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Big Tech Warns of 'Japan's Millennium Bug' Ahead of Akihito's Abdication (theguardian.com)
MightyMartian shares a report from The Guardian: On April 30, 2019, Emperor Akihito of Japan is expected to abdicate the chrysanthemum throne. The decision was announced in December 2017 so as to ensure an orderly transition to Akihito's son, Naruhito, but the coronation could cause concerns in an unlikely place: the technology sector. The Japanese calendar counts up from the coronation of a new emperor, using not the name of the emperor, but the name of the era they herald. Akihito's coronation in January 1989 marked the beginning of the Heisei era, and the end of the Shwa era that preceded him; and Naruhito's coronation will itself mark another new era. But that brings problems. For one, Akihito has been on the throne for almost the entirety of the information age, meaning that many systems have never had to deal with a switchover in era. For another, the official name of Naruhito's era has yet to be announced, causing concern for diary publishers, calendar printers and international standards bodies. It's why some are calling it "Japan's Y2K problem." "The magnitude of this event on computing systems using the Japanese Calendar may be similar to the Y2K event with the Gregorian Calendar," said Microsoft's Shawn Steele. "For the Y2K event, there was world-wide recognition of the upcoming change, resulting in governments and software vendors beginning to work on solutions for that problem several years before January 1, 2000. Even with that preparation many organizations encountered problems due to the millennial transition. Fortunately, this is a rare event, however it means that most software has not been tested to ensure that it will behave with an additional era."
Unicode's Ken Whistler wrote in a message earlier this month: "The [Unicode Technical Committee] cannot afford to make any mistakes here, nor can it just *guess* and release the code point early. All of this is pointing directly to the necessity of issuing a Unicode 12.1 release sharply on the heels of Unicode 12.0, incorporating the addition of the new Japanese era name character, which all vendors will be under great pressure to immediately support in 2019 software releases."
Unicode's Ken Whistler wrote in a message earlier this month: "The [Unicode Technical Committee] cannot afford to make any mistakes here, nor can it just *guess* and release the code point early. All of this is pointing directly to the necessity of issuing a Unicode 12.1 release sharply on the heels of Unicode 12.0, incorporating the addition of the new Japanese era name character, which all vendors will be under great pressure to immediately support in 2019 software releases."
When Jesus comes back do we need to reset the year back to zero? Crap, as a programmer I hate our calendar system(s)!
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
n/t
"the official name of Naruhito's era has yet to be announced"
Then... just announce it?
Calm down, Ivan. I'm sure the orange traitor will make the headlines again before the day is out.
Great opportunity to adopt the Gregorian calendar? Dunno, just sayin'...
Japanese regnal years are not used for any significant calculations. Behind the scenes it's YYYY, with regnal years used only for display. This is an aesthetic issue only, and hardly unforeseen.
And I'm a throwback apparently for using BC and AD ...
As long as Japan continues to use the traditional calendar, they are not part of the "information age". It is time to wake up, put on some fresh clothes and join the rest of the world.
Akihito has been on the throne [since 1989] for almost the entirety of the information age
Here in the real world, the information age began long before millennials were born. And yet in the sociotech industry of rockstar techbros, the only viable solution for a Y2K problem is for millennials to kill themselves.
Flambéred bull testicles! So is this story. I don't believe for a second that there would be a single security system in Japan that would reset itself on the event of the emperor dying or abdicating.
And you had to go and ruin it. Let us never speak of this again.
Time to offend someone
Please keep butt fucking to a minimum
Officially years in Japan start with 1 and the coronation of the new emperor. Now it seems that the year in Japan is Heisei 30, which means it's the 30th year since the Heisei emperor (Akihito) took the throne. This would be something like in the US calling 2016 as Obama 8 or 2018 by the term Trump 2. The real problem here isn't that computers are going to shut down in Japan when the current emperor abdicates next year as planned. This isn't really a Y2K problem. The Guardian usually does good work but to say this is similar to Y2K is just not correct. The article even admits that some older computers have actually never updated the year from the Showa era (when Hiirohito was emperor) so they think this year is Showa 93. Those computers will have a problem in 2025 as their calendars were never designed to hold 3 digit years, which would make 2025 be Showa 100. The real problem with the abdication is that the next era for the upcoming emperor has not yet been named. OK, so why is that a problem? Well, Japan has a history of creating a brand new character for the era when it change and Unicode has a major release scheduled for right before the abdication is scheduled to happen. The brand new character is the problem because the next release of Unicode won't support it because nobody knows what it will be yet. They have the ability to guess, but nobody wants to guess because they could be wrong. So all this hubbub is that next year's major Unicode release will require a patch shortly after release with the patch including the new character for the new era. Do keep in mind that Akihito could die of natural causes before the abdication and this problem will happen immediately upon his death. And this problem will happen every time a new emperor takes over. I'm not convinced that this is really a major problem. Computers could easily just show Heisei 31 and so on until the Unicode fix is in place. I guess it's just fun on a slow news day to blow things out of proportion.
Calm down, Ivan. I'm sure the orange traitor will make the headlines again before the day is out.
This is how you define winning: Getting Communist-sympathizing Democrats to agree that Russia is an evil empire.
MAGA!!!!
will they also fix the 2038 bug as well?
or hold off so they have jobs in 2037 fixing it.
Well, I've always thought the International Fixed Calendar [wikipedia.org] was a decent attempt at sanity, but if there's people in the world that can't adopt the metric system, there's no way in hell the calendar could change.
Maybe the best solution is to use a sane calendar system similar to that one as a base system (similar to Universal Coordinated Time) and then just calculate offsets into whatever crazy calendar system some group prefers to use.
Our current calendar system is pretty much bonkers anyway. We seem bizarrely attached to concepts like a 7 day week which is familiar but totally arbitrary. You could have a year with 73 weeks of 5 days each or a year with 5 months of 73 days and it would be equally valid and equally arbitrary. It's never been clear to me why we need to worry about keeping months coordinated with particular seasons. So what if Christmas in the northern hemisphere gradually drifts to summer over the course of a few hundred years?
I've always liked the concept of metric time too.
The evidence is clear, lock him up!
And all the rethuglicans traitors that enable him.
Only Japanese? We are at Jesus 2018.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Akihito has been on the throne for almost the entirety of the information age"
Umm, no. We were well into the information age by 1989. The use of computers in vital infrastructure (e.g. banking) dates back to the late 50's. I checked out the author of the article, and as expected, he appears to be under 30; this would explain his myopic view of history.
anyone that watches it should commit seppuku
"...Unicode, the international standards organisation which most famously controls the introduction of new emojis to the world."
This is a new level of cluelessness. "Most famously"? Like, internationalization and localization were just afterthoughts; it's the emojis that they really focus on.
How is this guy a technology reporter for a major newspaper?
He did make it to Hokage!
Actually it's not the Shwa era, but the Showa era, with a bar on top of the o. The character in question (U+014D) is used in transliterating Japanese in Latin script to indicate pronunciation. It has been part of Unicode since 1991.
It's interesting to see in the summary a discussion of Unicode 12.1 vs. 12.0, when Slashdot itself doesn't support the Unicode 1.0 characters necessary to write the summary :)
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Get rid of the "emperor" system. They serve no purpose anyway.
7 day weeks are speculated to have been based on the lunar cycle from the ancient Babylonians.
Assuming that is true for argument's sake, what relevance does it have to modern life?
Regarding a non-7 day week, this has been tried before and didn't work.
Just because a small group tried something a long time ago doesn't have a lot of relevance to the discussion. Maybe it just wasn't the right system or the right time to do it. There is nothing magical about a 7 day week. It's fine but we could easily have a 6 or an 8 day week and there is no objective reason that couldn't work just as well. It's just something we continue to do because we've done it that way for a long time. The major benefit of it is that most of the world has standardized on it which probably outweighs most drawbacks but that doesn't mean that it is optimal or couldn't be improved upon. The real question is whether an improved calendar would result in benefits that outweigh the costs.
Sometimes a long-followed social construct has survived because it works well for us animals
Just because something worked reasonably well in the past is not a valid justification for continuing to do it that way in the face of a better alternative. "That's the way we've always done it" is one of the worst and most expensive arguments people routinely make. Tradition is a fine thing and standards are a good thing but only to a point. Now you could sensibly argue that any of the calendar improvements we could make are well into diminishing returns as far as improvements go and thus not worth the cost but one should not blindly assume that to be true.
My suspicion is that the calendar won't be changed again (if it ever is) until after we become a multi-planetary species. It would take a major event to get everyone to agree to change calendars so everything I've said is purely conjecture.
I still want to strangle the coder who thought it would be a good idea to use a SIGNED integer to count seconds in the epoch.
Like time's gonna run backwards soon? Bloody Nitwit. You HAD 32 bits - Why didn't you use all of them?!?! GRRR
AC
The Soviet Union is a rather large testing ground. They tried variations of 5 and 6 that worked poorly in an attempt to avoid using 7, which they viewed as a number that made it too easy for people to hold on to religion.
The Soviet Union tried a lot of things that didn't work very well. This is pretty far down the list among them. Plus like most standards it's the network effects of the existing standard that makes them hard to change once they are well established.
While there are certainly an infinite number of variations one could try, its not like France (in the reference I cited) or the Soviets were too small a sample size to pretend that we have no evidence of relevance that 7 isn't just an arbitrary number and any other would work fine.
Those are interesting case studies but one would have to dig a lot deeper into the reasons for those failures to determine if the length of the chosen week was the proximal cause of the failure. My guess is that it failed for other reasons similar to how the metric system has to date failed to take hold in the US. Just local political and economic and network effect realities that made changing problematic. There is no objectively obvious reason a 7 day week should be preferable to any other similar length week and what evidence we have in relation to it is relatively scant. Main problem is that it's hard to test alternatives in the real world on a large scale.
To change it would be monumentally expensive, disruptive, and really would replace it with something else just as arbitrary.
Certainly. That doesn't mean doing so isn't a worthwhile exercise. My whole point is that our current calendar is unarguably illogical, flawed, and occasionally problematic. We use it because of network effects, not because it is an optimal system.
In other words, at least until we start colonizing other worlds with other chronological cycles, it will persist.
Agreed and I said more or less exactly this in a different post in this thread. I think it would take something like us becoming a multi-planet species to be a big enough jolt to the system to make it worthwhile to change calendar systems. Maybe not even then but I'm not sure what else would be sufficient cause.
This is just stupid.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Tell the Emperor to use 'X' as his name for now on. And let's create a new shit emoji, and bring the entire Unicode world to its knees.
TLDR: Time is that way for a reason, and you should have a healthy respect for it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Just checked some packaged food, and the "use by"/"best before"/"packed on" dates are in Heisei Era on all of them. Some have both Heisie and CE dates, but none have CE only.
What exactly is the point in having a calendar that's not synchronized to the solstices?
There is no objectively important reason that a calendar that tracks rotations of the Earth has to have any relationship whatsoever to orbits around the Sun. There is some utility in doing so but it's not as if we would be unaware of and unable to plan for the fact that the Earth takes approximately 365.25 days to orbit the Sun. Heck for quite a long time we used the Julian calendar and it worked pretty well overall despite not quite so accurately reconciling the length of a year to the length of a day. The length of a year doesn't care how we bother to subdivide it.
Clocks measure time elapsed since an arbitrary epoch - calendars subdivide a year so that you can schedule seasonal activities.
You are conflating two unrelated things. Calendars measure time in relationship to arbitrarily chosen celestial cycles. A day measures the rotational time of Earth and a year measures the orbital time of Earth around the Sun. There is no reason we necessarily need a calendar to reconcile orbits around the Sun with rotations of the Earth. They are separate and arbitrarily chosen events with no causal relationship between their lengths. It is a useful exercise to do so but a useful calendar can just measure the passage of days with relation to a different cycle (the lunar cycle for example) and be just as valid. And having a calendar that has arbitrarily varying sub cycles (months over varying lengths) does not add to its practicality or make scheduling easier.
An accurate clock can't even measure the passage of days correctly, since every day is, on average, slightly longer than the one before it thanks to a combination of solar and lunar tidal drag, along with other forces that are less well understood
That argument is self defeating. If an accurate clock couldn't measure the passage of days accurately then we wouldn't be able to tell that the length of a day changes. That said, it is not objectively necessary to change the definition of a day to match Earth's current rotational period. In fact if we are on a different planet it would be impractical to use Earth's rotational period as the basis for calendar scale time keeping. Furthermore the length of a year (an orbit around the Sun) is also changing because of the n-body problem and changes to Earth's orbit.
Why not put the era names in a separate config file? The logic won't change, but the list will be added to until Japan's population grows extinct.
Why does every era have to have its own codepoint? It's just a name, isn't it composed of existing glyphs?
Yeah, not sure how this is a problem for the Unicode Technical Committee, or indeed anyone in tech. They'll get to it when the Japanese forward on the relevant information (i.e. the new era name).
The Japanese are a well-organized, competent nation. If they want to solve this problem then they can; if not, then not.
It's like this. Organization A tells Organization B, "we need X many months of lead time to issue updates". Organization B ignores this guidance and makes changes with insufficient lead time. Then Organization B expresses disappointment and dissatisfaction with Organization A? How does that work?
The correct response is for Organization A to carry on and issue an update in X months. If they can accelerate it a bit that would be good too, but that should be seen as 'going out of their way for' Organization B.
Who the heck moderated this Funny?? It's an Informative important correction to the Summary!
No wonder they wish the emperor would live for 10,000 years.
I agree the number of days is now arbitrary and possibly political/economic but whatever number chosen will have to be an odd number. If it doesn't, there's no middle of the week. For whatever reason, people like things to have a middle. If it's something that we are going to share, we want an even number so there's equal parts to divide.
The reason 7 was chosen was due to religious astronomy. Moon based timekeeping works on a 28 day cycle. 28 can only be equally divided by multiples of 2 & 7, hence your moon goddess gets 4 weeks of 7 days or 2 weeks of 14 days, etc. 14 weeks of 2 days and 28 weeks of 1 day are stupid and right out. Now that we use the Sun as our reference point, the numbers are all screwed up and to your point, are now arbitrary.
The more you know...
First thought on reading this: Isn't there a character or an accent or something, called a Shwa?
Yes there is! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa
It's so nice of /. to alter a Japanese era due to Unicode problems and make it sound not-Japanese. What's next, the Shmoo era? Oh, sorry, that's supposed to be Shimono...
Some Traditions ok to continue, like bowing , which is a fine substitute for hand shakes, kissing, etc... but using a persons anointed position date costs largely outweigh the nostalgic benefits. Japan has much bigger issues to confront. Scratch this one off the list.
Why do I think Trump will want a Trump Calendar now?
The computers are all on a superior calendar. One based on the Epoch, January 1, 1970. That's when life began as we know it. So all we have to do is publish a correction to the TZ data and be done with it.
Japanese drivers licenses will now list expiration dates in gregorian dates (previously regnal era dates), according to the national police agency. The official reason is that with many more foreigners, it was the easier choice to support both foreigners and japanese. But the reality is that japanese IT is tremendously behind the times, so the driver license centers simply could not be prepared to issue license with the correct kanji language characters for a new era expiration date. But by changing to gregorian, they avoid the IT updates for now (since birth dates are all still old eras on the licenses for eligible drivers, though backend systems are still another story), and get to blame the change on those damn foreigners!