Big Tech Warns of 'Japan's Millennium Bug' Ahead of Akihito's Abdication (theguardian.com) 211
MightyMartian shares a report from The Guardian: On April 30, 2019, Emperor Akihito of Japan is expected to abdicate the chrysanthemum throne. The decision was announced in December 2017 so as to ensure an orderly transition to Akihito's son, Naruhito, but the coronation could cause concerns in an unlikely place: the technology sector. The Japanese calendar counts up from the coronation of a new emperor, using not the name of the emperor, but the name of the era they herald. Akihito's coronation in January 1989 marked the beginning of the Heisei era, and the end of the Shwa era that preceded him; and Naruhito's coronation will itself mark another new era. But that brings problems. For one, Akihito has been on the throne for almost the entirety of the information age, meaning that many systems have never had to deal with a switchover in era. For another, the official name of Naruhito's era has yet to be announced, causing concern for diary publishers, calendar printers and international standards bodies. It's why some are calling it "Japan's Y2K problem." "The magnitude of this event on computing systems using the Japanese Calendar may be similar to the Y2K event with the Gregorian Calendar," said Microsoft's Shawn Steele. "For the Y2K event, there was world-wide recognition of the upcoming change, resulting in governments and software vendors beginning to work on solutions for that problem several years before January 1, 2000. Even with that preparation many organizations encountered problems due to the millennial transition. Fortunately, this is a rare event, however it means that most software has not been tested to ensure that it will behave with an additional era."
Unicode's Ken Whistler wrote in a message earlier this month: "The [Unicode Technical Committee] cannot afford to make any mistakes here, nor can it just *guess* and release the code point early. All of this is pointing directly to the necessity of issuing a Unicode 12.1 release sharply on the heels of Unicode 12.0, incorporating the addition of the new Japanese era name character, which all vendors will be under great pressure to immediately support in 2019 software releases."
Unicode's Ken Whistler wrote in a message earlier this month: "The [Unicode Technical Committee] cannot afford to make any mistakes here, nor can it just *guess* and release the code point early. All of this is pointing directly to the necessity of issuing a Unicode 12.1 release sharply on the heels of Unicode 12.0, incorporating the addition of the new Japanese era name character, which all vendors will be under great pressure to immediately support in 2019 software releases."
Oh damn! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh damn! (Score:5, Funny)
Crap, as a programmer I hate our calendar system(s)!
Me too. It would be so much simpler if the earth rotated the sun in exactly 256 days, divided into exactly eight 32 day months.
Re:Oh damn! (Score:4, Funny)
Right, what computer illiterate idiot designed this system?
Re:Oh damn! (Score:5, Informative)
All commonly used calendars are bonkers (Score:3)
Well, I've always thought the International Fixed Calendar [wikipedia.org] was a decent attempt at sanity, but if there's people in the world that can't adopt the metric system, there's no way in hell the calendar could change.
Maybe the best solution is to use a sane calendar system similar to that one as a base system (similar to Universal Coordinated Time [wikipedia.org]) and then just calculate offsets into whatever crazy calendar system some group prefers to use.
Our current calendar system is pretty much bonkers anyway. We seem bizarrely attached to concepts like a 7 day week which is familiar but totally arbitrary. You could have a year with 73 weeks of 5 days each or a year with 5 months of 73 days and it would be equally valid and equal
Re:All commonly used calendars are bonkers (Score:4, Informative)
Regarding a non-7 day week, this has been tried before and didn't work. See for example www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/3/4/399/pdf
Sometimes a long-followed social construct has survived because it works well for us animals, and if that makes it harder for programming computers that is a reasonable cost.
Tradition for tradition's sake (Score:2)
Regarding a non-7 day week, this has been tried before and didn't work.
Just because a small group tried something a long time ago doesn't have a lot of relevance to the discussion. Maybe it just wasn't the right system or the right time to do it. There is nothing magical about a 7 day week. It's fine but we could easily have a 6 or an 8 day week and there is no objective reason that couldn't work just as well. It's just something we continue to do because we've done it that way for a long time. The major benefit of it is that most of the world has standardized on it which
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The Soviet Union is a rather large testing ground. They tried variations of 5 and 6 that worked poorly in an attempt to avoid using 7, which they viewed as a number that made it too easy for people to hold on to religion. While there are certainly an infinite number of variations one could try, its not like France (in the reference I cited) or the Soviets were too small a sample size to pretend that we have no evidence of relevance that 7 isn't just an arbitrary number and any other would work fine.
In Soviet Russia... (Score:2)
The Soviet Union is a rather large testing ground. They tried variations of 5 and 6 that worked poorly in an attempt to avoid using 7, which they viewed as a number that made it too easy for people to hold on to religion.
The Soviet Union tried a lot of things that didn't work very well. This is pretty far down the list among them. Plus like most standards it's the network effects of the existing standard that makes them hard to change once they are well established.
While there are certainly an infinite number of variations one could try, its not like France (in the reference I cited) or the Soviets were too small a sample size to pretend that we have no evidence of relevance that 7 isn't just an arbitrary number and any other would work fine.
Those are interesting case studies but one would have to dig a lot deeper into the reasons for those failures to determine if the length of the chosen week was the proximal cause of the failure. My guess is that it failed for other reasons similar to how the m
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Magical, no. But I reckon fatigue has something to do with it.
I know some people do, but I wouldn't fancy working 9 days consecutively and getting one off. Not on an ongoing basis, anyway.
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After the French Revolution, the Paris Commune created a revolutionary calendar that was certainly more internally coherent and logical, but it did not last long. Whether or not 7 days a week is arbitrary or not, the fact is that it has very deep roots. Much of our Western timekeeping dates back at least to the Sumerians, so it's probably one of the most long-lasting conventions ever made.
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What exactly is the point in having a calendar that's not synchronized to the solstices? Clocks measure time elapsed since an arbitrary epoch - calendars subdivide a year so that you can schedule seasonal activities. The two serve very different functions, and overlap only insofar as both measure the elapse of time.
An accurate clock can't even measure the passage of days correctly, since every day is, on average, slightly longer than the one before it thanks to a combination of solar and lunar tidal drag,
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I suppose I should say a *consistent* clock - one which holds the length of a second as constant over time. A sun dial accurately subdivides the day into sub-periods, but at the cost of constantly varying the length of those periods.
Reconciling arbitrary celestial cycles (Score:2)
What exactly is the point in having a calendar that's not synchronized to the solstices?
There is no objectively important reason that a calendar that tracks rotations of the Earth has to have any relationship whatsoever to orbits around the Sun. There is some utility in doing so but it's not as if we would be unaware of and unable to plan for the fact that the Earth takes approximately 365.25 days to orbit the Sun. Heck for quite a long time we used the Julian calendar [wikipedia.org] and it worked pretty well overall despite not quite so accurately reconciling the length of a year to the length of a day.
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Except calendar aren't designed to track rotations of the Earth, they're designed to subdivide orbits so that people could effectively prepare for the changing of seasons well in advance, and served that purpose 10's of thousands of years before the Julian calendar was established. The inaccuracy of Julian calendar was itself due to insufficient correction, (they had 1 leap year every four) rather than not recognizing the fundamental problem. And considering that it took 100 years to drift (a bit less tha
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Sorry - that bit near the top should have have been "took 100 years to drift a bit less than one day"
It's Not In The Least Bit Bonkers (Score:2)
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There is nothing arbitrary in our calendar system.
Chrismas is 3 or 4 days after Jule, the winter solistice. (Because the Christians wanted to steal that germanic/nordic festival)
A month is 28 days long, following the moon, hence its name.
Our calendar is arranged around the 4 corner stones: the two equinoxes and the two solistices.
I spare me to call you an idiot or a moron, blame your school system that you seem not to know the most simplest things in the universe.
Ancient Babylon? (Score:2)
7 day weeks are speculated to have been based on the lunar cycle from the ancient Babylonians.
Assuming that is true for argument's sake, what relevance does it have to modern life?
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It's a standard that a large portion of the world agrees upon. It's relevance is that a lot of people use it. To change it would be monumentally expensive, disruptive, and really would replace it with something else just as arbitrary. In other words, at least until we start colonizing other worlds with other chronological cycles, it will persist.
Network effects (Score:2)
To change it would be monumentally expensive, disruptive, and really would replace it with something else just as arbitrary.
Certainly. That doesn't mean doing so isn't a worthwhile exercise. My whole point is that our current calendar is unarguably illogical, flawed, and occasionally problematic. We use it because of network effects, not because it is an optimal system.
In other words, at least until we start colonizing other worlds with other chronological cycles, it will persist.
Agreed and I said more or less exactly this in a different post in this thread. I think it would take something like us becoming a multi-planet species to be a big enough jolt to the system to make it worthwhile to change calendar systems. Maybe not even then
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And VHS was inferior to betamax, and still won. Sometimes a standard, no matter how inferior, is so entrenched that no, there are no good arguments for changing it.
As to interplanetary colonization, I expect when the time comes, we'll do what we've done already; a local time and a universal time (sort of like the Star Trek star dates).
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I'm not sure, but if we switched to a five day week I wonder how many you'd get off? It'd probably be less than two, and you'd still get paid the same.
That's probably the real reason for 7 - to work the peasants as much as possible without actually killing them.
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Of course it is true.
Strangely *all* calendars on ghe world are 7 days based.
Anyway: what relevance does changing the calendar system have for modern life?
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That makes no sense - 3, 10 day weeks are closer to the average length of a lunar month (29.5 days) than 4, 7 day ones. Plus, the Babylonians used a base-60 number system, which 10x3 fits into much better than 7x4.
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Finally .... ... ... actually it is not hard, but basically everyone I ask fails to grasp it :)
Or not
The number system has nothingto do with it, but you don't grasp that.
A month is 28 or 29.5 days long, depending how you count. And the number system does not change anything about that.
I leave it to an excersice to you to figure why the sumerians used a system based on 12 and 60
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Pretty bold calling a calendar system written by a British person the "International Fixed Calendar."
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Re:Oh damn! (Score:5, Interesting)
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The second is a fundamental unit, so there are lots of other units which depend upon it's value. Change that and you've changed the value of the Hz, erg, amp,etc.. According to Wikipedia of the 22 names derived units only 3 do not depend on the second.
huh??
1 second is defined to be exactly 9 192 631 770 cycles of a Caesium atomic clock
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It is actually a second every few years.
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Solary is not a word, though from language patterns it would probably mean something like "sunny" if it was - "having the quality of solar", like "shiny" means "having the quality of shine". What concept where you trying to convey? Solarly (also apparently not a word) would be something like "relating to the sun", which I'm guessing might be what you mean.
The appropriate term though, the one that caused the creation of leap years in the first place, is "seasons". Without leap years the date of the solsti
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One advantage of that is that my homebrew date/time library which really is much better than all the others wouldn't break twice a year due to DST.
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Meh, just use UTC-based Unix time - it both ignores that daylight saving nonsense, AND leaves your data in a format compatible with pretty much everything else in the world.
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When you admitted that you know the word was already published by another, you gave evidence that you yourself had received evidence that it is indeed a word.
You don't seem to comprehend what words are, or where they come from in the English language!
Re:Oh damn! (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly in this case it probably won't be the numerical side of things that causes problems. Most IT systems use the same Gregorian calendar we do, and have a conversion function to handle translation to/from imperial eras.
The problem is that, like leap seconds, there is no way to predict when eras will change so you have to update all your software every time there is a new one. Particularly for systems that handle personal data it's still common for people to enter their birthday using the imperial era system, so when the new era starts all those systems need to be able to handle it.
It was bad enough the last time it happened, but this time IT is much more pervasive and user facing. All sorts of industries are affected, e.g. airlines need to be able to handle children born in the new era from day one.
Re: Oh damn! (Score:4, Informative)
It's not uncommon either. Pregnant people can go in labor weeks early, stress of flying often exacerbates the issue.
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Ya know, with enough planets and moons of the right masses and orbits, you probably could generate a system that was locked into that kind of orbital resonance [wikipedia.org]. Maintaining stability in such a system, where small perturbations accumulate, would probably be difficult to guarantee, though.
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I wonder what the Outsiders charged them for those planetary drives?
Whatever it was it would be worth it to make years 256 days long.
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On nibble weeks, aka 4 day weeks, I would agree, but not on 8 days.
Re:Oh damn! (Score:4, Insightful)
Serious answer: No, because the current calendar is based on the BIRTH of Christ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini
If Jesus comes back "in glory" it's unlikely that he'll be back as an infant (unless your a Stewie fan), so your timekeeping based on the birth of a highly religious infant should remain intact. Whether or not He will need clocks in the eternal world to come remains up for debate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Coming
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I think you missed the memo... the new dating scheme is BCE and CE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
BC and AD have gone out the window...
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BC and AD have gone out the window...
Not quite... here's another Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
BC and AD are the traditional ways of designating eras. BCE and CE are common in some scholarly texts and in certain topic areas. Either convention may be appropriate for use in Wikipedia articles.
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Didn't BCE/CE come about fairly recently due to political correctness?
Nope, about 400 years ago. It's the second paragraph in the Wikipedia link.
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I think you missed the memo... the new dating scheme is BCE and CE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
BC and AD have gone out the window...
It isn't a "new dating scheme", the year numbers are exactly the same. The only change is the labels, because, as you may be surprised to find out, non-Christians would rather not to refer to the current date as being in "the year of our lord".
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There is no "our lord" in BC or AC ...
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I guess you got that reversed.
No one - except some idiots- is using BCE and CE anymore.
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Whether or not He will need clocks in the eternal world to come remains up for debate.
How do you know it's eternal unless you're watching a clock? Maybe it's only a month, and then He'll get tired and want to do something else. (ADD Jesus.)
OTOH, do they have night in Heaven? What if I'm an astronomer and want to see the stars? Oh, right; either I can just zoom over to see them, or I'll have forgotten all about them and be basking in the Glory of the One True Star. So I guess He's like a black hole with all of the other souls spinning and dancing around him.
(Yeah, I'm a non-believer a
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That is a classic out by 1 programming error. There is no year zero, the first year is year one.
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Isn't it even worse that that? I thought 4 years got missed somewhere?
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Correct, in theory Jesus was born between 6 BC and 4 BC.
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"When Jesus comes back do we need to reset the year back to zero? "
I suspect that if/when Jesus comes back (Why would he/she/it come back to Earth? There HAVE to be more interesting places populated by less obtuse/obnoxious entities to spend time with), Calender reset (Why would we do that in any case?) will be somewhere around item 43612 on our list of problems.
Re: Oh damn! (Score:2)
The Mojibake Era (Score:2, Offtopic)
So... (Score:3)
"the official name of Naruhito's era has yet to be announced"
Then... just announce it?
Re:So... (Score:4)
I'm pretty sure it will be known in IT circles as the "placeholder era", and decades from now we'll find something along these lines in a lot of code...
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Speaking of which, why are they still around? Isn't it about time to abolish this nonsense?
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It is called Heisei 31 until May 29, then it's Unknown Era 1 May 30 (Or whatever the changeover date is)
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Why are we using the Christian epoch?
Because right now most of the world uses it.
Unix time contains leap seconds that causes a whole host of other problems. TAI would be fine, but not enough people use it.
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Because right now most of the world uses it. ... ... 130M people ... Moron.
If you want to call "something around 45% of the world population 'most'"
Never heared about the muslim calendar or asian calendars? The article you posting to is actually about the japanese calendar
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
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"the official name of Naruhito's era has yet to be announced"
Then... just announce it?
Why is this a problem? In most computing systems, is the era encoded as a string or as an enumerated value? If it's enumerated, the corresponding human-readable string can be changed later.
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If this is a problem for unicode, then at least one of the calendar and unicode are total shit.
Fake news! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Fake news! (Score:5, Insightful)
Heisei calendaring appears on official documents, train tickets etc. (quick check, a Japan Rail reserved-seat ticket I was issued back on the 12th of May this year has the date of issue as 30.-5.12, that is Heisei year 30, month 5, day 12). Nearly all common date expressions in Japan use Christian Era numbering though.
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But seriously, a train machine printing an unambiguous but technically wrong date on a ticket is hardly a problem.
Oh it's a huge problem!
Lucky for you, I happen to be in the train ticket-machine business.
Unfortunately the old machines cannot be updated, but I'll give you a..... mmm....... 4% discount on new ones.
Unprecedented!
Are YOU Going to be the one shameful business which is printing years in an antiquated era? If so, shame on your family's next four generations.
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You are unfamiliar with trains in Japan then. It's an issue when they leave 20 [nytimes.com] or 25 seconds [soranews24.com] early. Lateness is inexcusable. If there is a change to the tickets that causes any confusion, it's going to be a madhouse.
In most other countries, no big deal.
Food, too (Score:2)
Just checked some packaged food, and the "use by"/"best before"/"packed on" dates are in Heisei Era on all of them. Some have both Heisie and CE dates, but none have CE only.
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Yes that was pretty much what happened - BECAUSE THE CORE PROBLEMS WERE ALREADY CORRECTED.
There haven't even been 20 years and history revisionism is going strong.
Re:Fake news! (Score:4, Interesting)
Apart from things like minor transportation delays, radiation monitors sounding, credit cards failing to work, some phones deleting new messages rather than old when running out of space, etc, probably the worst Y2K bug I heard of was a bunch of expectant mothers in the UK being falsely told that their children were at a high risk of Downs' Syndrome when they weren't, and vice versa, due to miscalculation of the mother's age. There were some abortions in the former group as a result of the email. Still, given all the hype, the actual effects were (as everyone here expected) quite small.
My favorite was when the government of Maine started issuing titles to peoples' new cars [washingtonpost.com] describing it as a "Horseless Carriage", as apparently that had been hard-coded as the terminology for vehicles from before 1916. ;)
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There were a bunch of Y2K bugs that happened during Y2k it wasn't end of the world stuff, because critical date/time information was not internally stored as yy/mm/dd or mm/dd/yy because of the complexity of date/time calculations these critical system just stored numbers such a utime. It would make reporting a bit funny though.
I have been more concerned about the approaching 2038. There have been patches and most systems are now 64bit. but there are those crazy systems that people are afraid to upgrade or
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I built an embedded system that uses 2000 as the epoch and a 16 bit number of days since then for the date. It's going to wrap around some time in 2064 IIRC. I'll be old, maybe dead... But I still feel a little bit guilty.
Luckily there is very little chance that the system will be in use by then, I keep telling myself.
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I hope you deleted the documentation?
Or there never was one in the first place?
Or ...
You wrote a missleading one?
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Unfortunately, using a 64-bit system does not magically make all Y2038 issues go away. This is because various system library calls (API), communication protocols and file systems can have restricted timestamp ranges. Some of these use the current UNIX time era which ends on January 19th 2038 (UTC) because 32-bit time overflows to a negative number.
For example, the NTPv4 Internet time protocol runs into difficulty in 2036 because it comes to the end of its time era (overflows).
Also 64-bit operating systems
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Actually some of it was - newer systems written by competent programmers tend to adopt Unix-time or similar, but that leaves a lot of legacy and... less competently coded programs. Quite a few databases, etc. do (did) in fact store dates as yy/mm/dd (or whatever) - probably because the person who first wrote it decided to do it that way without considering the long-term implications (perhaps because it was never intended to be a long-term solution), followed by many years of developers just holding their n
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I fixed about 1M LOC cobol code and crosschecked about 600k LOC PL1 code.
If the software systems had not been fixed, they compldtely had failed around 1999/2001.
And yes, all data was stored in obscure yy/dd/mm formats or julian dates or other obscure ways. No one was using 'unix time'.
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Japanese regnal years are not used for any significant calculations. Behind the scenes it's YYYY, with regnal years used only for display. This is an aesthetic issue only, and hardly unforeseen.
Obviosly this could be seen coming, but how to do you program for it?
Update your datetime libraries, I guess. That's where this should be programmed for. You shouldn't be figuring out regnal years in your own code. Any system that cannot be updated will simply be doomed to display the wrong regnal year forever, though it'll be perfectly clear what year is being referred to.
The next emperor is a high probability, but perhaps not a certainty.
And regardless of who the next emperor is, their reign is going to have a different name, and we still don't know what it is.
Dang (Score:2)
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The current year is 2771 AUC, and nobody can convince me otherwise!
Explanation of the problem (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Explanation of the problem (Score:4, Informative)
If Unicode was at least sane enough, there would be a range of consecutive reserved codepoints. However, 0x337A is already assigned to something else (as is 0x337F if they started going in the other direction). Having a character doesn't matter as much as having a reserved codepoint. You can test without a real character.
will they also fix the 2038 bug as well? (Score:4, Insightful)
will they also fix the 2038 bug as well?
or hold off so they have jobs in 2037 fixing it.
Myopic view of history (Score:2)
"Akihito has been on the throne for almost the entirety of the information age"
Umm, no. We were well into the information age by 1989. The use of computers in vital infrastructure (e.g. banking) dates back to the late 50's. I checked out the author of the article, and as expected, he appears to be under 30; this would explain his myopic view of history.
Laughable cluelessness (Score:3)
"...Unicode, the international standards organisation which most famously controls the introduction of new emojis to the world."
This is a new level of cluelessness. "Most famously"? Like, internationalization and localization were just afterthoughts; it's the emojis that they really focus on.
How is this guy a technology reporter for a major newspaper?
"The Shwa era"? 8-Bit Slashdot wins again (Score:5, Funny)
Actually it's not the Shwa era, but the Showa era, with a bar on top of the o. The character in question (U+014D) is used in transliterating Japanese in Latin script to indicate pronunciation. It has been part of Unicode since 1991.
It's interesting to see in the summary a discussion of Unicode 12.1 vs. 12.0, when Slashdot itself doesn't support the Unicode 1.0 characters necessary to write the summary :)
Informative, not Funny (Score:3)
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And let those gaijin be right? That's unpossible!
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Only Japanese? We are at Jesus 2018.
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Metric is crap. "But muh 10s!" Whatever. Computers have no problems with calculations (nor do most people), and I'd rather have a measurement meaningful to people than easily divide. I'm almost never converting inches to yards, but if I do it's just divide by 12 * 3 = divide by 36. Sure I could convert meters to decametres slightly faster in my head... but why? Also, I'd like to continue to name the temperature without going into decimals. It's much nicer to say "It's 91 degrees out" than "It's 32.78 degree
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I'm almost never converting inches to yards, but if I do it's just divide by 12 * 3 = divide by 36. Sure I could convert meters to decametres slightly faster in my head... but why?
There's really no argument in using metric other than "But everyone else is doing it" and "Everything divides by 10!"
And, as you yourself said, it's faster to do the conversions in your head.
Also, I'd like to continue to name the temperature without going into decimals. It's much nicer to say "It's 91 degrees out" than "It's 32.78 degrees out."
That's some pretty impressive trolling. The precision of Celsius degrees is a little over half the precision of Fahrenheit degrees. To get the same precision, you would only have to add 1/2 when necessary. Even so, I doubt most people can distinguish temperature to that precision without using a thermometer anyway, so there isn't any need to use fractions of a degree in normal conversation.
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False comparison.
While imperial units might be a little amusing, at least we all know precisely how many millimetres there'll be in an inch next year or a hundred years from now.
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Not nearly so well as the Japanese calendar.
Imperial / U.S. Customary units work great - until you need to perform even the simplest calculation, at which point you get subjected to mild torture grinding through arbitrary unit conversions, or have to deal with scientists, engineers, anyone anywhere else in the world - at which point you invoke some much uglier unit conversion torture that relies on knowing the conversions between units you use commonly, and units you rarely use in a completely different sys