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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."
Well, I've always thought the International Fixed Calendar 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.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
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.
Regarding a non-7 day week, this has been tried before and didn't work. See for example www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/3/4/399/pdf
Sometimes a long-followed social construct has survived because it works well for us animals, and if that makes it harder for programming computers that is a reasonable cost.
It's not uncommon either. Pregnant people can go in labor weeks early, stress of flying often exacerbates the issue.
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Metric is crap. "But muh 10s!" Whatever. Computers have no problems with calculations (nor do most people), and I'd rather have a measurement meaningful to people than easily divide. I'm almost never converting inches to yards, but if I do it's just divide by 12 * 3 = divide by 36. Sure I could convert meters to decametres slightly faster in my head... but why? Also, I'd like to continue to name the temperature without going into decimals. It's much nicer to say "It's 91 degrees out" than "It's 32.78 degrees out."
There's really no argument in using metric other than "But everyone else is doing it" and "Everything divides by 10!" For me, the usability and perception of imperial units are more meaningful. They were defined without needing an external reference to understand or measure roughly.
Japanese "eras" have only been tied directly to the emperor since the Meiji Restoration (mid-1800's). The current era is only the 4th since this change. The Emperor takes a new name when they ascend the throne, so there has never been a way to know the name of the era in advance. Given the intense superstition prevalent in Japanese society, it seems incredibly unlikely a name would ever be disseminated in advance.