

[freaker_TuC]

in Dutch it's "rode auto" instead of "auto rood"...
But we do have the dd/mm/yyyy notation.

10/10/10

[Drebin]

I think this day will be the ANSWER to a big question :)

Re:only if you use a faggy date system

[Phreakiture]

Actually, the only date system that is internally consistent, and consistent with other non-metric measures, is ISO-8631, which specifies year-month-date order. Most importantly, it sorts correctly without requiring you to code exceptions into your sorting algorithm.

Of course, this, too, means that 2006-08-02, 2006-08-03 and 2006-08-04 are unexceptional dates.