[starman]

Hi all,
I can see this being a problem in the future. My nephew's 5th grade teacher is setting the standard for dates in her classroom: dd/mm/yy. I can see this being a serious problem since the rest of the country uses mm/dd/yy. Personally, I like using dd Monthname Year but at least I spell out the month. When you're writing 5/7/2002, is it May or July?

Thoughts?

Mike

[MacManMikeOSX]

i use the european date format just because im used to it from getting my ass shipped of to milatry school. (The milatry uses european date and time formats)

[scaught]

i use m.d.yr just because thats what everyone else in america uses. i dont think one way is right or better than the other.

ack. mistype.

[The Godfather]

When I am in US territory, I use MonthName DD, YYYY (even in contracts, stuff I sign).
I never use mm/dd/yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy. Even less yy instead of yyyy.

[denim]

You might want to ask the child about the conflict in formats. Anyway, everyone knows the right format is yyyy mm dd. ISO 8601 forever! A good explaination of it is ISO here. Have the kid print that out and bring it in to the teacher.

[Cipher13]

dd/mm/yy is the better of the two.

mm/dd/yy makes no sense at all. You really should drop it.

[voodoo]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
dd/mm/yy is the better of the two.

mm/dd/yy makes no sense at all. You really should drop it.

What he said.

Scaught is undecided on what people around him use

Seems to have reached a conclusion.

[Timo]

Quelle scandale!

[ReggieX]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
dd/mm/yy is the better of the two.

mm/dd/yy makes no sense at all. You really should drop it.

Sure it makes sense.
When speaking, I say "It's September 26th today."
Bada-bing.

The problem is that Canada is such a mish-mash of Britishisms and Americanisms that it would be better to keep to the ISO standard.

Hear that, America? JOIN US OR DIE!

[khufuu]

I agree with the ISO standards people. I, of course, currently use dd/mm/yy because I live in Canada but yyyy-mm-dd is the best way I think.

Same with time. The whole AM/PM crap drives me crazy.

[denim]

Originally posted by khufuu:
Same with time. The whole AM/PM crap drives me crazy.

Yeah, dammit.

[nana4]

Originally posted by ReggieX:


Sure it makes sense.
When speaking, I say "It's September 26th today."
Bada-bing.

Yes but surely the most important bit of information is the day of the month? I mean it's harder to figure out the day, rather than the month. And the year is even easier to remember.

[Kenneth]

I was born in Hong Kong, which was a British colony before 1997. Now, I have been in this country for 6 years; I use to write out the month, such as Sept. 26th, 2002. I use it on my school assignments, checks, and such. For the time format, I love to use the 24hrs (military time).
Oh yea, the metric system is way to go, forget about inches, miles, mph, gallons. Those things don't make any sense to me.

[bewebste]

Originally posted by Kenneth:
I was born in Hong Kong, which was a British colony before 1997. Now, I have been in this country for 6 years; I use to write out the month, such as Sept. 26th, 2002. I use it on my school assignments, checks, and such. For the time format, I love to use the 24hrs (military time).
Oh yea, the metric system is way to go, forget about inches, miles, mph, gallons. Those things don't make any sense to me.

The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I like it!

[file]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
dd/mm/yy is the better of the two.

mm/dd/yy makes no sense at all. You really should drop it.

it's arguably better

but the american way puts the dd in proper context with mm first which i think is better

[Vanquish]

The European way is the only correct way, it's logical, and the rest of the world uses it. So get used to it, you'll all change some day.

[SimeyTheLimey]

I think on balance the European way of writing dates makes more sense, but it isn't a big deal either way. As has been mentioned, the US military uses it and the 24 hour clock- which is much more sensible than am/pm. So it's not like either are alien concepts here.

My real peeve is not going to metric. Feet, inches and pounds drive me batty. It's much easier to divide by 10 than 16 and so forth. The only reason not to go to metric is stubborness. I've heard people claim that it's hard to learn for people used to "standard" but that's not my experience seeing people adapt to using metric in the Army. You can get used to it if you try and it would make this country compatible with the rest of the world. I think that would help trade and exports. This country probably won't change to metric in my lifetime, but it should.

On the other hand, the US "letter" size is much more manageable than A4. So europe should change to that one.

[putamare]

mm/dd sorts, dd/mm doesn't and therefore makes more "sense," but ISO is the only solution that actually makes "sense"

[voodoo]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
I think on balance the European way of writing dates makes more sense, but it isn't a big deal either way. As has been mentioned, the US military uses it and the 24 hour clock- which is much more sensible than am/pm. So it's not like either are alien concepts here.

My real peeve is not going to metric. Feet, inches and pounds drive me batty. It's much easier to divide by 10 than 16 and so forth. The only reason not to go to metric is stubborness. I've heard people claim that it's hard to learn for people used to "standard" but that's not my experience seeing people adapt to using metric in the Army. You can get used to it if you try and it would make this country compatible with the rest of the world. I think that would help trade and exports. This country probably won't change to metric in my lifetime, but it should.

On the other hand, the US "letter" size is much more manageable than A4. So europe should change to that one.

Agree with everything you say. It is like spoken out of my mouth!

As for the US "letter" size, I haven't really used US letter size so I don't know.

I do know A4 is in the propotions of a golden rectangle, so it's very handy to scale up and down (A3 and A5 respectively).

[MacManMikeOSX]

Originally posted by Vanquish:
The European way is the only correct way, it's logical, and the rest of the world uses it. So get used to it, you'll all change some day.

wrongo with our new forign policy you will be using our format and well nuke you or invad if you disagree understand

-message brought to you by George W. Bush

[Developer]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
The US "letter" size is much more manageable than A4. So europe should change to that one.

What are the advantages of the "letter" format?

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by Developer:
What are the advantages of the "letter" format?

It's been a while since I had them side by side so I could be wrong. But as I recall the letter size is a bit smaller and a fatter rectangle than A4. I just found it works better, but your mileage, er . . . "kilometerage" may vary.

[wataru]

ISO! ISO! ISO!

[Mediaman_12]

Originally posted by Smoothly:
It's been a while since I had them side by side so I could be wrong. But as I recall the letter size is a bit smaller and a fatter rectangle than A4. I just found it works better, but your mileage, er . . . "kilometerage" may vary.

????So that's some how better????

This country's all Farked up with it's metric conversion. it's been taught (metric only) in schools for 20+ years, but weight was often referred to in Pounds until a year or two back, and distance (on road signs) is still in Yards and Miles.

[Xaositect]

I prefer yyyy.mm.dd and 24hr format of time, purely for sorting by computer. I never cared for the "100 minute hour" or the "1000 minute day" formats that were touted for a while, but I do understand the appeal.

[MindFad]

I've always hated the month-day-year thing, too. But I use it because everyone I know does, and they'd get confused and throw a fit if I did it the way I want.

And I would say it the 26th of September, 2002. Hey, we could all just start writing out the damn dates. 26/Sep./2002 What, an extra character or two?

[fat mac moron]

I pretty much write it out, 26 Sept 2002, but I think we should all use julian dates

Julian for 26 Sept 2002 is 02269

02 = last 2 spaces of the year 2002 and it's the 269th day of the year. 02269! No confusion, simple format

[Hawkeye_a]

Finally. ive traveled a lot, and every other country/region uses dd/mm/yy (logical), as opposed to mm/dd/yy, it's so annoying when coming back into the U.S. that you have to change your mode of thinking..... not only the date thing, but coming back to yards, miles and gallons is very frustrating.

I think it's about time, there is a systematic large scale adoption of the world standards.

[fulmer]

I like 20020927. that format--yyyymmdd. It's good for sorting. I think the Army is doing things like that, b/c I've been signing docs recently and they were *very* anal about using that format.

[denim]

Originally posted by putamare:
mm/dd sorts, dd/mm doesn't and therefore makes more "sense," but ISO is the only solution that actually makes "sense"

mm/dd/yyyy doesn't sort. yyyy/mm/dd does.

[daimoni]

.

[Spaldings]

Originally posted by denim:
You might want to ask the child about the conflict in formats. Anyway, everyone knows the right format is yyyy mm dd. ISO 8601 forever! A good explaination of it is ISO here. Have the kid print that out and bring it in to the teacher.

This is exactly what I do!!!!!!

[Developer]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
It's been a while since I had them side by side so I could be wrong. But as I recall the letter size is a bit smaller and a fatter rectangle than A4. I just found it works better, but your mileage, er . . . "kilometerage" may vary.

Sorry, what do you mean by "works better"? (please excuse my poor English) Do you mean it is visually more pleasing? (I have never seen one)

I'm not arguing that one is better than the other. Just curious about the advantages/disadvantages of the two.

[Developer]

Originally posted by denim:
A good explaination of it is ISO here.

Thanks for the link. It explicitly mentions that this is the standard now in Germany (and I looked it up in the "Duden" and it's indeed true). I guess I'll have to change my habit now.

ps:
First step, I changed the date formatting in system preferences right now.

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by Developer:
Sorry, what do you mean by "works better"? (please excuse my poor English) Do you mean it is visually more pleasing? (I have never seen one)

I'm not arguing that one is better than the other. Just curious about the advantages/disadvantages of the two.

Letter size is just somehow more pleasing to me. It's hard to define why, but I think I just find A4 to be too tall and thin. You can try it if you like by just cutting a sheet of paper. Let me see now, letter is 8.5 x 11 inches. I think it's 2.54 cm to the inch so that's 21.59cm x. 27.94cm. Not exactly round numbers in metric, unfortunately.

But anyway, I was basically joking about Europe adopting letter size.

[Hugi]

Originally posted by Developer:
I'm not arguing that one is better than the other. Just curious about the advantages/disadvantages of the two.

I prefer the european "A" system, since, as voodoo mentions, it is built around a golden rectangle - fold an A3 page in half and you have A4, fold that in half again and you have A5 etc.

This means you can lay out a page, and be certain that the layout will be the same on all paper sizes from A0 upwards.

[Developer]

Originally posted by hugi:

I prefer the european "A" system, since, as voodoo mentions, it is built around a golden rectangle - fold an A3 page in half and you have A4, fold that in half again and you have A5 etc.

It's not build around the golden cut, it's build around the square root of 2.

This means you can lay out a page, and be certain that the layout will be the same on all paper sizes from A0 upwards.

Yes, that's a great advantage. Now I understand why they did it that way. On the other hand - I compared the look of both formats in TextEdit - and I would agree with Simey, that US letter looks visually more pleasing. And you could keep the ratio ratio for different paper sizes even if it's not 1:sqr(2). You just can not fold the papers in half, but who needs to anyway?

Do American paper size series keep the same ratio for different sizes?

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by Developer:
It's not build around the golden cut, it's build around the square root of 2.
Yes, that's a great advantage. Now I understand why they did it that way. On the other hand - I compared the look of both formats in TextEdit - and I would agree with Simey, that US letter looks visually more pleasing. And you could keep the ratio ratio for different paper sizes even if it's not 1:sqr(2). You just can not fold the papers in half, but who needs to anyway?

Do American paper size series keep the same ratio for different sizes?

No, I don't think so. The next size up from letter (8.5x11 inches) is legal (8.5x14 inches). It's obviouly just longer.

Scalability is clearly an advantage of the European approach. I think the US approach is probably more that you choose a size depending on application. E.g. I'm writing a letter = letter size, I'm writing a contract = legal size. There seems to be an assumption that you wouldn't want to change from one to the other halfway through a project. Of course, I'm just speculating.

[Mediaman_12]

Originally posted by Developer:
You just can not fold the papers in half, but who needs to anyway?

Do American paper size series keep the same ratio for different sizes?

The A size thing is a god send to the print industry, and the 'folding' thing is the reason. To make A5 16 page booklet all you need is 1 A2 sheet fold it in half 3 times, a few cuts, ta'da 1 booklet. To print a 2 sided A4 sheet, 4 landscape A4's = 1 A2. You can even mix and match all the sizes and still end up with an A2 sheet that you can cut on a guillotine, with almost no waste.
How do US printers manage with there non-proportional sizes.

[Xaositect]

11x17 is the next largest paper size after 8.5x11, except "legal size" (8.5x14) which is there for lawyers to feel special (they don't get to ride the short bus anymore).

[gerbnl]

Originally posted by ReggieX:


When speaking, I say "It's September 26th today."

This is to be considered a speech empediment...

Probably this disorder is brought about by simply writing (or reading) your dates the wrong way around

[gerbnl]

Originally posted by Mediaman_12:


????So that's some how better????

This country's all Farked up with it's metric conversion. it's been taught (metric only) in schools for 20+ years, but weight was often referred to in Pounds until a year or two back, and distance (on road signs) is still in Yards and Miles.

Just wait until you guys have to drive on the right side of the street... Why do you think it's called 'right' in the first place

[BlackGriffen]

The American format makes sense, because most Americans will say things like, "I was born on July 10, 1962." So they just change how they would say it in to a date.

The European way makes sense, because it is perfectly fine to say, "23 of February, 1962."

Neither system makes as much sense as ISO (IIRC, they use this one in Japan, don't they?). Numbers are big endian. Or is it little endian? Fsck it, they have the large valued numbers first and small valued digits last (this makes sense because we read left to right, and the most important numbers are the big ones, or the first ones we read). The reason ISO makes more sense than the others is because it fits the endian style of the numbering system. Both the European and American systems make a mishmash of it.

Granted, you want to know the day more often than the year, but who hear hasn't counted like this: "...5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 50, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 60?" Besides, if you're dating something you never want to forget the month, because at least then you'll be certain of the date for a good year or two.

Though the American system at least gets the order of the month/day right .

BlackGriffen

Edit: type-o

[tie]

Here are some logical reasons in favor of using the US standard:

- When a date (like September 11, 2001, or December 7, 1941) starts a sentence, what do you do? Do you write out the number, capitalized? This follows the normal convention, but is awkward when the day is put first.

- The rhythm is better starting with the month. This sounds fuzzy but I mean two things specifically: 1. Giving the month gives the listener a parse warning that a date is coming and to pay attention. (I suspect that a scientific study would find that Americans less frequently need to have the day repeated ) 2. Giving the month gives the speaker a second to figure out the day (e.g., "I am going on vacation December .. uh .. 25" gives more information out faster than "I am going on vacation .. uh .. 25 December," where ".. uh .." might indicate a pause for thought or looking at the calendar).

What are some logical reasons for the European standard?

If computer programmers had any brains, there would be no need for computers to have the year first. So skip the dumb computer standards.

[MadMacs]

[denim]

Originally posted by tie:
Here are some logical reasons in favor of using the US standard:

You mentioned some emotional "reasons", but nothing "logical". Would you like to try again?

[MacManMikeOSX]

Originally posted by MadMacs:


Correction:

The military uses:

7 MAY 02

They use the month in 3 letter format, so OCT would be October and MAR would be March.

8 MAR 02

NOT 8/3/02

well all the special forces guys that taught us used 8/3/02 and would drop us or give us hours if we didnt.