ITU equivalent of ISO 8601
Markus Kuhn
>Can anyone tell me of an ITU equivalent of ISO 8601 (Representation
>of dates and times). Alternatively, can someone summarize the time
>of day format,
Get ftp.uni-erlangen.de pub/doc/ISO/ISO8601.ps.Z for a good summary.
What everyone should know about this standard:
date format is yyyy-mm-dd or yyyymmdd
time format is hh:mm or hhmm or hh:mm:ss.ssss or hhmmss.ssss
(There are a few more formats, like yyyy-ddd for day-of-the-year and others,
but these are mainly for special applications)
e.g. 1995-08-11 or 19950811
and examples for the time are 23:59 or 2359 or 23:59:59 or
23:59:58.992781 if you need microsecond resolution.
BTW: 00:00 is the beginning of a day, while 24:00 is the end of a day.
Puzzle for people in the US: I want to meet you on August 12, 1995, 12:00 pm
in New York. Can you transform this into ISO notation? Why not?
Is the U.S. notation seriously broken?
Markus
---
Markus Kuhn, Computer Science student -- University of Erlangen,
Internet Mail: <msk...@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> - Germany
WWW Home: <http://wwwcip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/user/mskuhn>
Fritz Whittington
>Puzzle for people in the US: I want to meet you on August 12, 1995, 12:00 pm
>in New York. Can you transform this into ISO notation? Why not?
>Is the U.S. notation seriously broken?
>Markus
Sounds easy enough: 1995-08-12 12:00:00.0000. Or is the trick that
there needs to be some special punctuation between the date and the
time?
Or perhaps you think that a huge majority of people in the US can't tell
whether 12:00 pm means noon or midnight?
As to whether the US notation is seriously broken, well, perhaps ISO
notation is technically better, and I prefer it, but if the rest of the
country can tell time with 12-hour clocks and am & pm, I guess it works.
Perhaps we shouldn't mention the enormous number of clocks in Germany
that seem to have 12-hour dials. :-)
--
Fritz Whittington Texas Instruments, P.O. Box 655474, MS 446 Dallas, TX 75265
Shipping address: 13510 North Central Expressway, MS 446 Dallas, TX 75243
fr...@ti.com Office: +1 214 995 0397 FAX: +1 214 995 6194
Since I am not an official TI spokesperson, these opinions contain no spokes.
Jerry Lahti
>msk...@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de (Markus Kuhn) writes:
>
>>Puzzle for people in the US: I want to meet you on August 12, 1995, 12:00 pm
>>in New York. Can you transform this into ISO notation? Why not?
>>Is the U.S. notation seriously broken?
>Sounds easy enough: 1995-08-12 12:00:00.0000. Or is the trick that
>
>Or perhaps you think that a huge majority of people in the US can't tell
>whether 12:00 pm means noon or midnight?
Eeek, now this poor European is confused! I always thought "NN:MM pm"
mean NN hours MM minutes after noon, so I would have written the
time as "1995-08-13 00:00". However, there obviously is a special
case which makes "12:00 pm" to mean "noon" (?).
--
Jerry Lahti |Voice:+358 0 456 5624, Fax:+358 0 456 7013
Technical Research |Internet: Jerry...@vtt.fi
Centre of Finland (VTT) |X.400: C=FI,ADMD=MAILNET,PRMD=VTT,PN=Jerry Lahti
H. Peter Anvin
By author: Jerry...@tel1.tte.vtt.fi (Jerry Lahti)
In newsgroup: comp.std.internat
>
> Eeek, now this poor European is confused! I always thought "NN:MM pm"
> mean NN hours MM minutes after noon, so I would have written the
> time as "1995-08-13 00:00". However, there obviously is a special
> case which makes "12:00 pm" to mean "noon" (?).
>
Wait a minute... you thought the U.S. system actually made sense?
Three minutes in the penalty box. No, U.S. time is always written so
it is between 01:00 and 12:59 [seconds ignored for ease of discussion]
inclusive, but the moinker "AM" means it is in the range 00:00 to
11:59, "PM" is 12:00 to 23:59.
Hence time goes:
12:00 AM, ..., 12:59 AM, 01:00 AM, ..., 11:59 AM, 12:00 PM, ...,
12:59 PM, 01:00 PM, ..., 11:59 PM, 12:00 AM
Confused yet? Most U.S. people are confused enough about it that
12:00 AM is often explicitly written as "12:00 midnight" and 12:00 PM
as "12:00 noon". However, these same people don't seem to have any
problems understanding 12:10 PM, for example.
This is probably a major reason why legislation in the U.S. usually
takes effect at times like 12:01 AM on <date>. I call this "the
American minute." :-)
/hpa
--
PGP public key available - finger h...@yggdrasil.com
"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens." -- Baha'u'llah
Erik Naggum
| Eeek, now this poor European is confused! I always thought "NN:MM pm"
| mean NN hours MM minutes after noon, so I would have written the
| time as "1995-08-13 00:00". However, there obviously is a special
| case which makes "12:00 pm" to mean "noon" (?).
the discovery of the zero is hailed as a breakthrough in mathematics.
lacking an appreciation of this discovery, "12" is used in the Imperial
system as the notation for what would have been the zero if it had been
invented in the Empire. stunningly outdated.
#<Erik 3017578838>
--
help! I'm lost in an n-dimensional universe and I don't know what n is!
Mark Brader
It's not "the U.S. system", you know. All English-speaking countries
use it, though not always universally (and not always with the same
punctuation, though "12:00" will be recognized everywhere).
> ... the moinker "AM" means it is in the range 00:00 to
> 11:59, "PM" is 12:00 to 23:59.
No. AM refers to a time *after* 00:00 and *before* the next 12:00, and
PM to a time *after* 12:00 and *before* the next 00:00. There is no
such time as 12:00 AM or 12:00 PM.
However, those times exist for only an instant. You can refer to
instants of time in writing, but the probability that a particular
time in the real world is going to be exactly a specified instant
is zero.
When you look at your *digital* watch and it says 12:00:00 PM, what it
really means is that the instant of 12 noon has passed and the instant
of 12:00:01 PM has not yet occurred. (If the watch doesn't display
seconds, make that 12:01 PM.) Since this is a PM time (for example,
it might be 12:00:00.01238273 PM, though the probability of it being
this particular time is zero also), the watch displays PM.
One may also take the point of view that the watch is displaying the
time *at the last instant the display was updated*, and that it is wrong
to display 12:00(:00) PM for one second or one minute, but that this
simplifies the design enough that it isn't worth correcting.
All this also applies to computer time calculations and displays, as
these are always quantized, either in seconds or some fraction of a
second. But in *specifying* a time, or generally in referring to an
instant of time in writing, these excuses are not available, and
12:00 PM or 12:00 AM should not be used.
> Confused yet? Most U.S. people are confused enough about it that
> 12:00 AM is often explicitly written as "12:00 midnight" and 12:00 PM
> as "12:00 noon". However, these same people don't seem to have any
> problems understanding 12:10 PM, for example.
And they're right, because 12:10 PM exists but 12:00 PM does not.
> This is probably a major reason why legislation in the U.S. usually
> takes effect at times like 12:01 AM on <date>.
A bigger reason is that just as 12:00 midnight divides PM from AM
without belonging to either, it also divides one *date* from the
next without belonging to either. "Midnight Thursday" is ambiguous.
(And for this reason, some railways will avoid having the time of
midnight appear in a timetable -- even some that don't use AM/PM.)
All of which is, as the earlier poster was pointing out, a reason to
avoid giving times in normal English in places where people will
understand a more regular method such as ISO 8601's. On the other
hand, if the time is to be read by a human, it's an issue that
really depends on your audience.
(Incidentally, I have seen digital time displays that counted from
1:00 to 23:59, then from 12:00 to 12:59 (AM); and I have also seen
the opposite, displays that counted from 0:00 to 12:59 (PM), then 1:00
to 11:59 (PM). I really wonder what the people who designed *these*
were thinking!)
--
Mark Brader "To err is human, but to really mess things up
m...@sq.com you need a timetable planner!"
SoftQuad Inc., Toronto -- Richard Porter
This article is in the public domain.
Peter Kerr
> (Incidentally, I have seen digital time displays that counted from
> 1:00 to 23:59, then from 12:00 to 12:59 (AM); and I have also seen
> the opposite, displays that counted from 0:00 to 12:59 (PM), then 1:00
> to 11:59 (PM). I really wonder what the people who designed *these*
> were thinking!)
I've got one of these. It doesn't do it in normal operation.
It's just a cheap way of leaving out one step in the setup procedure.
By cranking thru the time you also toggle the 12/24 mode and it sets
itself to wherever it was when you press set.
--
Peter Kerr bodger
School of Music chandler
University of Auckland neo-Luddite
Markus Kuhn
>msk...@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de (Markus Kuhn) writes:
>>Puzzle for people in the US: I want to meet you on August 12, 1995, 12:00 pm
>>in New York. Can you transform this into ISO notation? Why not?
>>Is the U.S. notation seriously broken?
>Sounds easy enough: 1995-08-12 12:00:00.0000. Or is the trick that
>there needs to be some special punctuation between the date and the
>time?
I am right now in New York and I am typing this over an incredibly
slow telnet connection to Erlangen.
I have asked over the past few days a number of US citicens what
exactly "August 12, 1995, 12:00 pm" means. There seems to be a large
confusion. I get mostly three different answers and all make sense
to some degree (in ISO standard notation):
a) 1995-08-12 12:00
b) 1995-08-12 24:00 = 1995-08-13 00:00
c) 1995-08-12 00:00
Some people told me that 12:00 am and 12:00 pm do not exist in the
US notation and that the words "midnight" and "noon" are used instead.
I have also seen the notation "12:00 n" and "12:00 m" were "n" means "noon"
and "m" means either "midnight" (00:00/24:00) or "meridian" (12:00).
There seems to be no official specification.
>Or perhaps you think that a huge majority of people in the US can't tell
>whether 12:00 pm means noon or midnight?
This is only one problem. The other problem is that the word "midnight" does
not differentiate between midnight at the start and at the end of a day.
Summary: the am/pm time notation is pretty much a mess. Use the
ISO notation in computer application and elsewere!
I asked time folks at the US Naval Observatory in Washington who keep the
official US master clock about "12:00 pm" and they gave me their press
release about this topic. It tells that the am/pm notation is
pretty much a mess and that the US Naval Observatory highly recommends
to use the 24h hour notation (just as ISO 8601 does). The US military
changed to the 24h system long ago.
As far as I know, the USA is the only country were the am/pm notation
is still dominating. I was last week in Canada and saw "9h00 to 18h30"
written on traffic signs and 20:00 written at cinemas. I also saw the
ISO notation used on airports and hotels in England. I've never been
in Australia and non-englisch speaking countries have long ago switched
to the 24h notation.
>Perhaps we shouldn't mention the enormous number of clocks in Germany
>that seem to have 12-hour dials. :-)
And were is the problem? Analog clocks are only used in applications
were the user has a rough estimate of the time (e.g. wrist watches
and church tower clocks). In all other places, numeric notations
of the time are used and there the 00:00 to 24:00 international standard
notation clearly has a number of advantages and no disadvantages compared
to am/pm. My analog clock uses the same display for 05:00 and 17:00,
but I can live with that because it shows the current time. If someone writes
in a letter 12:00 pm, then this is a scheduled time and I have no other way to
find out which one is correct.
Paul Eggert
> I have asked over the past few days a number of US citicens what
> exactly "August 12, 1995, 12:00 pm" means. There seems to be a large
> confusion.
That's because you're asking a nonsensical question. `pm' stands for
the Latin `post meridiem', and refers to the period between noon and
midnight. Strictly speaking from the original etymology, noon is
neither am nor pm; it is the boundary between am and pm.
> I have also seen the notation "12:00 n" and "12:00 m" were "n" means "noon"
Yes; for example, `12:00N' is used in airline tickets for noon.
> There seems to be no official specification.
The distinction between am and pm has been in common use for many centuries.
It doesn't need ISO's blessing.
> The word "midnight" does not differentiate between midnight at the
> start and at the end of a day.
That is the long-standing international tradition for civil time using
the Julian and Gregorian calendars. I write ``civil'' because until
fairly recently in historical terms, there were three separate
international traditions: civil (day ends at midnight), astronomical
(day begins at noon), and nautical (day ends at noon). For example, if
you study the records of Cook's voyages, you have to take into account
all three traditions, since Cook's astronomer kept astronomical time,
whereas Cook kept nautical time while at sea and civil time while in
harbor. The astronomers stubbornly held out until this century, and
even now I wouldn't be surprised if the GMT day still officially begins
at noon, since GMT is an astronomical term and as far as I know nobody
ever officially changed its definition.
> Use the ISO notation in computer application and elsewere!
I agree for many computer applications; for example, in retrospect,
it would have been nicer if C's `ctime' function had used something
akin to ISO format.
But I'm not sure I agree wholeheartedly with your ``elsewhere''.
There is much advantage to sticking with the existing am/pm
standard for civil time, even with its quirks, instead of making
wholesale changes for minor technical reasons. I don't know of anybody
who uses, or would want to use, the recommended ISO 8601 notation (ugly
capital `T' and all) for everyday applications.
>As far as I know, the USA is the only country were the am/pm notation
>is still dominating.
I don't think the world has shaken off the shackles of Rome quite so
easily as that. On the contrary, I would guess that more people
ordinarily use terminology like `am/pm' than use the 24-hour clock.
Mark Brader
> is still dominating.
*No*. It is *standard English*.
> I was last week in Canada and saw "9h00 to 18h30" written on traffic
> signs and 20:00 written at cinemas.
Where in Canada -- Quebec? I just walked across the street and saw:
[No parking symbol]
12:01 AM TO 10 AM
EXCEPT BY PERMIT
ONE HOUR PARKING
10 AM TO 6 PM
MON-FRI
And you certainly won't see 20:00 on any movie ad or marquee hereabouts.
(You *will* see it in railway timetables, but the railways have always
liked to go their own way in that regard. They went on using Standard
Time for years after almost everyone else in the country was using
Daylight Saving all summer.)
> I also saw the ISO notation used on airports and hotels in England.
This foreign idea has made some inroads there, yes. But if you ask
someone there what time it is, they'll never *say* that it's 20:00.
Why are you trying to rail against the English language like this?
--
Mark Brader | "It can be amusing, even if painful, to watch the
m...@sq.com | ethnocentrism of those who are convinced their
SoftQuad Inc., Toronto | local standards are universal." -- Tom Chapin
Christopher Fynn
msk...@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de "Markus Kuhn" writes:
> This is only one problem. The other problem is that the word "midnight" does
> not differentiate between midnight at the start and at the end of a day.
"Midnight" is just a convention which might only be
said to "exist" for an infintesiminally small moment of time
beteween one date an the next. As it falls between is there any
difference between midnight at the start and at the end of a day?
In common usage if I say "I'll meet you at midnight" it
means at 24:00 tonight not tommorow night.
In some cultures the new date starts a dawn yet their hours
and minutes are the same as ours - so 01:00 (AM) today would
still be yesterday. (That sentance doesn't make sense - but you
know what I mean)
Is an analouge represtentation of time which constantly
changes preferable to a digital one which breaks time down
into a series of units? Perhaps use of digital clocks
leads people to the notion that 24:OO:00 exists and is different
from 00:00:00.
- Chris
--
Christopher J Fynn <cf...@sahaja.demon.co.uk>
Erik Naggum
| As far as I know, the USA is the only country were the am/pm notation
| is still dominating.
[Mark Brader]
| *No*. It is *standard English*.
oh man, not you and your "standard English", again. Markus _actually_ said
"dominating". if you care to consult reference materials once in a while,
instead of pretending to be Mr. Reference yourself, you will find that the
Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition, lists the ISO date and time formats
as perfectly legitimate formats in *Standard American Style* (8.46, 8.50),
and the twenty-four hour system is apparently not as "non-standard" as you
appear to wish it were (8.49). British style, of course, has it backwards.
their 5/10/92 is 1992-10-05, while the American 5/10/92 is 1992-05-10. the
American "2:30" is written "2.30" in British style. now, what _exactly_ do
you refer to by "standard English", Mark Brader?
[Markus Kuhn]
| I was last week in Canada and saw "9h00 to 18h30" written on traffic
| signs and 20:00 written at cinemas.
[Mark Brader]
| Where in Canada -- Quebec? I just walked across the street and saw ...
| And you certainly won't see 20:00 on any movie ad or marquee hereabouts.
your provincialism is starting to annoy me, Mark. are you trying to refute
his argument, or are you trying to belittle Quebec? I don't think you have
succeded very well in either, to be frank.
| (You *will* see it in railway timetables, but the railways have always
| liked to go their own way in that regard. They went on using Standard
| Time for years after almost everyone else in the country was using
| Daylight Saving all summer.)
great! there are actually people in Canada who have the sense to ignore
stupid edicts from the government. well, that's progress. now, what if
they all got together and voted properly, too, perhaps there would be some
hope for that vast void between Alaska and the United States? (just trying
to get even, for once pretending to be offended on behalf of Quebec. :)
[Markus Kuhn]
| I also saw the ISO notation used on airports and hotels in England.
[Mark Brader]
| This foreign idea has made some inroads there, yes. But if you ask
| someone there what time it is, they'll never *say* that it's 20:00.
oh, so you think Markus Kuhn walks around and says "one-nine-nine-five
zero-eight two-zero" instead of "August 20, 1995", too? what _is_ wrong
with you? hint, Mark: nobody has implicated colloquialisms and oral
tradition in this discussion. _please_ pay attention.
I suggest you write to the editors of the Chicago Manual of Style and
complain about the untimely import of ISO standards into their reference
works. Just Say No to "foreign ideas", eh?
| Why are you trying to rail against the English language like this?
excuse me, but _you're_ one to drag the "English language" into this
discussion all of a sudden. if you knew a little more than your own silly
provincialism allows you to know, you would perhaps be able to appreciate
Markus' argument, instead of being such an annoying fart. (that's British
English for you, I think.)
Markus, keep up the good work. when Mark Brader and his "standard English"
is incapable of unambiguously identifying the day of month for over a third
of the days of the year (day 1 through 12 of any given month in the
"standard English" notation is ambiguous), it is high time to junk the
"standard English" and go for the _real_ standard.
Mark Brader and his fellow canadiens sans les québécoise, pardon my French,
can sit there and cherish their "standard English" while the rest of the
English-speaking world tries to make it into the 20th century before the
21st century is all over, too.
Mark, if you _have_ any arguments beyond the "foreign idea" kind of silly
protectionist provincialism, I'm sure you would appreciate an opportunity
to present _your_ "foreign ideas" to those who might not be as hung up in
the errors of his (culture's) ways.
| --
| Mark Brader | "It can be amusing, even if painful, to watch the
| m...@sq.com | ethnocentrism of those who are convinced their
| SoftQuad Inc., Toronto | local standards are universal." -- Tom Chapin
how apt a signature!
#<Erik 3018009514>
--
trigraph ??!??! die
Erik Naggum
| Yes; for example, `12:00N' is used in airline tickets for noon.
this is quite interesting. the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition
surprised me by listing noon as "12:00 M" for _meridies_ or "noon" in
Latin.
[Markus Kuhn]
| There seems to be no official specification.
[Paul Eggert]
| The distinction between am and pm has been in common use for many
| centuries. It doesn't need ISO's blessing.
he was talking about the "n" vs "m" notation. "ISO's blessing" is usually
obtained through international agreement on existing common ways of
expression. your indignant refusal to acknowledge such "blessing" could
very easily transfer to an argument of intellectual protectionism where
anything you don't like that the rest of the world wants you to do, is a
"foreign idea", to borrow a phrase from Mark Brader's excellent "them and
us" attitude of those "standard English"-speakers.
[Markus Kuhn]
| Use the ISO notation in computer application and elsewere!
[Paul Eggert]
| I agree for many computer applications; for example, in retrospect, it
| would have been nicer if C's `ctime' function had used something akin
| to ISO format.
agreed. the Unix time format is beyond silly.
| But I'm not sure I agree wholeheartedly with your ``elsewhere''. There
| is much advantage to sticking with the existing am/pm standard for
| civil time, even with its quirks, instead of making wholesale changes
| for minor technical reasons. I don't know of anybody who uses, or
| would want to use, the recommended ISO 8601 notation (ugly capital `T'
| and all) for everyday applications.
business communication probably rates as an everyday application, and we
happen to have standards and recommendations for such in countries that
rely less on Mark Brader to know what to do. the ISO 8601 date format is
quite common, except with companies that use American software to print
their business communication.
[Markus Kuhn]
| As far as I know, the USA is the only country were the am/pm notation
| is still dominating.
[Paul Eggert]
| I don't think the world has shaken off the shackles of Rome quite so
| easily as that. On the contrary, I would guess that more people
| ordinarily use terminology like `am/pm' than use the 24-hour clock.
you need to travel a bit more, or define what you mean by "ordinarily". to
give but one example: I have not seen a single formal invitation use
anything but the 24-hour system in Norway or in Europe (excluding Britain)
for that matter. if there is one place you would expect to find the
"traditional" and "conservative" notations, it is in formal invitations,
such as official receptions, weddings, and the like.
the problem is that "you Americans" are generally clueless about dates and
times. "you Americans" don't even know that other parts of the world don't
use mm/dd/yy, but dd/mm/yy, dd/mm-yy, dd.mm.yyyy, and others that are
universally _different_ from your abbreviated form. "you Americans" even
try to sell software in Europe that get this wrong, and it can't even be
fixed through the much touted "localization" and "internationalization".
I must concur with Markus: the U.S. of A. is the only country where the
AM/PM notation is still _dominating_. that is not to say that other
countries do not use it, but if the country does not have English as (one
of) their (possibly historical) official languages, the chances that they
will use AM/PM is about zero. whether the colloquial form uses a twelve-
hour clock is a very different question.
sidenote: I asked CNN for the air times of their show Future Watch (e-mail:
future...@cnn.com), and asked if they could supply the times in
Universal Coordinated Time, because, firstly, I don't believe in timezones
and secondly, I wanted to know what the "future" of time indication would
look like. the reply:
Unfortunately, neither I nor anyone on my staff knows what Universal
Coordinated Time is. Perhaps you could e-mail me back and clue me in.
we have some distance left to go before even future-watchers get the hang
of this time notation business: they sent me the times in am/pm form
relative to EDT. sic transmit gloria mundi.
#<Erik 3018011144>
--
trigraph ??!??! die
Mark Brader
> AM/PM notation is still _dominating_.
I don't understand why this poster feels such a need to restate a "fact"
which I have already pointed out is incorrect. I do know how things are
done in my own country! I invite him to look at any Canadian newspaper
published in English -- the majority language here -- and see what sort
of times are used in advertisements as well as articles. After that, he
might continue his research to a British newspaper.
> That is not to say that other countries do not use it, but if the
> country does not have English as (one of) their (possibly historical)
> official languages, the chances that they will use AM/PM is about zero.
*This* is close to true in my experience.
> Whether the colloquial form uses a twelve-hour clock is a very different
> question.
In that case "the question" needs to be more precisely defined if there is
to be any sensible discourse. Perhaps some of us are disagreeing as to
what we should be talking about.
Followups directed out of sci.astro.
--
Mark Brader, m...@sq.com "The time to make up your mind about people
SoftQuad Inc., Toronto is never." -- The Philadelphia Story
My text in this article is in the public domain.
Lance Kibblewhite
>sidenote: I asked CNN for the air times of their show Future Watch (e-mail:
>future...@cnn.com), and asked if they could supply the times in
>Universal Coordinated Time, because, firstly, I don't believe in timezones
>and secondly, I wanted to know what the "future" of time indication would
>look like. the reply:
> Unfortunately, neither I nor anyone on my staff knows what Universal
> Coordinated Time is. Perhaps you could e-mail me back and clue me in.
>we have some distance left to go before even future-watchers get the hang
>of this time notation business: they sent me the times in am/pm form
>relative to EDT. sic transmit gloria mundi.
^^^
Are you sure it was EDT, and not EST? :)
Remember the recent event by Microsoft where they herded people in to
movie theatres for their one-way tele-conference? Since it was a
nation-wide event, they need to specify the time of the event in a
format everybody would understand. Therefore, the event was scheduled
to start at 10:00am EST. The problem was that this was was during
daylight savings, so it wasn't clear if they meant EST or EDT. I
called their 800 number to check, and they didn't know what I was
talking about.
-- Lance.
Michael Shields
Paul Eggert <egg...@twinsun.com> wrote:
> I don't know of anybody
> who uses, or would want to use, the recommended ISO 8601 notation (ugly
> capital `T' and all) for everyday applications.
Substitute a space for the `T' and it's readable by everyone. It's been
the most common format I use for a few years, and no one has had any
problems understanding it. (Some people do blink at the year-first
notation -- sheltered lives they've lead.)
1995-08-21 22:02:44 UTC,
--
Shields.
Michael D Shapiro
>[Paul Eggert]
>
>| Yes; for example, `12:00N' is used in airline tickets for noon.
>
>this is quite interesting. the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition
>surprised me by listing noon as "12:00 M" for _meridies_ or "noon" in
>Latin.
A quick look at the U.S. Government Printing Office Style Manual (March
1984) shows that references to meridian in statements of time are
abbreviated as follows (p. 143, section 9.54):
10 a.m. 12 m. (noon)
2:30 p.m. 12 p.m. (midnight)
Page 166, section 12.9.b further expands on this.
--
Michael D. Shapiro, Ph.D. Internet: msha...@nosc.mil
Code 4123, NCCOSC RDT&E Division (NRaD) San Diego CA 92152
Voice: (619) 553-4080 FAX: (619) 553-4808 DSN: 553-4080
Paul Eggert
>[Paul Eggert]
>| The distinction between am and pm has been in common use for many
>| centuries. It doesn't need ISO's blessing.
> he was talking about the "n" vs "m" notation.
That wasn't clear to me; if you're right then of course he was
quite correct that there is no generally accepted standard.
> "ISO's blessing" is usually obtained through international agreement
> on existing common ways of expression. your indignant refusal to
> acknowledge such "blessing" could very easily transfer to an argument
> of intellectual protectionism
I wasn't indignant, and it was not my intent to promote protectionism.
My point was that ISO needn't standardize the definition of AM, PM,
noon, and midnight, any more than it needs to standardize what day of
the year Easter falls on. These matters were decided by societies that
existed long before ISO was founded, and it would generally be a waste
of time for ISO to poke its nose into them.
>| I don't know of anybody who uses, or would want to use, the recommended
>| ISO 8601 notation (ugly capital `T' and all) for everyday applications.
> the ISO 8601 date format is quite common
Yes, but it's ordinarily munged, because people ordinarily replace that
format's ugly capital `T' with a space, or some other punctuation.
Too bad this isn't blessed by the standard;
perhaps the next revision of the standard will fix this.
>| I would guess that more people
>| ordinarily use terminology like `am/pm' than use the 24-hour clock.
> define what you mean by "ordinarily".
Ordinary everyday use, e.g.
``Why are you calling me at 2 o'clock in the morning?!''
> "you Americans" are generally clueless about dates and times.
Ah, that must explain why the first author of the Revision Control System
(who is a German) used a date-and-time format that resembles ISO 8601,
but does not allow collaboration between people in different time zones,
and stops working after 1999. And it also must explain why
I (an American) modified RCS to work around those problems
in a mostly-upward-compatible way (and what a hassle that was!),
and added support for times in proper ISO 8601 format --
except it doesn't generate that ugly `T'. Call me an ugly American
if you like, but I can't stand the `T'.
Mark Brader
> > > is still dominating.
>
>
> do you refer to by "standard English", Mark Brader?
I'd say that a usage is standard English if almost any English-speaker
would consider it correct, and most would use it at least some of the time.
The term would be contrasted with "nonstandard" or "substandard", referring
to usages that most speakers anywhere would avoid or consider incorrect;
with "jargon" or "slang", indicating use in specific subcultures; and
with "regional" or "national" (or references to specific regions or
countries), indicating that the usage is common or is considered correct
only in those places.
In this case, of course, "standard" was being contrasted with "US national".
It certainly does not necessarily refer to the *only* way to express
something, and in this case was not so intended. The sort of style guide
citation that would support the claim that AM/PM is US-only would be one
from another English-speaking country that did not allow for that notation.
> > > I was last week in Canada and saw "9h00 to 18h30" written on traffic
> > > signs and 20:00 written at cinemas.
>
> > Where in Canada -- Quebec?
>
> Your provincialism is starting to annoy me, Mark. Are you trying to refute
> his argument, or are you trying to belittle Quebec?
I may feel a degree of provincialism in my preferences -- I think most
people do that -- but I am *trying* to discuss an issue of fact. The
relevance of Quebec is that it is not predominantly English-speaking;
so *if* those signs were there, then they prove nothing about the degree
of use of 24-hour notation in places that are predominantly English-speaking.
If there are in fact English-language cinemas in Canada (even in Quebec)
using 24-hour notation on their marquees, it's news to me and I'd be
interested to find out.
> Markus, keep up the good work. when Mark Brader and his "standard English"
> is incapable of unambiguously identifying the day of month for over a third
> of the days of the year (day 1 through 12 of any given month in the
> "standard English" notation is ambiguous), it is high time to junk the
> "standard English" and go for the _real_ standard.
Huh? Standard English expresses dates with the months in words, in any of
several ways, all of them perfectly unambiguous. For numerically abbreviated
dates, of course, it's chaos when different national styles collide. I've
been using big-endian styles such as ISO 8601 for nearly 15 years now.
Not that what I personally do proves anything; I'm responding here to the
previous paragraph, which for some reason refers specifically to me.
> Mark, if you _have_ any arguments beyond the "foreign idea" kind of silly
> protectionist provincialism, I'm sure you would appreciate an opportunity
> to present _your_ "foreign ideas" to those who might not be as hung up in
> the errors of his (culture's) ways.
I wasn't trying to present any idea. I was mostly trying to *correct some
misstatements* about when and where people use AM/PM notation in English,
and specifically the assertion that it is a "US notation". Slipping in
"foreign" like that was a mistake on my part; it was intended as a slightly
jocular way of describing how I think most British people would think of
the 24-hour notation today, but I can see that a foreign :-) audience might
not see it that way.
I don't think there's much more for me to add, so if someone wants to get
annoyed again and shout back at me, they can have the last word. Followups
directed away from sci.astro, again.
--
Mark Brader | "One of the lessons of history is that nothing
m...@sq.com | is often a good thing to do and always a clever
SoftQuad Inc., Toronto | thing to say." -- Will Durant
Clive D.W. Feather
> After that, he
> might continue his research to a British newspaper.
The TV pages of my (British) newspaper label, for each channel, the
first programme as "6.30 am" or "12 noon" or "4 pm" or "12 mdnt". The
remaining programmes are just given times as "7" or "7.25", with no
special note at the transition between am and pm (that is, the first
programme at or after noon or midnight does not have a suffixed time).
Public transport, on the other hand, normally uses the 24-hour clock
--
Clive D.W. Feather | If you lie to the compiler,
cl...@demon.net (work, preferred) | it will get its revenge.
cl...@stdc.demon.co.uk (home) | - Henry Spencer
Peter Kerr
Altho' the 24hr version might be a bit stonkered at low - mid latitudes...
Erik Naggum
| Call me an ugly American if you like, but I can't stand the `T'.
I wish you wouldn't bring that up all the time -- it's such a good excuse
to ignore the entire standard, and that would be a pity. I use a space
unless it isn't allowed, such as in USENET message-ID's.
#<Erik 3018068934>
--
trigraph ??!??! die
A. Grant
>> I also saw the ISO notation used on airports and hotels in England.
>This foreign idea has made some inroads there, yes. But if you ask
>someone there what time it is, they'll never *say* that it's 20:00.
No, they'll say it's "eight o'clock in the evening". But if they
want to write down a time for travel, meeting etc. the use of 24hr
clock is quite common in England. I got a message today asking me to
play cricket at 17:30, how much more English do you want?
>Why are you trying to rail against the English language like this?
There is spoken and written English, and there is informal and formal
English. If you want to discuss colloquial spoken English then try
alt.english.usage, not here.
Paul Schlyter
>even now I wouldn't be surprised if the GMT day still officially begins
>at noon, since GMT is an astronomical term and as far as I know nobody
>ever officially changed its definition.
GMT has mostly been abandoned by astronomers since it'sw ambiguous. It
has been replaced by time scales such as UT0, UT1, UT2, UTC, TAI, TDT, TBT,
all of which are precisely defined.
And, yes, even in astronomy a new date begins at midnight -- the only
exception being the Julian Day Numbers, for backwards compatibility
reasons.
--
----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Schlyter, Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
Nybrogatan 75 A, S-114 40 Stockholm, SWEDEN
e-mail: pau...@saaf.se paul.s...@ausys.se
Markus Kuhn
>> I was last week in Canada and saw "9h00 to 18h30" written on traffic
>> signs and 20:00 written at cinemas.
>
>Where in Canada -- Quebec?
Montreal. But it was an English language cinema.
>> I also saw the ISO notation used on airports and hotels in England.
>
>This foreign idea has made some inroads there, yes. But if you ask
>someone there what time it is, they'll never *say* that it's 20:00.
I read at the Youth Hostel in Philadelphia (US) even "The house will open
again at 16:30". :-) However this was the only place were I saw the 24h
notation so far in the civil USA.
Even in Germany, people say "Es ist viertel nach 8" (It is a quarter
past 8) when you ask them for the time, but nobody in Europe and Asia
would ever write down anything else than 20:15 (may be sometimes also
20.15 or 20^{15} in TeX notation) in this case. As Erik already pointed out,
we do not talk about coloquial spoken language here.
>Why are you trying to rail against the English language like this?
Is a local time notation really linked to the language? The
AM/PM notation is a legacy from a time were analog clocks were labeled
with roman numerals from I to XII. The roman numeral system has no
representation for the zero and this led to this (from a modern point
of few) pretty strange system were the overflow from 12:59 AM (00:59) to
1:00 AM (01:00) happens one hour after the new day has started, and were
there is pretty much confusion about how to designate noon and both
midnights of a day.
But to answer your question more honestly about the deeper reasons
for my enthusiasm for educating Americans about the right way of writing the
time:
The English language has become the defacto language for international
communication and it is the language understood by the largest part of
the earth's population. I very much appreciate this (although from
a computer linguistic's point of few, I had of course prefered Esperanto ;-).
However with the English language becoming the dominating means of
international communication, a number of minor other things commonly
used traditionaly with this language should clearly be kept from
spreading into international use. These mainly are:
- the imperial system of units (feet, inches, yards, ounces, pounds,
gallons, cups, etc.)
- the 1-12 a.m./p.m. time notation
- the mm/dd/yy date notation
- the US paper sizes (legal, letter, etc.)
because for all these things, the international community has long ago
established much better conventions (the metric system, the 24h clock,
the A and B series of paper sizes, etc.).
However it is amazing how little especially people from the US (this
excludes of course all comp.std.internat readers here) are aware of the fact
that 7' 8", 12/31/95 and 5:30 p.m. are pretty strange notations to people
in REALLY all of the non-English speaking countries. In dayly international
communication, the old English conventions listed above are causing
a lot of trouble and the worst part of it is that the only real reason
for this is that most people in the US are simply not aware of the standards
to which the rest of the world has already agreed on (perhaps not yet
on the ISO yyyy-mm-dd notation, but surely on the SI units (even the
term "metric system" used in the US is obsolete, because the SI has replaced
the old French/German metric system (which had now obsolete units like
kilopond and bar)), the 24h time notation and the ISO paper sizes).
The sad consequence is that because of the dominating position of the
US in certain markets,
- I have to hunt for non-metric screws when I want to repair
mechanical PC components,
- my Abitur (high school diploma) has been printed on 11 inch long
paper and does not fit into the common A4 filing material,
- I have to fight with with software written by people who do not
know that nobody in Europe, Afrika and Asia has a HP Laserwriter for
US paper sizes
- and all of this makes me a little bit angry if I work with software
were date and time is displayed in the quite awkward US notation,
were strange things happen when I try to use German umlaut characters
(non-ASCII), when I see data base fields for names or addresses which
really work only for typical US names and addresses, etc.
Thats were I got interested in standards and especially in
internationalization. I do not even expect from e.g. US software
developpers that they include huge localization mechanisms into all their
programs. It would already be ok, if this software would be written
with keeping in mind that the above things (date/time, paper sizes
and SI units) are THE de-facto standard everywhere outside the
English-speaking world. That's all.
Markus
--
Markus Kuhn, Computer Science student -- University of Erlangen,
Internet Mail: <msk...@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> - Germany
WWW Home: <http://wwwcip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/user/mskuhn>
Present location: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, US
Robin W. Laing
>> > > As far as I know, the USA is the only country were the am/pm notation
>> > > is still dominating.
>>
>>
>> do you refer to by "standard English", Mark Brader?
>
>would consider it correct, and most would use it at least some of the time.
>The term would be contrasted with "nonstandard" or "substandard", referring
>to usages that most speakers anywhere would avoid or consider incorrect;
>with "jargon" or "slang", indicating use in specific subcultures; and
>with "regional" or "national" (or references to specific regions or
>countries), indicating that the usage is common or is considered correct
>only in those places.
>
>In this case, of course, "standard" was being contrasted with "US national".
>
>It certainly does not necessarily refer to the *only* way to express
>something, and in this case was not so intended. The sort of style guide
>citation that would support the claim that AM/PM is US-only would be one
>from another English-speaking country that did not allow for that notation.
>
>> > > signs and 20:00 written at cinemas.
>>
In my travels, I have seen the 24 hour clock used more and more in
government operations. Of course even the federal governement cannot
get their own standards in order.
Having worked for the Gov for over 12 years, I would still run into
forms with the yy/mm/dd or dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy format on them. In
one case two different formats on one form.
Well it is the government. This is the reason for standards being
laid down.
Standard English, even in the UK they don't have a standard english,
but that is another story.
>>
>> Your provincialism is starting to annoy me, Mark. Are you trying to refute
>> his argument, or are you trying to belittle Quebec?
>
>I may feel a degree of provincialism in my preferences -- I think most
>people do that -- but I am *trying* to discuss an issue of fact. The
>relevance of Quebec is that it is not predominantly English-speaking;
>so *if* those signs were there, then they prove nothing about the degree
>of use of 24-hour notation in places that are predominantly English-speaking.
>
>If there are in fact English-language cinemas in Canada (even in Quebec)
>using 24-hour notation on their marquees, it's news to me and I'd be
>interested to find out.
>
I will vouch for that, we use it in some locations in Alberta.
>> Markus, keep up the good work. when Mark Brader and his "standard English"
>> is incapable of unambiguously identifying the day of month for over a third
>> of the days of the year (day 1 through 12 of any given month in the
>> "standard English" notation is ambiguous), it is high time to junk the
>> "standard English" and go for the _real_ standard.
>
>Huh? Standard English expresses dates with the months in words, in any of
>several ways, all of them perfectly unambiguous. For numerically abbreviated
>dates, of course, it's chaos when different national styles collide. I've
>been using big-endian styles such as ISO 8601 for nearly 15 years now.
>Not that what I personally do proves anything; I'm responding here to the
>previous paragraph, which for some reason refers specifically to me.
>
>> Mark, if you _have_ any arguments beyond the "foreign idea" kind of silly
>> protectionist provincialism, I'm sure you would appreciate an opportunity
>> to present _your_ "foreign ideas" to those who might not be as hung up in
>> the errors of his (culture's) ways.
>
>I wasn't trying to present any idea. I was mostly trying to *correct some
>misstatements* about when and where people use AM/PM notation in English,
>and specifically the assertion that it is a "US notation". Slipping in
>"foreign" like that was a mistake on my part; it was intended as a slightly
>jocular way of describing how I think most British people would think of
>the 24-hour notation today, but I can see that a foreign :-) audience might
>not see it that way.
>
>I don't think there's much more for me to add, so if someone wants to get
>annoyed again and shout back at me, they can have the last word. Followups
>directed away from sci.astro, again.
As I said before, standards are great, when dealing with people around
the world or even between the US and Canada or Britian, what does
4/7/95 really mean is it April 7 or July 4? If I lived in the US I
wouldn't want to get that wrong, I might miss my holiday.
>--
>Mark Brader | "One of the lessons of history is that nothing
>m...@sq.com | is often a good thing to do and always a clever
>SoftQuad Inc., Toronto | thing to say." -- Will Durant
>
>My text in this article is in the public domain.
--
Robin Laing || - Free thoughts and free expression is paramount to the
President || advancement of understanding those things that we don't
TST Consulting || like or understand. *** Censorship is Mind Control ***
Stephen Baynes
: In article <1995Aug21.1...@sq.com>, Mark Brader <m...@sq.com> wrote:
: > After that, he
: > might continue his research to a British newspaper.
: The TV pages of my (British) newspaper label, for each channel, the
: first programme as "6.30 am" or "12 noon" or "4 pm" or "12 mdnt". The
: remaining programmes are just given times as "7" or "7.25", with no
: special note at the transition between am and pm (that is, the first
: programme at or after noon or midnight does not have a suffixed time).
: Public transport, on the other hand, normally uses the 24-hour clock
It also seems in UK TV listings and timetables to be common to use a
space (24h and 12h) or nothing at all (24h) between the hours and the minutes.
Examples: 7 45 am 07 45 0745
It is not uncommon for people in the UK write a colon rather than a dot
between hours and minutes.
Every digital clock I have seen uses a colon between the hours and minutes.
Almost all will do the 24 hour clock. Fewer will do a 12 hour clock too - I
have not checked if they think noon is AM or PM.
Strictly noon cannot be AM or PM as AM means before noon and PM means after
noon. A literal interpretation would have 12PM as 2400 and perhaps 12AM as
0000.
--
Stephen Baynes bay...@mulsoc2.serigate.philips.nl
Philips Semiconductors Ltd
Southampton My views are my own.
United Kingdom
Christopher Fynn
shi...@tembel.org "Michael Shields" writes:
> I'd be interested to hear the rationale.
That's obvious: m. is an abbreviation for meridian (noon)
midnight is 12 hours post meridian (after noon).
The problem with using m. to indicate noon is that I believe
a majority of english speaking Americans would take it to be an
abbreviation of midnight.
Markus Kuhn
Michael D Shapiro <msha...@nosc.mil> wrote:
> A quick look at the U.S. Government Printing Office Style Manual (March
> 1984) shows that references to meridian in statements of time are
> abbreviated as follows (p. 143, section 9.54):
>
> 10 a.m. 12 m. (noon)
> 2:30 p.m. 12 p.m. (midnight)
I have also already seen 12:00 m. used for 00:00 or 24:00, were
m. means midnight.
The quoted book is very interesting. Unfortunately, I have only found
the January 1967 version here. In this old edition, there are a few
very strange things specified about usage of SI units that do not agree
at all with ISO 31 and how these units are usually used in scientific
publications (well, ISO 31 has been written after 1967).
E.g. Section 10.55 says "degrees Kelin", section 10.58 says that
"metric abbreviations are set in lowercase" (e.g. "a" for Ampere)
and that cc instead of cm^3 should be used for volumes. Has this been
fixed in the newer editions? If not then the editors really should
have a look into ISO 31 and ISO 1000. Current editions of books like
the Webster ("myriameter") and the AP style guide ("degrees Kelvin") have
obviously copied such strange things without checking the official
definition.
May be it would be a nice experiment to write to the "U.S. Printing Office,
United States Government Printing Office Style Board, Washington,
D.C. 20402" and suggest them to include the ISO 8601 date/time notations
into their style book (e.g. 1995-08-23 19:10:37).
Gordon A. Lew
*snip*
Is it true that automobile speedometers in the UK will be recalibrated
to furlongs per fortnight? :-)
Bob Goudreau
: I must concur with Markus: the U.S. of A. is the only country where the
: AM/PM notation is still _dominating_.
Presumably, you mean that one of the 24-hour notations is dominant
in other English-speaking countries such as the UK, Australia and
the non-French part of Canada. I don't know about Australia, but
I haven't seen any evidence of this in the British and Canadian
media I read/view. Comments from residents of those countries?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Goudreau Data General Corporation
goud...@dg-rtp.dg.com 62 Alexander Drive
+1 919 248 6231 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA
Bob Goudreau
: sidenote: I asked CNN for the air times of their show Future Watch (e-mail:
: future...@cnn.com), and asked if they could supply the times in
: Universal Coordinated Time, because, firstly, I don't believe in timezones
: and secondly, I wanted to know what the "future" of time indication would
: look like. the reply:
: Unfortunately, neither I nor anyone on my staff knows what Universal
: Coordinated Time is. Perhaps you could e-mail me back and clue me in.
: we have some distance left to go before even future-watchers get the hang
: of this time notation business: they sent me the times in am/pm form
: relative to EDT. sic transmit gloria mundi.
I'm surprised at the EDT-relative times, because I've seen plenty of
announcements on CNN World News (when they're about about to branch
to different upcoming programs on CNN International vs. CNN USA)
where program times are quotes in terms of Greenwich Mean Time.
It just sounds like they need to be educated that UTC ~= GMT.
(I know, they're not precisely the same, but the tiny differences
only matter in scientific settings.)
Mike Kupfer
Bob Goudreau <goud...@dg-rtp.dg.com> wrote:
> Erik Naggum (er...@naggum.no) wrote:
>
> : I must concur with Markus: the U.S. of A. is the only country where the
> : AM/PM notation is still _dominating_.
I don't think this is accurate. When I went to Australia in March I
assumed I would mostly find a 24-hour clock. Well, I saw one clock at
the Sydney airport that used 24-hour notation. The Australian Bureau
of Meteorology postings I occasionaly get off the net use a 24-hour
clock. A few cash register receipts used a 24-hour clock, but you can
find those here, too. Pretty much everything else used the AM/PM
system, including all my airplane reservations and, if I'm remembering
correctly, the digital clocks in the hotel rooms. So, I would say
that the AM/PM system is the dominant one in Australia, too, though it
is less dominant there than in the States.
--
Mike Kupfer kup...@eng.sun.com
NFS Engineering Speaking for myself, not for Sun.
"So many books, so little time."
Christopher Fynn
> I must concur with Markus: the U.S. of A. is the only country where the
> AM/PM notation is still _dominating_.
In the UK the correct form is a.m. and p.m. (Hart's Rules) - though
Collins Dictionary also allows AM and PM; am and pm; as well as A.M.
and P.M.
Christopher Fynn
goud...@dg-rtp.dg.com "Bob Goudreau" writes:
> Presumably, you mean that one of the 24-hour notations is dominant
> in other English-speaking countries such as the UK, Australia and
> the non-French part of Canada. I don't know about Australia, but
> I haven't seen any evidence of this in the British and Canadian
> media I read/view. Comments from residents of those countries?
While everyone understands the 24 hour system here in the UK a.m and p.m.
still predominate. The fact that a twenty four hour system is shown on
some digital displays means little as some of these devices won't generate
anything else.
My grandfather used to collect Napoleonica - one of the fascinating things
in his house was a French twenty four hour (analouge) clock from that period
which ran on dripping water. It is the only twenty four hour analouge clock
that I can recall seeing. How many people in even non English speaking
countries have a watch with a twenty four hour dial or, keep their digital
watch set to display twenty four hour time?
If twenty four hour notation predominated anywhere surely there would
be a bigger demand for twenty four hour watches and clocks.
Computer programmers should not impose twenty four hour time notation
and year, month, day date notation on users just because it is logical
or more convenient for them to work with. However we should all be careful
that whatever system of notation we choose to use is unabiguous.
"Standards" can sometimes be a bit like political correctness - ruinous
of the richness of language.
- Chris
Gene Fornario
>In article <1995Aug25.1...@dg-rtp.dg.com>
> goud...@dg-rtp.dg.com "Bob Goudreau" writes:
>
>> Presumably, you mean that one of the 24-hour notations is dominant
>> in other English-speaking countries such as the UK, Australia and
>> the non-French part of Canada. I don't know about Australia, but
>> I haven't seen any evidence of this in the British and Canadian
>> media I read/view. Comments from residents of those countries?
>
>be a bigger demand for twenty four hour watches and clocks.
>
>Computer programmers should not impose twenty four hour time notation
>and year, month, day date notation on users just because it is logical
>or more convenient for them to work with. However we should all be careful
>that whatever system of notation we choose to use is unabiguous.
>
>"Standards" can sometimes be a bit like political correctness - ruinous
>of the richness of language.
Well, personal and customary conventions are not a problem with me. As a
shortwave broadcast listener, I deal with the standard usage of UTC, but I
wouldn't use it for setting a local appointment.
Dates are interesting...when I got a letter from a broadcaster in India, the
postmark was 24-IX-94, which means Sept. 24th, 1994...not a problem for me
to figure out.
I sometimes peruse Japanese art. They have gone to dating it in ISO style
big-endian: 1995.02.14, sometimes they use the date of the current Emperor's
reign (Heisei 7 for 1995).
I don't think it's difficult to learn other systems and it shouldn't stop us
from using our local customary ones.
Gene--
--
ge...@netcom.com
Erik Naggum
| How many people in even non English speaking countries have a watch
| with a twenty four hour dial or, keep their digital watch set to
| display twenty four hour time?
when I bought my last digital watch, I asked about this. the shopowner
said he had never received a digital watch for repairs or battery changing
which was _not_ set to 24-hour time. this is in Oslo, Norway. _every_
numeric expression of time in this country is in the 24-hour notation. we
simply do not have any equivalence of the (obsolescent) AM/PM notation.
| If twenty four hour notation predominated anywhere surely there would
| be a bigger demand for twenty four hour watches and clocks.
why does that conclusion follow?
| Computer programmers should not impose twenty four hour time notation
| and year, month, day date notation on users just because it is logical
| or more convenient for them to work with.
computer programmers should tell users that certain pre-electronic-age
habits were bad to begin with, and get worse with computers trying to help
them. users who think computer programmers (and, by extension, computers)
should help them and be friendly when they are acting like stubborn,
spoiled brats should be deprived of their computers. for the first time in
the history of human tool-making, humans refuse to adapt to their tools.
| "Standards" can sometimes be a bit like political correctness - ruinous
| of the richness of language.
let's hope you weren't too proud of that analogy.
#<Erik 3018417915>
--
trigraph ??!??! die
Erkki Ruohtula
>My grandfather used to collect Napoleonica - one of the fascinating things
>in his house was a French twenty four hour (analouge) clock from that period
>which ran on dripping water. It is the only twenty four hour analouge clock
>watch set to display twenty four hour time?
Here in Finland I have never seen anyone keep a digital clock
voluntarily in 12-hour mode. By "voluntarily" I mean that some digital
clocks, particularly older ones, display only 12-hour time, or changing
the default mode is so arcane that the user has not bothered,
and the instruction booklet has been lost...
Before imported computer programs and digital clocks started foisting
these AM/PM-times on us, the very abbreviations AM and PM were
unknown to most Finns. Fortunately AM happened to be almost mnemonic,
since "morning" is "aamu" or "aamupäivä" in Finnish (depending on whether
you are talking about early or late morning). PM is not: "afternoon"
is "iltapäivä".
>If twenty four hour notation predominated anywhere surely there would
>be a bigger demand for twenty four hour watches and clocks.
Apart from tradition, the problem with a 24-hour analog clock is that the
hours come too close to each other. It is harder to read. Since most
people look at the clock during the day, a large part of the dial would
be "unused". Not a problem with digital clocks.
>Computer programmers should not impose twenty four hour time notation
>and year, month, day date notation on users just because it is logical
>or more convenient for them to work with. However we should all be careful
The experience of Finnish users of software has been that it is 12-hour
notation that many foreign computer programmers are trying to impose,
along with strange notations for dates. Fortunately the situation is
getting better in new software.
>"Standards" can sometimes be a bit like political correctness - ruinous
>of the richness of language.
That is true. However, supporting only one output format is cheaper than
proper localisation of products. Given that, it is better to make a product
that displays times and dates according to the standard, instead in the
manufacturer's culture-dependent notation, if localisation is not an option
for some reason, and you still want to export your creation.
--
Erkki Ruohtula / Nokia Telecommunications Oy
e...@tele.nokia.fi / P.O. Box 33 FIN-02601 Espoo, Finland
(My private opinions, of course)
Doug McDonald
>| Computer programmers should not impose twenty four hour time notation
>| and year, month, day date notation on users just because it is logical
>| or more convenient for them to work with.
Exactly.
>computer programmers should tell users that certain pre-electronic-age
>habits were bad to begin with,
That's arrogant and stupid. And quite likely, a Europeanism. You know,
authoritarianism. Here in the US we are a democracy, not a monarchy,
and haven't, since we beace an independent country, been tied to
an autioritarian, monarchic, past. IF the people don't want
1 24 hour clock, or the metric system, they say so to their
representatives, and it is so.
Doug McDonald
Erik Naggum
| computer programmers should tell users that certain pre-electronic-age
| habits were bad to begin with,
[Doug McDonald]
| That's arrogant and stupid. And quite likely, a Europeanism. You
| know, authoritarianism.
I'm pleased that you resort to such arguments.
| Here in the US we are a democracy, not a monarchy, and haven't, since
| we beace an independent country, been tied to an autioritarian,
| monarchic, past. IF the people don't want 1 24 hour clock, or the
| metric system, they say so to their representatives, and it is so.
you seem to have missed the much-publicized release of Windows 95, and the
fact that "Kill Bill" is much more authoritarian than any of the European
monarchs have been in the past hundred years. in Europe, we tend to think
that protecting the individual from the vagaries of concentrated power is a
very important issue, irrespective of whether the choice of the people who
erect the seats of power do so by casting their ballots or at check-out
points. I see that your "democracy" has caused the largest number of
lawyers per capita in the known history of the world, and the greatest per
capita public debt in the history of the world, even counting ancient wars.
I must assume that it is was the will of the people to bring these sorry
states of affair about, or it wouldn't have happened. right?
if you had done your homework, you would have noticed that the democracy
you seem to be so much in favor of consists of voicing opinions, reaching a
consensus or mutually agreable compromise, and then having all parties
abide by said consensus or compromise. the United States of America is
just such a voice in the standards creation process, and standards are no
more than formal documents of consensus and compromise, but the U.S.A. is
quite unique in insisting that it keep its own conventions in spite of
voting in favor of standards for the rest of the world. one word comes to
mind to describe this kind of behavior: authoritarianism. the world can
argue, compromise, and vote all it wants: the U.S.A. will force its own
standards-violating conventions on the rest of the world through what it
defends as "marketing". this is not democracy. this isn't even anarchy.
this is plutocracy, where opinions are formed according to whoever has the
most money to waste on "marketing". nowhere else in the world are people
not elected because they run out of campaigning money, and nowhere else in
the world are people elected because they can run the biggest campaign.
only in your "democratic" United States of America, Doug.
there is also a possible problem that the "representatives" are not actual
"representatives" of the U.S. population in the sense that they have been
empowered with the ability to speak for and accept responsibilities on
behalf of those that they represent, but this is trivially true of any
representative democracy.
the remaining force of your argument is that you will not abide by the
agreements that are made on your behalf in an international democracy.
this is not an issue of democracy, monarchies, or authoritarianism -- it
just an instance of the stupid stubbornness that Europe did away with soon
after those who failed to agree to anything fled to America to go their own
way, and to create the only peacetime society in world history that is
killing its citizens faster and more consistently than most wars did.
not that I'm anti-American, but I _am_ anti-patriotism, especially when it
takes the form of religious denial and rampant ignorance of alternatives.
#<Erik 3018436057>
--
trigraph ??!??! die
Chris Marriott
>Erik Naggum (er...@naggum.no) wrote:
>
>: I must concur with Markus: the U.S. of A. is the only country where the
>: AM/PM notation is still _dominating_.
>
>Presumably, you mean that one of the 24-hour notations is dominant
>in other English-speaking countries such as the UK, Australia and
>the non-French part of Canada. I don't know about Australia, but
>I haven't seen any evidence of this in the British and Canadian
>media I read/view. Comments from residents of those countries?
Here in the UK 24h notation is universally used on all such things
as timetables, etc. Eg last night I went to the cinema; my ticket was
stamped "2145 performance".
Chris
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Marriott, Warrington, UK | Author of SkyMap v2 award-winning
ch...@chrism.demon.co.uk | shareware Windows planetarium.
For full info, see http://www.execpc.com/~skymap
Author member of Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Markus Kuhn
>How many people in even non English speaking
>countries have a watch with a twenty four hour dial or, keep their digital
>watch set to display twenty four hour time?
I can assure you that you will practically never find the 12h numeric
notation for time being used in Germany. Ok, analog clocks have here an angular
speed of 360 degrees per 12h as everywhere else, and sometimes the 12h clock
is used in SPOKEN language. But in Germany, you will find no digital
clock (except perhaps those from English speaking visitors ;-) that show 5:00
when it is 17:00, everybody writes times here in the 24 hour notation. The
German language does not know any equivalent to the English a.m./p.m. terms.
The 24h time notation is in Germany not only used on rail and bus schedules,
cinemas, tv guides, newspapers, digital watches, etc., but it is THE notation
used everywhere. Yesterday, I did NOT go to bed at 11, but at 23 o'clock.
We usually think in terms of the 24h clock, it is very convenient.
I have travelled around already quite a bit in Europe, and I do not know any
country (except GB+US), where I have ever seen the 12h time notation
written down. The French language also has no equivalent of the terms
a.m./p.m., because they are not necessary. The same applies to all other
non-english languages I am aware of. English speaking countries
(and may be former British colonies) are to my knowledge the only
countries were there is anything like a.m./p.m. (and were non-SI
units are still used for length, weight and volume and were non-ISO
paper sizes are still used, with the US being the country were
the common international standards are ignored most).
>If twenty four hour notation predominated anywhere surely there would
>be a bigger demand for twenty four hour watches and clocks.
All digital watches and clocks you can buy on the European continent have
either only the 24h mode (my CASIO watch displays right now 15:35) or some
of them can be configured into both a 12h and 24h mode (I assume for the US
market, because nobody in Continental Europe would use this mode).
>Computer programmers should not impose twenty four hour time notation
>and year, month, day date notation on users just because it is logical
>or more convenient for them to work with. However we should all be careful
>that whatever system of notation we choose to use is unabiguous.
The perfect solution is locatization were you can switch between many display
formats. However if you do not want to take the effort of supporting
many possible common formats, then PLEASE do not select the very unusual
and unpractical US notation as the only supported format. In this
case (if you want to avoid the effort of locatization functions), the
ISO YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss notation surely is an excellent choice.
The "12:00 a.m. 04/02/07" notation is clearly quite ambigious. Select
which of the following times in ISO notation the above example represents:
2007-04-02 00:00
2007-04-03 00:00
2007-02-04 00:00
2007-02-05 00:00
2007-04-02 12:00
2004-02-07 00:00
2004-02-07 24:00
...
and this is only a very incomplete list of how the above date could
reasonably be interpreted (remember that the dd/mm/yy and the yy/mm/dd
notation are also commonly used and that each day both starts and ends
with midnight).
The majority of the world has already decided to use the 24h time
notation, and may be the year 2000 is a good opportunity to have a closer
look at the YYYY-MM-DD notation as a common worldwide standard, too.
Christopher Fynn
msk...@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de "Markus Kuhn" writes:
...
> I have travelled around already quite a bit in Europe, and I do not know any
> country (except GB+US), where I have ever seen the 12h time notation
> written down. The French language also has no equivalent of the terms
> a.m./p.m., because they are not necessary. The same applies to all other
> non-english languages I am aware of. English speaking countries
> (and may be former British colonies) are to my knowledge the only
> countries were there is anything like a.m./p.m. (and were non-SI
> units are still used for length, weight and volume and were non-ISO
> paper sizes are still used, with the US being the country were
> the common international standards are ignored most).
...
Hmm. I stand corrected. I spent years in S. Asia
and everyone there seems to use a 12 hr system when using
their own languages. This includes Tibet and Nepal which
wern't colonized by any European power.
Erland Sommarskog
>but nobody in Europe and Asia would ever write down anything else than
>20:15 (may be sometimes also 20.15 or 20^{15} in TeX notation) in this
>case.
Well, almost. Swedish cinemas stick to old tradition and advertises
their programme at 1, 2.45, 5, 7.15 etc. Rarely any source for con-
fusion since there rarely are any films between midnight and noon.
--
Erland Sommarskog, som...@enea.se, Stockholm
Michael Shields
Markus Kuhn <msk...@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> wrote:
> The "12:00 a.m. 04/02/07" notation is clearly quite ambigious. Select
> which of the following times in ISO notation the above example represents:
>
> 2007-04-02 00:00
It could also represent a date in the twentieth century.
--
Shields.
Paul Eggert
> 00:00 is the beginning of a day, while 24:00 is the end of a day.
I'd avoid `24:00' even if it's part of the standard, since it can be confusing.
For example, the best printed resource I know of for historical
time zone information* contains several bugs where 24:00 was written
where 00:00 was meant.
* Thomas G. Shanks, The International Atlas (3rd edition), San Diego:
ACS Publications, Inc. (1991).
Peter Kerr
> That's arrogant and stupid. And quite likely, a Europeanism. You know,
> and haven't, since we beace an independent country, been tied to
> an autioritarian, monarchic, past. IF the people don't want
> 1 24 hour clock, or the metric system, they say so to their
> representatives, and it is so.
I prefer to think that this is apathy at work. People at large,
and their representatives don't know or care which is the better system.
After all we have had some 4 centuries of seeing 12 hour analogue
clock faces. Time recognition by the hand positions is generally
faster if not as accurate as interpretation of a digital display.
How the two 12 hour periods in one day are distinguished is partly
cultural, and won't be resolved in my time.
--
Peter Kerr bodger
School of Music chandler
University of Auckland neo-Luddite
Erik Naggum
| I'd avoid `24:00' even if it's part of the standard, since it can be
| confusing. For example, the best printed resource I know of for
| historical time zone information* contains several bugs where 24:00 was
| written where 00:00 was meant.
I see. a new principle of design: avoid everything that can be confusing
to a real or imagined entity, and a new principle of implementation: if one
guy gets it wrong, everybody should drop it immediately. I wish you had
been on the C++ standards committee, Paul.
I think I'll still favor the principle of education and polite corrections
mailed to the publisher's copy-editors. authors can't be expected to know
what they're talking about, anymore, so we need to educate the publishers.
even that will fail when authors send in camera-ready copy and refuse to
edit it. we're living in a world where we vote on facts and read personal
opinions (such as paying for a product) as gospel.
#<Erik 3018588600>
--
Windows 95: a new definition of "user friendly":
the user is friendly to Bill Gates.
Kari E. Hurtta
Christopher Fynn <cf...@sahaja.demon.co.uk> writes in
comp.std.internat and sci.astro:
»My grandfather used to collect Napoleonica - one of the fascinating things
»in his house was a French twenty four hour (analouge) clock from that period
»which ran on dripping water. It is the only twenty four hour analouge clock
»that I can recall seeing. How many people in even non English speaking
»countries have a watch with a twenty four hour dial or, keep their digital
»watch set to display twenty four hour time?
In my watch dial is 12-hours and digital numbers are 24 hour time.
Well, I haven't seen 24 hour dial. Digital watches I keep in 24 hour time
(even 12 hour digits are possible). Timetables, TV-programas and so on
uses 24 hour time. I use 12 hour time in speak (of course you don't say
AM or PM in Finnish :-)).
Martin J. Duerst
In article <41ctat$d...@usenet.rpi.edu>,
Markus Kuhn <msk...@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> writes:
> E.g. I have distributed the small attached explanation to a number of relevant
> USENET groups and the response was VERY positive. The yyyy-mm-dd notation
> is now starting to become well established in the German de.* USENET
> groups, FAQ authors (e.g. sci.astro) have included the ISO date explanations
> into their texts and numerous people use them now on their Web pages
> (they wondered often anyway which notation would be most adequate).
There is an internet draft available now that discusses i18n issues
of HTML, the "lingua franca" of the Web. The draft can be retrieved
from any internet draft repository as
draft-ietf-html-i18n-00.txt
The draft contains a section proposing markup for such things as
date and time, e.g. by including <DATE>1995-08-28</DATE> in your
HTML text, you could have a knowing browser change that notation
to what the user is expecting. The draft is currently discussed
in the respective working group, and specific proposals both on
syntax (e.g. using an EDI-like structure or whatever) as well as
the general desirability (move that aspect of the draft to a later
step) of the features have been discussed. Any further comments
are wellcome. Smaller things can be sent to me directly (I am one
of the authors); formal comments should be sent to htm...@oclc.org,
preferably after first studying the previous discussion archived
at
http://www.acl.lanl.gov/HTML_WG/archives.html
and supplying technical arguments and detailled suggestions for
new wording if possible.
Regards, Martin.
Fritz Whittington
>Ok, analog clocks have here an angular
>speed of 360 degrees per 12h as everywhere else, and sometimes the 12h clock
>is used in SPOKEN language.
. . .
>The German language does not know any equivalent
to the English a.m./p.m. terms.
. . .
While I agreed with the great majority of what you posted (the parts I
deleted for brevity), I have some difficulty understanding the two above
statements. You sometimes use the 12h clock in spoken language, yet
there is no way to distinguish?
>The French language also has no equivalent of the terms
>a.m./p.m., because they are not necessary. The same applies to all other
>non-english languages I am aware of.
Same problem. Before the French Revolution, the French used a 12-hour
clock, as did all of Europe.
Are you going to tell me that all those beautiful centuries-old clocks
up in church towers in Germany actually chime 23 times the second time
they point to "XI" in the day? What do they chime at midnight, 24 or
not at all?
And if I had realized what would ensue when I answered your original
post, I perhaps wouldn't have! :-)
--
Fritz Whittington Texas Instruments, P.O. Box 655474, MS 446 Dallas, TX 75265
Shipping address: 13510 North Central Expressway, MS 446 Dallas, TX 75243
fr...@ti.com Office: +1 214 995 0397 FAX: +1 214 995 6194
Since I am not an official TI spokesperson, these opinions contain no spokes.
Joern Wilms
Fritz Whittington <fr...@hc.ti.com> wrote:
>Markus Kuhn <msk...@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> writes:
>
>>Ok, analog clocks have here an angular
>>speed of 360 degrees per 12h as everywhere else, and sometimes the 12h clock
>>is used in SPOKEN language.
> . . .
>>The German language does not know any equivalent
> to the English a.m./p.m. terms.
> . . .
>
>While I agreed with the great majority of what you posted (the parts I
>deleted for brevity), I have some difficulty understanding the two above
>statements. You sometimes use the 12h clock in spoken language, yet
>there is no way to distinguish?
>
should not confuse the "colloquial" use with the "formal" use. Most
previous posters have done that. Yes, in Germany, you WILL hear "Let's meet
at 14 o'clock" when speaking with somebody, but you'll also hear "Let's
meet at 2 o'clock IN THE AFTERNOON" or something like that if it is not
completely clear from the context whether you mean during the night or in
the afternoon. Whenever it is not ABSOLUTELY clear, which time you mean,
one normally uses the 24 hour time.
I guess, the main point in all previous posts criticizing the english usage
of a.m. and p.m. is that it seems kind of awkward to always have to append
am or pm, with all the problems that so many of us have pointed to. The
question now is, what should COMPUTERs do? I think that the usage of the
ISO standard is a good idea here, because it is important for these dumb
devices to use a clearly defined interface. If this forces the english
speaking countries to adjust to the rest of the world, that's fine with
me... I think there are many rational points against the am/pm system, and
the fact that most software has its origin in English language countries
has unfortunately hindered the propagation of a time-system that has been
more commonly used in most other countries.
>>The French language also has no equivalent of the terms
>>a.m./p.m., because they are not necessary. The same applies to all other
>>non-english languages I am aware of.
>
>Same problem. Before the French Revolution, the French used a 12-hour
>clock, as did all of Europe.
>
>Are you going to tell me that all those beautiful centuries-old clocks
>up in church towers in Germany actually chime 23 times the second time
>they point to "XI" in the day? What do they chime at midnight, 24 or
>not at all?
No, they chime 12 times, but it is clear whether it is in the afternoon or
not WHEN you hear the chime. If you just speak about time, there is a
difference though...
>
>And if I had realized what would ensue when I answered your original
>post, I perhaps wouldn't have! :-)
>--
>Fritz Whittington Texas Instruments, P.O. Box 655474, MS 446 Dallas, TX 75265
> Shipping address: 13510 North Central Expressway, MS 446 Dallas, TX 75243
>fr...@ti.com Office: +1 214 995 0397 FAX: +1 214 995 6194
>Since I am not an official TI spokesperson, these opinions contain no spokes.
--
Joern Wilms
IAA Tuebingen, Waldhaeuser Str. 64, D-72074 Tuebingen
JILA, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80305, USA
wi...@astro.uni-tuebingen.de; wi...@colorado.edu
Lawrence Crowl
Gordon A. Lew <gl...@galstar.com> wrote:
>Is it true that automobile speedometers in the UK will be recalibrated
>to furlongs per fortnight? :-)
No, it is not true. Automobile speedometres (note the correct
spelling) will be recalibrated in kilofurlongs per fortnight. This
avoids the extra expense and significant paint pollution from the
otherwise inevitable trailing zeros.
Oh, yeah, :-)
--
Lawrence Crowl 503-737-2554 Computer Science Department
cr...@cs.orst.edu Oregon State University
...!hplabs!hp-pcd!orstcs!crowl Corvallis, Oregon, 97331-3202
Lawrence Crowl
Richard A. O'Keefe <o...@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> wrote:
>I do wish people in the US who kindly make documents available over the
>net would make Tex, LaTex, Troff, or something else available instead of
>Postscript, because the postscript files are almost always for the wrong
>paper size, and we haven't _any_ US-sized paper to print them on.
People in the US have the reverse problem with documents made available
outside of the US.
Making a document available in anything other than PostScript will mean
that huge chunks of your potential audience will not be able to read
it. (Note, however, that HTML may soon be standard enough.) The only
real solution for the present is to ensure that the text area fits
within both A4 and letter-size paper.
Another advantage to PostScript distribution is that it is more
difficult for someone to steal your text. (Plagarism shouldn't be a
problem, but...)
>--
>"conventional orthography is ... a near optimal system for the
> lexical representation of English words." Chomsky & Halle, S.P.E.
This is interesting. Do you have a more complete reference?
Peter Whittaker
Lawrence Crowl <cr...@jade.CS.ORST.EDU> wrote:
>In article <41go4t$n...@mercury.galstar.com>,
>Gordon A. Lew <gl...@galstar.com> wrote:
>>Is it true that automobile speedometers in the UK will be recalibrated
>>to furlongs per fortnight? :-)
>
>No, it is not true. Automobile speedometres (note the correct
>spelling) will be recalibrated in kilofurlongs per fortnight. This
If we can rely on spelling to convey meaning (which we were once able to
do, back when literacy was a virtue), a "speedometre" is a unit of
distance, analogous to a kilometre or nanometre, and while I cannot find
the definition of the speedo prefix anywhere, I suspect that the prefix
"speedo" means "50", making a speedometre equal to the length of an
olympic swimming pool.
On the other hand, as is well known, a speedometer is a measuring
device. Whether it measures speed (not velocity, remember to
differentiate between scalars and vectors) or the tightness of swimwear,
I do not remember.
pww
ps Speedo is a well known (at least in my neck of the woods) brandname
for a line of swimwear.
--
Peter Whittaker [~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~] X.500 Specialist
p...@entrust.com [ http://www.entrust.com ] Nortel Secure Networks
Ph: +1 613 765 2064 [ ] P.O. Box 3511, Station C
FAX:+1 613 765 3520 [__________________________] Ottawa, Canada, K1Y 4H7
Fritz Whittington
>In article <41gr0v$p...@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>,
>Richard A. O'Keefe <o...@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> wrote:
>>I do wish people in the US who kindly make documents available over the
>>net would make Tex, LaTex, Troff, or something else available instead of
>>Postscript, because the postscript files are almost always for the wrong
>>paper size, and we haven't _any_ US-sized paper to print them on.
>People in the US have the reverse problem with documents made available
>outside of the US.
*I* don't have that problem. We bought A4 cartridges and A4 paper for our
printers!
However, on a more serious note, I agree that I have had difficulties in
the past printing some PS files on some PS printers. Some PS drivers
put out PS that depends on some prologue having been downloaded to the
printer sometime in the past. Or fonts which your printer doesn't have,
and substitution of Courier is not usually the best thing to do!
On the other hand, the Adobe definition of the Portable Document Format
(PDF) takes care of all these problems, plus adds the ability to insert
hyperlinks as well.
The Acrobat reader/printer software is free, and it can handle the
printing of A4 on letter or letter on A4 quite well. You pick the
option to "shrink/expand to fit paper" and it does it quite well. I
guess if you produced a document as A1 and told it to print on A4, it
might be a little hard to read!
Try it out. The latest version of Acrobat does *not* require the Adobe
Type Manager to run, and it runs on Windows, Windows 95, Windows NT, as
well as Macs and Unix systems. See http://www.adobe.com.
Paul Eggert
>| I'd avoid `24:00' even if it's part of the standard, since it can be
>| confusing. For example, the best printed resource I know of for
>| historical time zone information* contains several bugs where 24:00 was
>| written where 00:00 was meant.
>I see. a new principle of design: avoid everything that can be confusing
>to a real or imagined entity, and a new principle of implementation: if one
>guy gets it wrong, everybody should drop it immediately.
There is a good reason to avoid `24:00' other than avoiding confusion
(though I still maintain it's wiser to avoid confusion when possible).
Given two complete UTC timestamps A and B, one would hope that
A is lexicographically less than B if and only if A precedes B temporally.
Allowing `24:00' destroys this nice property.
Meyer - Osaka Jyouhou System Situ
question.
In article <41nufn$a...@usenet.rpi.edu> Markus Kuhn <msk...@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> writes:
|The French language also has no equivalent of the terms
|a.m./p.m., because they are not necessary. The same applies to all other
|non-english languages I am aware of.
NITPICK: Japanese (and probably Chinese as well) has words which are
equivalent to a.m. and p.m., and 12-hour time notation using them is common,
even in writing. However, 24-hour time notation is universally
understood and used commonly also, and I have never heard of anyone
storing 12-hour formats in a database.
QUESTION: I have a dim recollection from high school French that a.m.
and p.m. are "... heures de la matin" and "... heures apre-midi"
respectively. (Sincerest apologies for butchered French. It is a very
dim memory.) Am I just plain wrong, are the phrases just literal
tranlations of English unused by actual French speakers, or is Markus's
French worse than mine?
--
David Meyer Information Systems Office Sumitomo Chemical Co., Ltd.
Osaka, Japan
me...@ohsun01.sumitomo-chem.co.jp +JMJ
Lawrence Crowl
>in Europe, we tend to think that protecting the individual from the
>vagaries of concentrated power is a very important issue,
So much so that European governments have outlawed the use of
traditional units of measure in favor of the arbitrarily chosen metric
standard.
>if you had done your homework, you would have noticed that the democracy
>you seem to be so much in favor of consists of voicing opinions, reaching a
>consensus or mutually agreable compromise, and then having all parties
>abide by said consensus or compromise. the United States of America is
>just such a voice in the standards creation process, and standards are no
>more than formal documents of consensus and compromise, but the U.S.A. is
>quite unique in insisting that it keep its own conventions in spite of
>voting in favor of standards for the rest of the world. one word comes to
>mind to describe this kind of behavior: authoritarianism.
No, the U.S. government refuses to force the standard on its citizens.
The principle is called limited government.
More important, though, is that Europeans in general do not understand
how large and isolated the Unites States is. It is a huge market that
mostly talks to itself. A switch to the metric system means that the
relatively small international trade dominates the domestic trade. The
adoption of the metric system in Europe was driven by commercial
considerations that just do not exist in the U.S.
I happen to encourage use of the metric system. But practical
arguments adopting it in the U.S. are not as compelling as they were in
Europe.
BTW, the metric system was legal in the United States a full 33 years
before it was legal in Norway (1866 U.S. vs 1899 Norway).
> the world can
>argue, compromise, and vote all it wants: the U.S.A. will force its own
>standards-violating conventions on the rest of the world through what it
>defends as "marketing". this is not democracy. this isn't even anarchy.
>this is plutocracy, where opinions are formed according to whoever has the
>most money to waste on "marketing".
Show me where the U.S. has forced its standards on the rest of the
world. Perhaps we forced the Germans and Japanese to adopt our
standards after WWII. No, they are metric. Any other candidates?
> nowhere else in the world are people
>not elected because they run out of campaigning money, and nowhere else in
>the world are people elected because they can run the biggest campaign.
>only in your "democratic" United States of America, Doug.
Did you ever consider that these campaigns are necessary precisely
_because_ the U.S. is more democratic? In the U.S., popular opinions
matter. (The value of a high level of democracy is a separate issue.)
>there is also a possible problem that the "representatives" are not actual
>"representatives" of the U.S. population in the sense that they have been
>empowered with the ability to speak for and accept responsibilities on
>behalf of those that they represent, but this is trivially true of any
>representative democracy.
The representatives _are_ empowered, but in a limited manner. In
reference to measurement standards, the appointed officials of our
elected representatives have negotiated a set of standards that U.S.
citizens are _permitted_ and often _encouraged_ to use, but citizens
are not always required to use them.
>the remaining force of your argument is that you will not abide by the
>agreements that are made on your behalf in an international democracy.
When has the U.S. government not abided by its agreements. I suspect
most such agreements _permitted_ the use of a standard, but in no way
_forced_ the standard.
Kai Henningsen
> analouge clock 裨hat I can recall seeing. How many people in even non
> English speaking è“Šountries have a watch with a twenty four hour dial or,
> keep their digital 誦atch set to display twenty four hour time?
As for digital, I expect plenty - as in, for example, nearly all Germans.
Around here, "am" or "pm" might just as well be Chinese. While we still
use 12 hour terminology fairly often speaking, there *is* *no* notation
like am or pm. If you have to be explicit, you revert to the 24 hour
system.
Kai
--
>>> PFM-Mainz.de distributes mail bombs. <<<
Internet: k...@khms.westfalen.de
Bang: major_backbone!khms.westfalen.de!kai
http://www.westfalen.de/~kai/
Erik Naggum
| So much so that European governments have outlawed the use of
| traditional units of measure in favor of the arbitrarily chosen metric
| standard.
thank you for making it clear that you are a lawyer defending a lost cause.
all standards are arbitrary, the question is the degree of arbitrariness.
fact is, you won't find anything more arbitrary than "traditional units".
| No, the U.S. government refuses to force the standard on its citizens.
| The principle is called limited government.
I think you must have missed a major part of the 20th century. or did the
Food and Drug Administration (among many others) stop forcing its standards
on the American citizens just before you wrote your message? and I thought
I could trust CNN to bring me the top news stories...
| BTW, the metric system was legal in the United States a full 33 years
| before it was legal in Norway (1866 U.S. vs 1899 Norway).
is that true? if so, it's just wonderful! thanks for the information!
it reminds me that IBM officially adopted ASCII as their character set
standard in the late 1960's.
| Show me where the U.S. has forced its standards on the rest of the
| world. Perhaps we forced the Germans and Japanese to adopt our
| standards after WWII. No, they are metric. Any other candidates?
you appear not to have tried to "localize" American software. your
wonderful "democracy" must also mean that there is not only one agent
acting on behalf of the United States of America, such as Bill Gates'
software, which typically offers a host of options acceptable to an
American user, and all unaccetable to a European user.
| Did you ever consider that these campaigns are necessary precisely
| _because_ the U.S. is more democratic? In the U.S., popular opinions
| matter. (The value of a high level of democracy is a separate issue.)
bullshit. the size of campaign funds have skyrocketed after the television
became the primary campaigning medium.
| When has the U.S. government not abided by its agreements. I suspect
| most such agreements _permitted_ the use of a standard, but in no way
| _forced_ the standard.
you seem to have a rather limited view of what constitutes a standard.
BTW, I have learned in private exchanges that the U.S. has metricized all
its units (the year was elusive, maybe you can help?), such that the inch
is now _exactly_ 25.4 millimeters. in contrast, there still exists a
"U.S. survey foot" which has the old definition due to surveys. using the
new foot would be one foot short every 500 000 feet or somesuch.
#<Erik 3018696478>
--
ln /dev/null /dev/www
agurski on BIX
I believe that you are incorrect about the meanings of a.m. and p.m.
a.m. = ante meridian
p.m. = post meridian
Pierre Jelenc
Meyer - Osaka Jyouhou System Situ <me...@ohsun01.sumitomo-chem.co.jp> wrote:
>QUESTION: I have a dim recollection from high school French that a.m.
>and p.m. are "... heures de la matin" and "... heures apre-midi"
>respectively.
1 am: une heure du matin
2 pm: deux heures de l'apres-midi
9 pm: neuf heures du soir
Switch from apres-midi to soir around 6 pm.
Pierre
--
Pierre Jelenc Why should I have to w o r k for everything?!
rc...@panix.com It's like saying I don't deserve it!
Calvin & Hobbes
http://www.columbia.edu/~pcj1/
Peter Kerr
> QUESTION: I have a dim recollection from high school French that a.m.
> and p.m. are "... heures de la matin" and "... heures apre-midi"
> dim memory.)
My slightly less dim memory, but probably just as butchered since it came
from Belgians, not French (Dites, ca va, vous autres!) is that in casual
conversation it is common to say "Neuf heures du matin" or "Neuf heures du
soir", but when written down it is always 0900 or 2100 respectively.
Amos Shapir
>No, it is not true. Automobile speedometres (note the correct
>spelling) will be recalibrated in kilofurlongs per fortnight.
Actually, furlongs per fortnight is a useful unit, it's almost exactly
1cm/min. It joins other useful units such as nano-C (1.08 kmh) and
micro-century (the average length of a school class). :-)
I hope I'm not starting yet another nonsense thread here...
--
Amos Shapir Net: am...@nsof.co.il
Paper: nSOF Parallel Software, Ltd.
Givat-Hashlosha 48800, Israel
Tel: +972 3 9388551 Fax: +972 3 9388552 GEO: 34 55 15 E / 32 05 52 N
Markus Kuhn
of ISO 8601 and a few things that have been discussed here (e.g. am/pm).
You can find the text on the Web in
<http://www.ft.uni-erlangen.de/~mskuhn/iso-time.html>
Any comments and links to it are welcome.
Markus
---
Lawrence Crowl
HISTORY, below.
Before I go further, let me state up front that I support the use of
metric/ISO standards within the U.S. I am trying to make clear the
reasons why the U.S. is not yet fully using those standards and why
blaming the U.S. for that fact is not quite fair. See BIG REASON,
below.
In article <19950829...@naggum.no>, Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> wrote:
>[Lawrence Crowl]
>
>| So much so that European governments have outlawed the use of
>| traditional units of measure in favor of the arbitrarily chosen metric
>| standard.
>
>thank you for making it clear that you are a lawyer defending a lost cause.
>all standards are arbitrary, the question is the degree of arbitrariness.
>fact is, you won't find anything more arbitrary than "traditional units".
I was pointing out the inconsistency between the statement "Europeans
protect individual rights" and the enforcement of the use of standards.
>| No, the U.S. government refuses to force the standard on its citizens.
>| The principle is called limited government.
>
>I think you must have missed a major part of the 20th century. or did the
>Food and Drug Administration (among many others) stop forcing its standards
>on the American citizens just before you wrote your message? and I thought
>I could trust CNN to bring me the top news stories...
Notice I said "the" standard, in reference to the metric system. If
you call it a kilogram, it must be a kilogram, but you need not sell by
the kilogram. I know that at least in France, it became illegal to
sell by the pound.
>| BTW, the metric system was legal in the United States a full 33 years
>| before it was legal in Norway (1866 U.S. vs 1899 Norway).
>
>is that true? if so, it's just wonderful! thanks for the information!
>it reminds me that IBM officially adopted ASCII as their character set
>standard in the late 1960's.
Yes, it's true. When backwards compatibility is important, old
standards hang around for a long time, just as with the English
measurement system in the U.S.
BIG REASON
When the metric system was adopted througout the world, nearly
every nation fell into one of two catagories.
(1) an industrial nation with a large amount of foreign trade
(2) a non-industrial nation with a small amount of foreign trade
Category 1 nations could pay the cost of converting their
infrastruction through the increased efficiency of trade with other
nations. Category 2 nations did not have much of a conversion cost,
and hence could also pay for converting with trade.
The United States was nearly unique in being in another category
(3) an industrial nation with a small amount of foreign trade
At no point in the past has the U.S. ever been able to pay for the
conversion cost with the little amount of foreign trade that it had.
This situation has been stable because the size of the infrastructure
has generally grown with the amount of foreign trade. Only now has
foreign trade reached the point where not using the metric system has a
significant cost. The U.S. will switch, but it will do by switching
pieces of the infrastructure over time, and hence at a slow pace.
Sometimes it is very difficult to switch one piece without switching
all, and the cost of switching all may be just too high.
>| Show me where the U.S. has forced its standards on the rest of the
>| world. Perhaps we forced the Germans and Japanese to adopt our
>| standards after WWII. No, they are metric. Any other candidates?
>
>you appear not to have tried to "localize" American software. your
>wonderful "democracy" must also mean that there is not only one agent
>acting on behalf of the United States of America, such as Bill Gates'
>software, which typically offers a host of options acceptable to an
>American user, and all unaccetable to a European user.
These standards are not forced on you. You choose to accept them when
you buy American software. If you do not like the poor localization,
do not buy the software. You would get the attention of software
manufacturers if you did not buy based on localization.
I'm not sure I understand the point about Bill Gates. Could you please
elaborate.
>| Did you ever consider that these campaigns are necessary precisely
>| _because_ the U.S. is more democratic? In the U.S., popular opinions
>| matter. (The value of a high level of democracy is a separate issue.)
>
>bullshit. the size of campaign funds have skyrocketed after the television
>became the primary campaigning medium.
They are expensive because whoever convinces more people wins, and so
politicians spend what they can/need to win.
The point of all this is that it is difficult to push through laws for
which average citizens see no good reason. Right now, the use of
metric standards doesn't have "good enough" reasons _within_ the U.S.
to make it an enforced standard. A politician would commit political
suicide trying to force a switch.
>| When has the U.S. government not abided by its agreements. I suspect
>| most such agreements _permitted_ the use of a standard, but in no way
>| _forced_ the standard.
>
>you seem to have a rather limited view of what constitutes a standard.
In the middle ages, a "pound" could vary from village to village and
grocer to grocer. A standard is when you agree to use the same
definition for a "pound". The existence of one standard does not imply
that you cannot use another (which is what is happening in the U.S.).
HISTORY
>BTW, I have learned in private exchanges that the U.S. has metricized all
>its units (the year was elusive, maybe you can help?), such that the inch
>is now _exactly_ 25.4 millimeters. in contrast, there still exists a
>"U.S. survey foot" which has the old definition due to surveys. using the
>new foot would be one foot short every 500 000 feet or somesuch.
This isn't quite accurate. In 1866, the U.S. converted to the metric
system. This was the original "metricization". The inch was defined
as _exactly_ 1000/3937 of a meter. This is 25.400050800101598
millimeters. People still used inches, and they didn't have to change
their rulers. The other American English units were also defined
relative to the metric system. Sometime in the 1960s, I think, there
was an ISO standard that defined the inch as _exactly_ 25.4
millimeters, and the U.S. adopted that standard, with the exception of
the survey, which kept the old standard. As you stated, the difference
is about 1 foot in 500,000. The old standard was necessary because
otherwise all the property lines would change and the legal hassle
would be huge. I think the reason for the change was that decimal
ratios are easier for modern conversion methods. The 1960s event was
actually a "remetricization".
While the U.S. has used the inch since colonial days, the definition of
an inch has changed over time. In 1866, the inch became metric. This
definition, of course, does not diminish the fact that most U.S.
commerce still uses the English units.
Erik Naggum
| Notice I said "the" standard, in reference to the metric system. If
| you call it a kilogram, it must be a kilogram, but you need not sell by
| the kilogram. I know that at least in France, it became illegal to
| sell by the pound.
the same is apparently happening in Great Britain these days.
| (1) an industrial nation with a large amount of foreign trade
| (2) a non-industrial nation with a small amount of foreign trade
| (3) an industrial nation with a small amount of foreign trade
I'm curious into which category you would place Great Britain.
[Erik Naggum]
| you appear not to have tried to "localize" American software. your
| wonderful "democracy" must also mean that there is not only one agent
| acting on behalf of the United States of America, such as Bill Gates'
| software, which typically offers a host of options acceptable to an
| American user, and all unaccetable to a European user.
[Lawrence Crowl]
| These standards are not forced on you. You choose to accept them when
| you buy American software. If you do not like the poor localization,
| do not buy the software. You would get the attention of software
| manufacturers if you did not buy based on localization.
if quality had entered the picture with respect to software, Bill Gates
would have been out of business. the problem is that people vote for a
package deal, just like politics, and they vote _for_ issues with higher
priority even if they are _against_ issues with lower priority that come
with it. worse, they vote _for_ something even if they _would_ be against
it on account of numerous minor issues if they had known about them and
will be against them once they get what they voted for. this happens all
the time in democracies -- don't tell me you don't know it.
fraud, Lawrence, is when you "accept" something you don't know about when
you buy something, and when you later find out, discover that if you had
known about it to begin with, you would never have bought it. however, you
may already have based too much on these decisions to be able to go back,
so instead of fighting Microsoft in class-action lawsuits for fraud, like
people should have done _years_ ago, they stick with the bugs and crashes
and problems, and hope that the costs are defrayed by ever more software,
man-hours, and that the next version will be better. the Gartner Group
recently published a report on the Total Cost of Ownership of PC's (with
Microsoft software) which indicated they were five times more expensive to
own than Macintosh computers. do you think this is what customers "accept"
when they buy a PC? I don't.
| I'm not sure I understand the point about Bill Gates. Could you please
| elaborate.
you argued that America is so much more "democratic" than Europe, implying
that people vote with various kinds of ballots, including dollars. if so,
then Bill Gates is your chosen representative, and if defrauded Europeans
get disgruntled, they should look at the voting Americans, and blame (1)
their elected representative, and (2) the stupid Americans who vote for
him. in a less "democratic" country, one would go to the Department of
Justice and demand an investigation of the business practices of usurpatory
players in the field. (note that no European country has anti-trust
legislation. instead, they have a less costly and more annoying "active
involvement" of the government in the sales of goods, including prices and
quality standards, which saves the European countries hundreds of billions
of dollars a year in avoided lawsuits, even at the significantly higher
cost of running a business in Europe. the U.S. market is big enough that
the scale probably tips in favor of lawyermania.) in a democracy, citizens
are allowed to get together and work towards common goals (the right of
association). why does the U.S. citizens not vote to stop lawyerization of
their land? my answer: Americans "accept" it, the same way Europeans
"accept" unlocalizable software, i.e., they have no choice.
| Right now, the use of metric standards doesn't have "good enough"
| reasons _within_ the U.S. to make it an enforced standard. A
| politician would commit political suicide trying to force a switch.
with the number of suicidal politicians around (judging by the causes they
favor), there must be a quantitative difference between breaking the law
and fighting like hell to defend yourself while committing political
suicide, and finding a cause _worthy_ of fighting while committing
political suicide. (re Bob Packwood.)
| >| When has the U.S. government not abided by its agreements. I suspect
| >| most such agreements _permitted_ the use of a standard, but in no way
| >| _forced_ the standard.
| >
| >you seem to have a rather limited view of what constitutes a standard.
|
| In the middle ages, a "pound" could vary from village to village and
| grocer to grocer. A standard is when you agree to use the same
| definition for a "pound". The existence of one standard does not imply
| that you cannot use another (which is what is happening in the U.S.).
note that the existence of a standard means that each and every time you
use the standardized unit, you are obliged to follow the standard. if not,
you are guilty of fraud and counterfeit. this is _the_ important aspect to
standardization (whether de jure or de facto). this means that once you
obtain one standard in a field, all other measurements in that field must
have a unique mapping to the standard (or take the active position that the
standard is itself ambiguous), and it becomes legitimate to question users
of arcane units exactly how much they translate to using standard units.
| This isn't quite accurate. In 1866, the U.S. converted to the metric
| system. This was the original "metricization". The inch was defined
| as _exactly_ 1000/3937 of a meter. This is 25.400050800101598
| millimeters. People still used inches, and they didn't have to change
| their rulers. The other American English units were also defined
| relative to the metric system. Sometime in the 1960s, I think, there
| was an ISO standard that defined the inch as _exactly_ 25.4
| millimeters, and the U.S. adopted that standard, with the exception of
| the survey, which kept the old standard. As you stated, the difference
| is about 1 foot in 500,000. The old standard was necessary because
| otherwise all the property lines would change and the legal hassle
| would be huge. I think the reason for the change was that decimal
| ratios are easier for modern conversion methods. The 1960s event was
| actually a "remetricization".
thank you for this information. (by the way, it would be exactly 1 foot in
500,000, with rational numbers I get 254/1000 / 1000/3937 = 499999/500000.)
#<Erik 3018945894>
--
they accepted the results of science, but rejected its methods.
Arthur Chance
> [Lawrence Crowl]
>
> | Notice I said "the" standard, in reference to the metric system. If
> | you call it a kilogram, it must be a kilogram, but you need not sell by
> | the kilogram. I know that at least in France, it became illegal to
> | sell by the pound.
> the same is apparently happening in Great Britain these days.
As of 1995-10-01. It only applies to certain foodstuffs, others foods
and non-foods could in theory be sold in pounds & ounces for another
year or two, but the big supermarket chains at least have realised
that having half their wares marked in kg and half in lb/oz is the
worst possible solution, so they're going to go for a big bang, with
loads of warning signs clearly visible in the entrances and handout
conversion tables for all customers who can't hack SI units.
> | (1) an industrial nation with a large amount of foreign trade
> | (2) a non-industrial nation with a small amount of foreign trade
> | (3) an industrial nation with a small amount of foreign trade
>
> I'm curious into which category you would place Great Britain.
Considering the time he was talking about, I would say that Great
Britain *plus* the Empire, all considered as a single economic unit,
fell into category 3. AFAIR, even in the 1950s and maybe the 60s the
amount of trade GB had within what was by then called the Commonwealth
far exceeded trade with mainland Europe. Add to that trade with the US
and you probably have at least 75% of our trade with countries that
shared feet/inches and pounds/ounces as measures, even if one country
couldn't measure pints and gallons correctly. :-)
Things are of course a little bit different these days (except for our
love of understatement), so finally we are moving to the SI units
which we've been teaching our schoolkids for at least 20+ years.
As a final note, for decades a lot of British have been able to handle
SI units when in mainland Europe. 25 years ago my mother-in-law could
quite happily ask for meat in the butchers in France using the local
units. Mind you, the butcher was a bit surprised when she asked for a
half a kilometer of sausages. :-)
--
What if there were no hypothetical questions?
Gwillim Law
[Portions deleted]
> Markus Kuhn <msk...@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> writes:
>
>>... sometimes the 12h clock is used in SPOKEN language.
>>The German language does not know any equivalent
>>to the English a.m./p.m. terms.
> . . .
>
> there is no way to distinguish?
>
heures du matin", "une heure de l'apres-midi", "huit heures du soir":
six o'clock in the morning, one o'clock in the afternoon, eight o'clock
at night. (I don't think there was any rigid rule about the dividing
line between afternoon and night.) These expressions are probably still
current. Of course, in some contexts, "six heures" (six o'clock) alone
was sufficient. I've read analogous expressions in German.
The plot of the well-known Tintin comic, _Objectif Lune_ (Destination
Moon), hinges on an a.m./p.m. mixup. The two comic detectives are
accidentally caught on board the rocket at take-off because they thought
that the departure time, 1:35, meant 1:35 in the afternoon. Their
mistake is explained to them using 1:35 vs. 13:35.
-- Gwillim Law
Markus Kuhn
>While I agreed with the great majority of what you posted (the parts I
>deleted for brevity), I have some difficulty understanding the two above
>statements. You sometimes use the 12h clock in spoken language, yet
>there is no way to distinguish?
The 12h convention is used in German SPOKEN language only when there is no
distingtion necessary. E.g. if it is now 15:50, I might say to
someone "We have to finish now, the next lecture starts at 4" [which btw.
means in the German academic community always 16:15 and is written often
as "16 ct" were ct stands for lat. "cum tempore" and means 15 minutes
later opposed to 16 st (lat. "sine tempore") which means 16:00. But
this st/ct notation is used only inside universities with some long
tradition, not anywhere else.]
When I order a taxi for driving me to the airport the next day,
I would always say "17 Uhr", because when I sayd "5 Uhr", the
taxi would certainly be here early in the morning.
>Same problem. Before the French Revolution, the French used a 12-hour
>clock, as did all of Europe.
That's many generations ago ...
>Are you going to tell me that all those beautiful centuries-old clocks
>up in church towers in Germany actually chime 23 times the second time
>they point to "XI" in the day? What do they chime at midnight, 24 or
>not at all?
I'd prefer "not at all" ;-)
As I live only 200 m from a church with a quite loud clock tower,
I guess I can give you an "expert answer" on this:
Clock bells use here the 12h system. I don't think that counts as
"written or displayed time". Churches have anyway their own time
system. They start the week with Sunday, were ISO and the commercial
word start the week with monday and they have a different week
numbering system than the one used by ISO and the commercial world
(week 01 is the week that includes January 4, i.e. the first week
which has the majority (>3) of its days in the new year.
BTW: how to I get the ISO week number with sprintf()?).
Back to the church clock:
The clock in our village uses 3 different bells and signals every 15 min.
First there are between 1 and 4 signals depending on whether
is is :15, :30, :45 or :00. In the case of a full hour,
the first 4 signals are followed by between 1 and 12 signals from
a second bell and these are repeated by a third bell. The pitch of the
three bells is decreasing in this sequence. There is no AM/PM bell,
the signal at 8:00 and 20:00 is exactly identical.
>And if I had realized what would ensue when I answered your original
>post, I perhaps wouldn't have! :-)
It has been an interesting discussion so far, didn't it?
Gene Fornario
>I have just finished writing a short summary of the most important aspects
>of ISO 8601 and a few things that have been discussed here (e.g. am/pm).
>You can find the text on the Web in
>
> <http://www.ft.uni-erlangen.de/~mskuhn/iso-time.html>
>
>Any comments and links to it are welcome.
I took a look at it, and the arguement as to whether 0000 or 2400 is the
correct one has been cleared up. 2400 is used to mark the definite end
of the day...as in the closing of a store, and 0000 marks a beginning, such
as a radio program. As you mentioned, 2400 goes no further according to the
standard. (No 2401, it's 0001)
Gene-- 1995-09-02 16:48:50 UTC
--
ge...@netcom.com
Markus Kuhn
>In article <MEYER.95A...@ohsun01.sumitomo-chem.co.jp>,
>Meyer - Osaka Jyouhou System Situ <me...@ohsun01.sumitomo-chem.co.jp> wrote:
>>QUESTION: I have a dim recollection from high school French that a.m.
>>and p.m. are "... heures de la matin" and "... heures apre-midi"
>>respectively.
>1 am: une heure du matin
>2 pm: deux heures de l'apres-midi
>9 pm: neuf heures du soir
>Switch from apres-midi to soir around 6 pm.
Is this really used in WRITTEN language e.g. at railway stations,
TV guides, cinemas, shop signs, etc.? That was what the discussion
was originally about ... In Germany we have of course also
"in der Frueh", "nachmittags" and "abends" in SPOKEN
language, but you'll never find this written e.g. at a railway
station.
Gene Fornario
>
>While the U.S. has used the inch since colonial days, the definition of
>an inch has changed over time. In 1866, the inch became metric. This
>definition, of course, does not diminish the fact that most U.S.
>commerce still uses the English units.
While I have been nervous around hospitals, I have noticed that the metric
system and the english system is mixed. Medication is measured off in cc
(cubic centmeters), yet blood is referred to as "by the pint." Weight is
taken in pounds as far as patients go, and pills are measured in milligrams.
(Those in the medical profession are free to take issue with me if my facts
are not straight.)
I agree, no one in the US is going to switch to metric unless neccesary.
There's an old saying "if it's not broken, don't fix it." I think
traditional and metric wil co-exist for a long time...long after I'm gone.
Gene--
Lawrence Crowl
>thank you for this information. (by the way, it would be exactly 1 foot in
>500,000, with rational numbers I get 254/1000 / 1000/3937 = 499999/500000.)
As someone pointed out in email, my ratio had a typo. The old inch/meter
ratio is 100/3937, not 1000/3937. Likewise, the new inch/meter ratio
should be 254/10000, and as expected, 254/10000 / 100/3937 = 499999/500000.
The rest of this post is non-technical.
>[Lawrence Crowl]
>| (1) an industrial nation with a large amount of foreign trade
>| (2) a non-industrial nation with a small amount of foreign trade
>| (3) an industrial nation with a small amount of foreign trade
>
>I'm curious into which category you would place Great Britain.
I would put it somewhere between 1 and 3. Not as 3 as the U.S., but
certainly more 3 than the other European countries. With the Chunnel
and recent politics in Europe, Britain is fast moving towards a full 1.
>if quality had entered the picture with respect to software, Bill Gates
>would have been out of business. the problem is that people vote for a
>package deal, just like politics, and they vote _for_ issues with higher
>priority even if they are _against_ issues with lower priority that come
>with it. worse, they vote _for_ something even if they _would_ be against
>it on account of numerous minor issues if they had known about them and
>will be against them once they get what they voted for. this happens all
>the time in democracies -- don't tell me you don't know it.
Yes, all this is true. However, in commerce, you are not required to
participate.
>fraud, Lawrence, is when you "accept" something you don't know about when
>you buy something, and when you later find out, discover that if you had
>known about it to begin with, you would never have bought it.
No, fraud is when you are lied to about the product. Anyone that buys
American software should expect that it was made first and foremost for
the American market. If you fail to determine that the software does
not meet your needs, who's fault is that?
Manufacturers cannot possibly determine all of their customers' needs,
so it is up to the customers to evaluate suitability.
>however, you may already have based too much on these decisions to be
>able to go back, so instead of fighting Microsoft in class-action
>lawsuits for fraud, like people should have done _years_ ago,
I do not know how software is packaged in Europe, but in the U.S.,
nearly all software explicitly says "we make no claim this software is
good for anything at all". Legally, you are renting the use of
something that may be useless. There is no basis for a suit here, and
certainly no basis for the criminal charge of fraud.
A more productive approach is for Europeans to get together and pay
someone to produce versions of the software that have better
localization capability.
BTW, there are several major U.S. companies that are heavily involved
in producing products that are easily localized.
>they stick with the bugs and crashes
>and problems, and hope that the costs are defrayed by ever more software,
>man-hours, and that the next version will be better. the Gartner Group
>recently published a report on the Total Cost of Ownership of PC's (with
>Microsoft software) which indicated they were five times more expensive to
>own than Macintosh computers. do you think this is what customers "accept"
>when they buy a PC? I don't.
Of course they accept it. They paid didn't they? It may have been a
bad decision, but it was their decision.
>| I'm not sure I understand the point about Bill Gates. Could you please
>| elaborate.
>
>you argued that America is so much more "democratic" than Europe,
I said "more", not "much more". However, I think we may be using a
different definition of "democratic". I mean "Athenian" democracy,
where everyone stands in the forum (or whatever) and shouts. The U.S.
elects its president in a more direct manner than most nations of
Europe, I believe. In half of the states, citizens can ram laws and
constitutional changes down the throats of the legislature, etc. (My
state of Oregon has done this several times in the past two elections.)
>implying that people vote with various kinds of ballots, including
>dollars. if so, then Bill Gates is your chosen representative,
Bill Gates is not my representative any more than your grocer is your
representative. Someone becomes my representive only when given
authority to act in my behalf. Bill Gates has no such authority.
>and if defrauded Europeans get disgruntled, they should look at the
>voting Americans, and blame (1) their elected representative, and (2)
>the stupid Americans who vote for him.
When you bought the software, you voted for him. I do not own any
Microsoft software, you do (assumption, I know). I chose not to buy.
You chose to buy. Why blame me for your decision?
> in a less "democratic" country, one would go to the Department of
>Justice and demand an investigation of the business practices of usurpatory
>players in the field. (note that no European country has anti-trust
>legislation. instead, they have a less costly and more annoying "active
>involvement" of the government in the sales of goods, including prices and
>quality standards,
Someone earlier said that the U.S. is filled with all those malcontents
that couldn't get along in Europe. That is true and it bears
repeating. Americans do not much like the government telling them what
to do. We have anti-trust legislation because the American approach is
to tell people what they cannot do, rather than what they can do. Now
before I get flamed, I am not saying Europe is repressive. I am not
saying the American system is better. I am saying that it is
_different_. The U.S. is not a European country in more than just
location.
>which saves the European countries hundreds of billions
>of dollars a year in avoided lawsuits, even at the significantly higher
>cost of running a business in Europe. the U.S. market is big enough that
>the scale probably tips in favor of lawyermania.) in a democracy, citizens
>are allowed to get together and work towards common goals (the right of
>association).
Yes. This happens in both Europe and the U.S., though I think it
happens in different ways.
> why does the U.S. citizens not vote to stop lawyerization of
>their land? my answer: Americans "accept" it, the same way Europeans
>"accept" unlocalizable software, i.e., they have no choice.
There _is_ a considerable movement against lawyers and litigation.
However, they won't go away because litigation is how a lot of problems
get addressed.
>| Right now, the use of metric standards doesn't have "good enough"
>| reasons _within_ the U.S. to make it an enforced standard. A
>| politician would commit political suicide trying to force a switch.
>
>with the number of suicidal politicians around (judging by the causes they
>favor), there must be a quantitative difference between breaking the law
>and fighting like hell to defend yourself while committing political
>suicide, and finding a cause _worthy_ of fighting while committing
>political suicide. (re Bob Packwood.)
There is a difference. I do not defend Bob Packwook. However,
whatever Bob Packwood did with those women isn't going to affect my
life, or the life of most voters. If he were to change my ruler, that
would affect my life!
>note that the existence of a standard means that each and every time you
>use the standardized unit, you are obliged to follow the standard. if not,
>you are guilty of fraud and counterfeit. this is _the_ important aspect to
>standardization (whether de jure or de facto).
I agree. (Though I do not think counterfeit applies.)
>this means that once you
>obtain one standard in a field, all other measurements in that field must
>have a unique mapping to the standard (or take the active position that the
>standard is itself ambiguous), and it becomes legitimate to question users
>of arcane units exactly how much they translate to using standard units.
I agree. And one inch = 2.54 cm (or 100/3937 m, depending on when and
why). The U.S. has done this since 1866. What the U.S. has not done
is force the use of metric units. The fact that the U.S. has agreed to
the metric standard, only means that the U.S. means the same thing by a
meter (metre) as everyone else. It does not mean that the U.S. will
force its citizens to use meters. (We often do so voluntarily.)
If we changed to using metric units (meaning integral units) for
everything instead of integral English units, there would be huge
repercussions. I do not care how many laws you pass, my front door is
still going to be 36 inches wide. If I need to replace the door,
neither a 91 cm or 92 cm door will work, and certainly not a 90 cm
door. (I supposed you could force me to sell/buy 91.44 cm doors, but
what is the point?)
>they accepted the results of science, but rejected its methods.
This is an interesting quote. Where did it come from?
Lawrence Crowl
Arthur Chance <art...@Smallworld.co.uk> wrote:
>but the big supermarket chains at least have realised
>that having half their wares marked in kg and half in lb/oz is the
>worst possible solution, so they're going to go for a big bang, with
>loads of warning signs clearly visible in the entrances and handout
>conversion tables for all customers who can't hack SI units.
What!? No more noggins and pottles? No more trips to the dock for a
good hogshead? Whatever will we do? :-)
Units have an amazing persistence. In 1973, I watched a German woman
order a pound (pfund) of something. What she meant was not the
traditional German pound, but 500 gm. There is evidence that the
Mesopotamians preserved the same unit of mass over 1500 years.
>even if one country couldn't measure pints and gallons correctly. :-)
During the 18th century, there were several different gallons in
England, depending whether you were measuring wine, beer, or dry.
There were other units in Scotland, Ireland. (Most Welsh units were
the same as the English units, but not all.) This was a mess, so in
1824 the Empire standardized on the British Imperial system. The
big change was getting rid of the distinction between wet and dry
capacities.
The U.S. pretty much used only the English wine gallon for all liquid
measure. So, we didn't have the mess that the Empire had, and given
that the British burning of Washington D.C. was not too far in the
past, I don't think there was much political will to adopt the new
standard. :-)
Gwillim Law
Whom are you correcting, and what did they say it was? Latin for "noon"
or "midday" is "meridies", just as "day" is "dies". It's a fifth
declension noun, like "res". Both "ante" and "post" take the
accusative. The accusative of a fifth declension noun ends in -em (have
you seen the phrase "ad rem", meaning "on the subject"?). Therefore,
the correct form of the Latin phrases is "ante meridiem" and "post
meridiem".
The adjective for "meridies" is "meridianus, -a, -um", and it's normal
to drop the declensional suffix when Anglicizing a Latin adjective; so
"antemeridian" is the adjective form of "ante meridiem".
-- Gwilllim Law
Michael Shields
Lawrence Crowl <cr...@jade.CS.ORST.EDU> wrote:
> I agree. And one inch = 2.54 cm (or 100/3937 m, depending on when and
> why). The U.S. has done this since 1866. What the U.S. has not done
> is force the use of metric units. The fact that the U.S. has agreed to
> the metric standard, only means that the U.S. means the same thing by a
> meter (metre) as everyone else. It does not mean that the U.S. will
> force its citizens to use meters. (We often do so voluntarily.)
But the US government resists using the metric system internally.
They still set speed limits in mph, tax by the ton, and produce reports
on 8.5x11 paper.
--
Shields.
Erik Naggum
the article I respond to.)
[Lawrence Crowl]
| No, fraud is when you are lied to about the product.
Fraud: ... A false representation of a matter of fact, whether by words or
by conduct, by false or misleading allegations, or by concealment of that
which should have been disclosed, which deceives and is intended to deceive
another so that he shall act upon it to his legal injury. Anything
calculcated to deceive, whether by a single act or combination, or by
suppression of truth, or suggestion of what is false, whether it be by
direct falsehood or innuendo, by speech or silence, word of mouth, or look
or gesture. ... [Black's Law Dictionary, 6th ed]
| Anyone that buys American software should expect that it was made first
| and foremost for the American market.
not if all texts are in Norwegian and it is marketed in Norway, you don't.
| If you fail to determine that the software does not meet your needs,
| who's fault is that?
you assume, wrongly, that it is possible to determine this with any degree
of accuracy without access to internals or statements of the products
quality and capabilities. the information crucial to complete such a task
is intentionally concealed from the customers. since a customer would not
have bought the products if such information were available, fraud applies
| Manufacturers cannot possibly determine all of their customers' needs,
| so it is up to the customers to evaluate suitability.
of course. so why do the manufacturers then work so fiercly to deny the
customers that right?
| I do not know how software is packaged in Europe, but in the U.S.,
| nearly all software explicitly says "we make no claim this software is
| good for anything at all".
contract law is nearly universal in the Western civilization in that
contracts are protected by the legal system only insofar as they fulfill
the basic requirements of the legal system. (if you enter a contract to
sell your body in exchange for food and lodging, no court will uphold that
contract, no matter what the wording is.) the license agreements customers
_implicitly_ agree to are intended to protect the manufacturer from the
consequences of bugs they did not know about, and could not be expected to
know about. purposefully including (i.e., refusing to remove even after
significant knowledge of their causes) in successive releases of MS-DOS the
very highway of virus infection does not constitute a bug of that kind. a
judge and jury can refuse to recognize the words of any contract if they
are shown intentionally to have a different interpretation by the writer
than that which can reasonably be expected by the reader, and those
contracts that are not explicitly signed are likely to be easy targets for
just this kind of refusal of recognition.
| Legally, you are renting the use of something that may be useless.
| There is no basis for a suit here, and certainly no basis for the
| criminal charge of fraud.
the reason your country has so many lawyers is that you can _never_ make
this sort of claims.
| BTW, there are several major U.S. companies that are heavily involved
| in producing products that are easily localized.
sure. I do not attempt to tar the whole industry with that broad a brush.
| >they stick with the bugs and crashes and problems, and hope that the
| >costs are defrayed by ever more software, man-hours, and that the next
| >version will be better. the Gartner Group recently published a report
| >on the Total Cost of Ownership of PC's (with Microsoft software) which
| >indicated they were five times more expensive to own than Macintosh
| >computers. do you think this is what customers "accept" when they buy
| >a PC? I don't.
|
| Of course they accept it. They paid didn't they? It may have been a
| bad decision, but it was their decision.
the law recognizes the bases for decisions, not just the decisions. in the
case of consumer law, Europe is a few centuries ahead of the U.S., but you
still have prominent product liability cases that prove that "it may have
been a bad decision, but it was their decision" is a silly argument to the
extreme. the question the court will pose is whether the customer would
have made the same bad decision if the customer had known what the vendor
knew at the time of the exchange.
| However, I think we may be using a different definition of
| "democratic". I mean "Athenian" democracy, where everyone stands in
| the forum (or whatever) and shouts.
however, you populace has been denied the right to act or form opinions by
the very license agreements you invoke as arguments.
on a tangent, I would argue that the nature of democracy is changing in the
face of nearly cost-free dissemination of misinformation and disinformation
the likes of which would have required enormous political campaign funds
and the world's largest product launches today.
| When you bought the software, you voted for him. I do not own any
| Microsoft software, you do (assumption, I know). I chose not to buy.
| You chose to buy. Why blame me for your decision?
I prefer direct namecalling to this kind of vile defamation. OF COURSE I
DON'T OWN ANY MICROSOFT SOFTWARE. (well, I think my 1984 vintage Altos 486
(Intel 80186-based) still has Xenix 3.0b on its long dead harddisk.) do
you think I could argue against Microsoft's shitware the way I do if I had
not made the simplest step in rejecting the totality of their business? we
may disagree on some issues, Lawrence Crowl, but implying that I'm a
tottering moron is a bit too much. _obviously,_ I don't own any of the
Microsoft products that I argue against. I _have_ voted against the lies
and fraud of Bill Gates, and I'm frustrated that people buy his glossy lies
hook, line, and sinker, not only because it makes quality software harder
to sell and more expensive, but because Bill Gates still lives in the late
1960's as far as software technology is concerned.
| If we changed to using metric units (meaning integral units) for
| everything instead of integral English units, there would be huge
| repercussions. I do not care how many laws you pass, my front door is
| still going to be 36 inches wide. If I need to replace the door,
| neither a 91 cm or 92 cm door will work, and certainly not a 90 cm
| door. (I supposed you could force me to sell/buy 91.44 cm doors, but
| what is the point?)
this is a good point, but you miss the fact that a measurement of 36 inches
is not exactly 36 inches. I would be surprised if it was within a narrower
band than 1/16 inch, which means that everything from 91.3 through 91.6 cm
is within the expected accuracy. (my own door frame moves by 6 mm during
the year due to changing humidity and the weight of snow.) thus, 91.5 cm
would be OK, and might fit better than the one you have today. (I have no
idea what the standards for doors and frames are over here, by my door
measures very close to 822 mm wide right now.)
| This [the signature] is an interesting quote. Where did it come from?
I came across it in some newsgroup, but I didn't take down any notes. I
think it pertains to Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" and the Encyclopaedia
Galactica's entry on earth.
(ironically, NBC's Meet the Press is now (European cable TV) discussing the
fate of labor unions in the U.S. with the President and Presidential
candidate of AFL-CIO, with what sounds like 1950's Eurosocialism.)
#<Erik 3019124502>
--
Erik Naggum
| (note that no European country has anti-trust legislation.
[Clive D. W. Feather]
| Strange. Why does the Monopolies and Mergers Commission exist, then?
I repeat: there is no anti-trust legislation in any European country. as I
said in the text you have conveniently deleted, we have other measures to
control prices and companies. you just mentioned one of them. surprised?
over here, large mergers are usually subject to government _approval_, even
if the government does not have shares in the companies involved, and
getting this political approval is a dirty process that frequently involves
politically tainted scandals when they go wrong. (Norway recently managed
to reward an incompetent fool sufficiently well that he wasted a billion
dollars in a failed insurance empire merger, with enormously costly
political repercussions, partly because he was a prominent Labor party
member, and they are now in power.) the U.S. is moving in the same
direction, but not necessarily for the same reasons.
IBM's decade-long anti-trust lawsuit would be impossible in any European
country (including the U.K.). IBM wouldn't have obtained that position to
begin with, unless it was protected by the government (French Bull comes to
mind).
#<Erik 3019125050>
Clive D.W. Feather
> (note that no European country has anti-trust legislation.
Strange. Why does the Monopolies and Mergers Commission exist, then ?
--
Clive D.W. Feather | If you lie to the compiler,
cl...@demon.net (work, preferred) | it will get its revenge.
cl...@stdc.demon.co.uk (home) | - Henry Spencer
Lawrence Crowl
In article <19950903...@naggum.no>, Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> wrote:
>(I have elided that which I agree with, which is a considerable portion of
>the article I respond to.)
I think we are getting close to an agreement.
>[Lawrence Crowl]
>
>| No, fraud is when you are lied to about the product.
>
>Fraud: ... A false representation of a matter of fact, whether by words or
>by conduct, by false or misleading allegations, or by concealment of that
>which should have been disclosed, which deceives and is intended to deceive
>another so that he shall act upon it to his legal injury. Anything
>calculcated to deceive, whether by a single act or combination, or by
>suppression of truth, or suggestion of what is false, whether it be by
>direct falsehood or innuendo, by speech or silence, word of mouth, or look
>or gesture. ... [Black's Law Dictionary, 6th ed]
Which basically says what I said, if you consider lies by ommission as
lies. I think we agree on what constitutes fraud. The question is
whether the specifics of selling the software constitute fraud.
>| Anyone that buys American software should expect that it was made first
>| and foremost for the American market.
>
>not if all texts are in Norwegian and it is marketed in Norway, you don't.
Was it sold as an American product or as a Norwegian product? I have
seen a number of products for sale in the U.S. that are clearly have
minimal packaging changes for the U.S. market.
>| If you fail to determine that the software does not meet your needs,
>| who's fault is that?
>
>you assume, wrongly, that it is possible to determine this with any degree
>of accuracy without access to internals or statements of the products
>quality and capabilities. the information crucial to complete such a task
>is intentionally concealed from the customers. since a customer would not
>have bought the products if such information were available, fraud applies
My limited experience buying software in the U.S. is that you haven't
actually purchased it (you can return it) until you open the envelope
with the disks (and usually even then). All of the manuals are outside
that envelope. You can thus read all the manuals to deterime
suitability. The crux of the matter is then "do the manuals adequately
describe the software". Most of the manuals that I have seen clearly
do. Thus nothing is concealed (excepting bugs).
(Of course, if the software substitutes on-line help for manuals, you
need to be able to read the help before committing to the purchase.)
Does the software in Norway follow this approach? If so, I do not see
fraud (excepting bugs).
>| Manufacturers cannot possibly determine all of their customers' needs,
>| so it is up to the customers to evaluate suitability.
>
>of course. so why do the manufacturers then work so fiercly to deny the
>customers that right?
When I was looking for genealogical software, the manufacturers were
most helpful in determining if the software met my needs.
>| I do not know how software is packaged in Europe, but in the U.S.,
>| nearly all software explicitly says "we make no claim this software is
>| good for anything at all".
>
>contract law is nearly universal in the Western civilization in that
>contracts are protected by the legal system only insofar as they fulfill
>the basic requirements of the legal system.
This is true in the U.S. The primary requirements, as I understand
them, are that the activities must be legal, and that both parties must
benefit. (There are a number of "gifts" that are legally contracts for
$1.)
>the license agreements customers _implicitly_ agree to are intended to
>protect the manufacturer from the consequences of bugs they did not
>know about, and could not be expected to know about.
And to protect the manufacturer against the sometimes suprising
ignorance of consumers.
Most of the license agreements that I have read protect the
manufacturer against known bugs. As you point out, this may not be
enforcable in court, depending on local laws.
> purposefully including (i.e., refusing to remove even after
>significant knowledge of their causes) in successive releases of MS-DOS the
>very highway of virus infection does not constitute a bug of that kind.
I must confess ignorance of the internals of MS-DOS, but I understand
the susceptability of MS-DOS to viruses was inherent to the
architecture. That is, MS-DOS was never designed to deter viruses. It
lacks the virus resistance feature. In this case, using MS-DOS becomes
an assumed risk, much like buying a car without anti-lock brakes.
>| Legally, you are renting the use of something that may be useless.
>| There is no basis for a suit here, and certainly no basis for the
>| criminal charge of fraud.
>
>the reason your country has so many lawyers is that you can _never_ make
>this sort of claims.
Actually, the reason our country has so many lawyers is that you can
_always_ make such a claim. Making it stick requires an argument,
which means lawyers. :-) We wouldn't have lawyers if you could not
make the claim.
>the law recognizes the bases for decisions, not just the decisions. in the
>case of consumer law, Europe is a few centuries ahead of the U.S.,
Given that the U.S. is only two centuries old, this is a little tough.
:-) I won't suprise me to learn that Europe does provide more consumer
protection.
>but you still have prominent product liability cases that prove that
>"it may have been a bad decision, but it was their decision" is a silly
>argument to the extreme.
Before about 1970, product liability cases were based on negligence.
If a company negligently designed a product, it was liability.
Recently, the judical mood has switched from negligence to demonstrable
harm. However, the issue is not product liability, but fraud. I can be
liable for a defect in my product without being guilty of fraud.
>the question the court will pose is whether the customer would
>have made the same bad decision if the customer had known what the vendor
>knew at the time of the exchange.
_And_ whether the vendor should have reasonably provided that
information. For instance, suppose I buy a word processor and then get
upset because it is written in K&R C instead of ANSI C. I claim that
the implementation language is not reasonable information to provide on
the packaging or the users' manual, and so I could not be held liable
for fraud.
>| However, I think we may be using a different definition of
>| "democratic". I mean "Athenian" democracy, where everyone stands in
>| the forum (or whatever) and shouts.
>
>however, you populace has been denied the right to act or form opinions by
>the very license agreements you invoke as arguments.
Our populace is not denied the right to act. Under a strict
interpretation of the licenses, the populace is denied legal action.
The populace can still boycott, etc. There was a famous suit in the
1960s brought by Ralph Nader alleging that a car was unsafe. The title
was something like "Unsafe at Any Speed". My understanding is that the
he lost the suit. However, the publicity killed sales, and the car was
taken off the market.
>on a tangent, I would argue that the nature of democracy is changing in the
>face of nearly cost-free dissemination of misinformation and disinformation
>the likes of which would have required enormous political campaign funds
>and the world's largest product launches today.
Likewise the cost of disseminating the truth is dropping
substantially. The Intel 80486 had more serious floating point bugs
than the Pentium, but the Internet spread the news about the Pentium in
a manner that didn't happen with the 486. I think our institutions
will become more democratic as a result of the information age.
>| When you bought the software, you voted for him. I do not own any
>| Microsoft software, you do (assumption, I know). I chose not to buy.
>| You chose to buy. Why blame me for your decision?
>
>I prefer direct namecalling to this kind of vile defamation.
Sorry. I thought it was a reasonable assumption, and I did label it as
an assumption.
>OF COURSE I DON'T OWN ANY MICROSOFT SOFTWARE. do you think I could
>argue against Microsoft's shitware the way I do if I had not made the
>simplest step in rejecting the totality of their business?
You wouldn't be the first person. I do not find it unreasonable for
anyone, including purchasers of Microsoft software, to argue against or
complain about Microsoft software. The only thing I find unreasonable
is the labels blame and fraud.
Let me make it clear that I am in no way asserting that Microsoft
products are of good quality or that anyone should buy them. Nor am
I asserting the opposite.
>we may disagree on some issues, Lawrence Crowl, but implying that I'm
>a tottering moron is a bit too much.
If I in any way implied you were a tottering moron, I apologize. If
I thought you were a tottering moron, I wouldn't be spending my time on
this.
>_obviously,_ I don't own any of the
>Microsoft products that I argue against.
Um, well it wasn't obvious to me.
> I _have_ voted against the lies
>and fraud of Bill Gates, and I'm frustrated that people buy his glossy lies
>hook, line, and sinker, not only because it makes quality software harder
>to sell and more expensive, but because Bill Gates still lives in the late
>1960's as far as software technology is concerned.
I am consistently suprised by the dichotomy between the reports in
popular press and the opinion of technical experts. I'd be happy to
hear an explanation of the phenomena.
>| If we changed to using metric units (meaning integral units) for
>| everything instead of integral English units, there would be huge
>| repercussions. I do not care how many laws you pass, my front door is
>| still going to be 36 inches wide. If I need to replace the door,
>| neither a 91 cm or 92 cm door will work, and certainly not a 90 cm
>| door. (I supposed you could force me to sell/buy 91.44 cm doors, but
>| what is the point?)
>
>this is a good point, but you miss the fact that a measurement of 36 inches
>is not exactly 36 inches. I would be surprised if it was within a narrower
>band than 1/16 inch, which means that everything from 91.3 through 91.6 cm
>is within the expected accuracy. (my own door frame moves by 6 mm during
>the year due to changing humidity and the weight of snow.) thus, 91.5 cm
>would be OK, and might fit better than the one you have today.
True. However, my point is that all the manufacturing infrastructure
is set up for 36 inches. Those doors are not going to be compatible
with European door manufacturing standards based on integral metric
units and hence Europeans and Americans cannot share markets. The
benefits of conversion to metric only really accrue when Europeans and
Americans can use the same manufacturing equipment to sell in both
markets.
This issue arose in a complaint by the European partners in Space
Station Fred (Space Station Freedom after it was scaled back). NASA
was publishing the construction specs using American units. The
Europeans complained that this effectively precluded them from bidding
on much of the construction because they didn't have the manufacturing
facilities in those sizes. This is true. NASA responded by rewriting
the document using metric units. However, the actual dimensions still
corresponed to, for example, standard American screws. The Europeans,
understandably, where not happy with the solution. I do not know the
final resolution.
>(I have no idea what the standards for doors and frames are over here,
>by my door measures very close to 822 mm wide right now.)
Do you happen to have conversion tables to traditional Norwegian
units? You may find the answer there.
Peter Kerr
Crowl) wrote:
> I do not care how many laws you pass, my front door is
> still going to be 36 inches wide. If I need to replace the door,
> neither a 91 cm or 92 cm door will work, and certainly not a 90 cm
> door. (I supposed you could force me to sell/buy 91.44 cm doors, but
> what is the point?)
After metrication here a two foot sheet of ply became 610mm,
and four foot became 1220mm. Doors here are sold in sizes
810mm (32 inch) and 915mm (36 inch)
Not precise, but reasonably practical. That extra 0.6mm?
For starters more doors are sold for new installation than replacement,
and, you have to do something with a chisel to rebate the hinges,
so a couple of extra minutes with a jackplane won't hurt you ;-)
Peter Kerr
> > there is no way to distinguish?
That's the trouble with trying to define something context sensitive which
relies on human intuition, eg.
the French example has been quoted in this thread, to take it further,
in my experience someone reading from say a newspaper will quote a
theatre performance time printed as 21.30, and read aloud as
"neuf heures et demi"
Yet from a train timetable 21.36, which apparently implies more precision
is read as "vingt et une heures trente six"
Clive D.W. Feather
>| (note that no European country has anti-trust legislation.
>| Strange. Why does the Monopolies and Mergers Commission exist, then?
> I repeat: there is no anti-trust legislation in any European country. as I
> said in the text you have conveniently deleted, we have other measures to
> control prices and companies. you just mentioned one of them. surprised?
I fail to see the effective difference between action under "anti-trust"
legislation and action under the legislation allowing an MMC investigation.
Unless you are nitpicking about the difference between American ("trust")
and English ("monopoly" and "oligopoly").
Peter Kerr
> However, my point is that all the manufacturing infrastructure
> is set up for 36 inches. Those doors are not going to be compatible
> with European door manufacturing standards based on integral metric
> units and hence Europeans and Americans cannot share markets. The
> benefits of conversion to metric only really accrue when Europeans and
> Americans can use the same manufacturing equipment to sell in both
> markets.
Which returns us to the definition of the US as a Type 3 market:
big manufacturing infrastructure, little foreign trade.
The Europeans on the other hand, 12 little-ish nations,
living in each others' pockets, needed a common standard,
and got their present system as a compromise.
New Zealand lives by foreign trade, and believes the customer
is always right. So we can make you doors 900mm, 915mm, 920mm,
or 36 inch if you want, except that for the 36 inch we actually
make them 914.4mm
Markus Freericks
> Units have an amazing persistence. In 1973, I watched a German woman
> order a pound (pfund) of something. What she meant was not the
> traditional German pound, but 500 gm. There is evidence that the
> Mesopotamians preserved the same unit of mass over 1500 years.
Yep, the "Pfund" is the sole surviving pre-metric measure in Germany, with
the meaning of "half a kilogram". My 1930 dictionary already defines the
Pfund as 500g, and I have no idea when the meaning changed from the "older"
pound meaning (and what it was, then. Prussian pound? I somehow don't
believe it was the British pound ;-).
-- Markus (I assume that metric measures have been popular in Germany since
Napoleonic times, not the least because they made trade between the German
mini-states easier. Anyone having a german pre-1872 dictionary handy?)
Markus Kuhn
>-- Markus (I assume that metric measures have been popular in Germany since
>Napoleonic times, not the least because they made trade between the German
>mini-states easier. [...])
Probably right, but only since 1977, we have a law about weights and measures
which enforces the units specified in the DIN standard which is the German
version of ISO 1000. Since this time, manufacturers have had to give e.g.
the power of cars in kW (the former usual unit was the PS (Pferdestaerke =
horse power)), mechanical force is now given in the unit newton
(the force necessary to accelerate 1 kg by 1 m/s*s) where the
old unit was the kilopond (the force which a mass of 1 kg exercises on
earth with a standard earth gravitational force of g=9.809... m/s*s),
etc. So although Germany used the metric system long ago, the SI
units (and this includes more than just the meter and the kilogram) specified
in ISO 1000 are the official German system of units only since 1977.
I still remeber this, because my father worked at a mechanical test center
at the University of Munich at this time and they had to change the scales
of all their equipment from kp to N in 1977 (1 kp = 9.809... N).
Since 1977, if specifications use units that do not conform to ISO 1000
in Germany, then they will e.g. be ignored by courts.
Fritz Whittington
>While I have been nervous around hospitals, I have noticed that the metric
>system and the english system is mixed. Medication is measured off in cc
>(cubic centmeters), yet blood is referred to as "by the pint." Weight is
>taken in pounds as far as patients go, and pills are measured in milligrams.
>(Those in the medical profession are free to take issue with me if my facts
>are not straight.)
I'm not in the medical profession, but I won't let that stop me :-)
The last time I went to the hospital, the form I had to fill out had
spaces for heighth and weight, with a check-box for feet/inches or cm,
and likewise pounds or kg. I filled mine out in cm and kg, and the
nurse who checked it showed no question or surprise.
From the extensive fine-print literature that the FDA now insist be
published with ads for prescription drugs, it's evident that some drugs
are to be adminstered based on the patient's mass. (The dosage is
quoted in mg (of drug)/kg (of patient).) So the doctor's balance reads
in pounds, so as not to confuse people, but the doctor converts to kg
for actual use. (And lots of hotels I've stayed at in the UK have
scales marked in stones, for pity's sake! Are there 20 pebbles to a
stone, and 14 grains to a pebble?)
From observation at the hospital, blood is referred to in "units", which
happen to be 500 ml. That's close enough to a pint that the staff might
call it that when soliciting blood donors.
--
Fritz Whittington Texas Instruments, P.O. Box 655474, MS 446 Dallas, TX 75265
Shipping address: 13510 North Central Expressway, MS 446 Dallas, TX 75243
fr...@ti.com Office: +1 214 995 0397 FAX: +1 214 995 6194
Since I am not an official TI spokesperson, these opinions contain no spokes.
Peter Kerr
> And lots of hotels I've stayed at in the UK have
> scales marked in stones, for pity's sake! Are there 20 pebbles to a
> stone, and 14 grains to a pebble?
>
A stone is 14 pounds, and for some mixed measures:
one stone = one quarter of a bushel (volume) of
something (wheat I think).
Don't laugh. Flight manuals for many light aircraft here
have to measure fuel in pounds per litre;
pounds for weight calculations with plane maker's data,
litres because that is the local dispensing measure.
Richard A. O'Keefe
>Presumably, you mean that one of the 24-hour notations is dominant
>in other English-speaking countries such as the UK, Australia and
>the non-French part of Canada. I don't know about Australia, but
>I haven't seen any evidence of this in the British and Canadian
>media I read/view. Comments from residents of those countries?
I am a New Zealander working in Australia (both English-speaking countries).
It came as a great surprise to me to see times in Australia written with a
dot instead of the colon I am used to (let's face it, 11.30 would mean
eleven and three tenths if it weren't used for a time, so you'd expect it
to mean elevent and three tenths of an hour, or 11:18. Do extra dots for
making colons cost $2 each, or something?). Normal usage is 12 hour
clock. I don't think I've ever seen a digital clock or watch that _has_
a 24-hour mode, let alone that being the default. The printed TV time-
table we get from the grocer has 12-hour clock times, but the TeleText
time-tables broadcast on Channel 7 use the 24-hour clock. The public
transport system (the Met) uses the 12-hour clock in its timetables and
on its 2-hour tickets.
--
"conventional orthography is ... a near optimal system for the
lexical representation of English words." Chomsky & Halle, S.P.E.
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~ok; RMIT Comp.Sci.
Mark Brader
> Don't laugh. Flight manuals for many light aircraft here
> pounds for weight calculations with plane maker's data,
> litres because that is the local dispensing measure.
And here in Canada, there was a famous incident about 10 years ago
(nicknamed the "Gimli glider" case) where the people fueling a plane
were so *used* to converting liters to pounds, that they inadvertently
used this same density factor on a plane where they needed to convert
from liters to *kilograms*. Wouldn't have mattered if not if the fuel
gauges had been working, but they weren't. Thanks to a combination of
luck and skill, nobody was hurt in the emergency landing that followed.
[Apologies if this has come up earlier in this thread. It has been
mentioned recently in at least one other newsgroup that I read, which
makes it hard to remember what was where. Anyway, it's particularly
apropos following Peter's item.]
--
Mark Brader The "I didn't think of that" type of failure occurs because
SoftQuad Inc. I didn't think of that, and the reason I didn't think of it
m...@sq.com is because it never occurred to me. If we'd been able to
Toronto think of 'em, we would have. -- John W. Campbell
My text in this article is in the public domain.
Fritz Whittington
>I am a New Zealander working in Australia (both English-speaking countries).
>transport system (the Met) uses the 12-hour clock in its timetables and
>on its 2-hour tickets.
Last March in Geneva, I noticed that the date-time stamp on bus tickets
had two different formats, depending on the station. One was DD.MM.YY
HH:MM (24-hour); the other was in the form YDDDSHHMM (12-hour). The Y
was the last digit of the year, the DDD was the day serial number, and
the S meant PM. I did not have an opportunity to stamp a ticket at one
of the 12-hour stations in the morning, so I don't know what is used for
AM.
And this in the most holy inner sanctum of international standards!
Gene Fornario
>m...@cs.tu-berlin.de (Markus Freericks) writes:
>the power of cars in kW (the former usual unit was the PS (Pferdestaerke =
>horse power)), mechanical force is now given in the unit newton
That bit of info helped me...I was looking at a Japanese magazine that
described a car's power in PS...(yes, they spelled it PS), and I didn't know
what the term meant until you just mentioned it. Does "Pferdestaerke" also
mean "horse power" when translated to English?
Gene--
--
ge...@netcom.com
Lawrence Crowl
Markus Freericks <m...@cs.tu-berlin.de> wrote:
>Yep, the "Pfund" is the sole surviving pre-metric measure in Germany, with
>the meaning of "half a kilogram". My 1930 dictionary already defines the
>Pfund as 500g, and I have no idea when the meaning changed from the "older"
>pound meaning (and what it was, then. Prussian pound? I somehow don't
>believe it was the British pound ;-).
The metric system was adopted in Germany in 1868 (according to my source).
Before then, the Pfund had different values depending on where in Germany
you were.
>-- Markus (I assume that metric measures have been popular in Germany since
>Napoleonic times, not the least because they made trade between the German
>mini-states easier. Anyone having a german pre-1872 dictionary handy?)
Not even France was metric in Napoleonic times. The metric system became
optional in 1792, but was not compulsory until 1840.
Lawrence Crowl
Peter Kerr <p.k...@auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
>A stone is 14 pounds, and for some mixed measures: one stone = one
>quarter of a bushel (volume) of something (wheat I think).
In 1303, the _Tractatus_ (with bad writing) defined the volume of a
gallon of wine (the ancestor of the U.S. gallon, and not that
new-fangled Imperial gallon) to be the volume of eight tower pounds of
wheat. Eight gallons of wheat made the London bushel. So 1/4 bushel
is the volume of 16 tower pounds of wheat. Since a tower pound =
5400/7000 Avoirdupois pound, 1/4 bushel is the volume of 12.34 Av.
pound = 0.88 stone. My figures do not match. Is there an alternate
definition?
Andreas Prilop
>That bit of info helped me...I was looking at a Japanese magazine that
>described a car's power in PS...(yes, they spelled it PS), and I didn't know
>what the term meant until you just mentioned it. Does "Pferdestaerke" also
>mean "horse power" when translated to English?
The units Pferdestärke (PS, CV) and horsepower (hp) are not identical:
1 PS = 75 kgf*m/s = 735.5 W
1 hp = 550 lbf*ft/s = 746 W
Also there are two different ways to measure the power of an engine -
the American way gives higher values than the European way.
Andreas
Gene Fornario
>So 1 anglosaxon horse-power is 1.39 % more powerful than
>1 metric Pferdstaerke.
Well, if the difference is really that small...that's close enough, 1 PS
could be said to be roughly 1 HP.
Horsepower can be something like a computer's MIPS...you know how strong the
engine is but that doesn't tell you how the rest of the car performs.
>Remaining question: How much physical work can a REAL horse do in
>one second?
I'm not sure except that 414 of them can't go a top speed of 310 kph :)
(Ferrari 512 M specs)
Gene--
Olle Jarnefors
in article <genefDE...@netcom.com>:
> In article <42hfr3$e...@cd4680fs.rrze.uni-erlangen.de> msk...@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de writes:
> >the power of cars in kW (the former usual unit was the PS (Pferdestaerke =
> >horse power)), mechanical force is now given in the unit newton
>
> That bit of info helped me...I was looking at a Japanese magazine that
> described a car's power in PS...(yes, they spelled it PS), and I didn't know
> what the term meant until you just mentioned it. Does "Pferdestaerke" also
> mean "horse power" when translated to English?
I think (but am not completely sure) that the German PS = Pferdstaerke
is the same as the Swedish hk = haestkraft, also still used when
indicating the power of car engines. 1 hk is defined as 75 kp*m/s,
and, as the kilopond is defined as 9,80665 N,
1 PS =? 1 hk =exactly 735.49875 W
The horse-power, on the other hand, is defined as 550 lbf*ft/s.
With 1 lb defined as 0.45359237 kg, standard acceleration of
gravity = 9,80665 m/s/s, and 1 ft = 12 in = 12*0.0254 m we get
1 hp =exactly 550*0.45359237*9,80665*12*0.0254 W =ca 745.700 W
So 1 anglosaxon horse-power is 1.39 % more powerful than
1 metric Pferdstaerke.
Remaining question: How much physical work can a REAL horse do in
one second?
/Olle
--
Olle Jarnefors, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm <oja...@admin.kth.se>
Dik T. Winter
> >So 1 anglosaxon horse-power is 1.39 % more powerful than
> >1 metric Pferdstaerke.
>
> could be said to be roughly 1 HP.
> >Remaining question: How much physical work can a REAL horse do in
> >one second?
>
> (Ferrari 512 M specs)
>
French have especially powerful horses, the more as they are fiscal. ;-)
--
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj amsterdam, nederland, +31205924098
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn amsterdam, nederland; e-mail: d...@cwi.nl