Microsoft eventually realized the world isn't just the Northern Hemisphere Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has explained why the megacorp ditched its increasingly twee naming conventions for Windows 10 releases in favor of the blander H1 and H2. The reason, according to Chen, was that Microsoft realized calling releases "Spring" and "Fall" didn't make sense in all parts of the world. Not only …
And the US date format! Please, ditch that, too!
Sorry to the folk in the US, but MM-DD-YYYY just makes no logical sense.
Perhaps a universal date format should be default: YYYY-MM-DD (yes, it's an option, but let's make it the Default!). That'll please some countries where that's the format used. Or DD-MM-YYYY for the rest of the world (other than the US).
Thought you were going to post this one.
The astronomy world switched over to YYYY-MM-DD quite a while ago. I appreciate the fervor of some of my fellow commentards for DD-MM-YYYY, but there are too many MM-DD-YYYY ones out there polluting the world for that to ever work well.
In communicating with English-speaking humans, I'll use 2025-Aug-07 for maximum disambiguation, but that doesn't sort correctly. Mars has a time system, but no 'official' calendar yet. If it gets one, I hope the 'months' are named something like, say, Alf, Bra, Cha, Del, etc.
2025-08-07 "people who bizarrely parse that as 2025 Jul 8."
They would never have an excuse for being late until the twelfth of the month when they will have to factor in the travel time to Mars which presumably has twice as many "months" as Earth and oddly twice as many moons too. ;)
I suppose it wouldn't make any difference if you wrote it 2025Y08M07D, or in XML or JSON. Impenetrabilty is, alas ... impenetrable.
> They would never have an excuse for being late until the twelfth of the month
Unless you use two-digit years, in which case you'll have to wait until 2032 Jan 13 for the first _really_ unambiguous date. But if you use a two-digit year, you deserve whatever happens to you.
> Mars which presumably has twice as many "months" as Earth and oddly twice as many moons too. ;)
Yes, I was thinking that the concept of a 'month' is a little odd for Mars. Since 'day' has been replaced by 'sol', 'month' might be replaced by... something. 'Marth', maybe. I'd go with sixteen marths, slightly longer than terrestrial months, with four per season. There are 668.6 sols per Martian year, so you'd have 41 or 42 sols per marth.
It's not something I expect to see used outside of science fiction, though, despite Elon Musk's stated desires.
It's a weird carry over from the English standard of June 8, 1958 format. Where the order is the same and makes a little more sense read aloud. For a digital representation yyyy-mm-dd makes the most sense, just most people aren't used to it as a convention. It should be now popularized though.
It irks me it isn't a windows localization option out of the box. Or Mac or Linux/gnome for that matter.
Yes, while DD-MM-YYYY is the standard format for most of the world I wonder if the peculiar Americanism stems from the old letter writing days when many of us would date them September 11th or whatever, maybe adding the year if it wasn't a transitory document. If you follow that into numbers as we needed dates in computer records you get MM-DD-YYYY.
Of course the real international standard is YYYY-MM-DD because computers 'think' that way but humans don't. Doh!
The number system is MSD to LSD
Pounds, (stones), ounces.
Hours, Minutes, seconds.
Degrees, minutes, seconds,
Yards, feet and inches.
Nothing odd about year, month, day.
Yes, it sorts better, but hardly unnatural and I don't think anyone uses year-day-month.
Also Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr etc only works for a minority.
While I'm at it, stop using flags to indicate language on Websites. Insulting to these and more:
Switzerland (4 languages)
Canada (more than 2)
Belgium
Austria
France
Spain (there are at least 3 languages widely spoken)
UK (four main languages)
Ireland (English, Irish, Polish, Chinese)
Malta (English, Maltese)
Brasil
And many in the USA speak Spanish.
National flags do not indicate a language.
It's '(stone), pound, ounce'... except 'stone' varies according to what you are weighing
For live cattle it's 14lb/st but only 8lb/st once slaughtered (the butcher keeps the offal, etc, delivering a carcase weighing stone-for stone)... for glass it's only 5lb per stone
It makes perfect sense. It's just the proper way to read a date. In a real conversation, if I'm talking about today, I would say August 7th. Month comes first. Now, YYYY-MM-DD isn't a terrible option, and works best on stuff if you're trying to put them in order, but again, month before day. The whole DD-MM-YYYY idea used elsewhere is just terrible.
But I would say 7th of August. It is just how you have grown up listening to how others say things.
When doing anything with dates on the computer it is always yyyymmdd.
Only a few days ago I was getting confused by 2 systems apparently showing 'different' dates. Was about to start investigating NTP config when I twigged one was using Satan's own US date format, while the other was set to a saner configuration.
It is at times like this I really appreciate working from home. If I was in the office I would probably have ended up having a chat with HR.
Ides of March?
If we were to re-adopt the Roman calender of nones, idea and Calends we could be certain the most of the left pond wouldn't have a clue what month it was let alone the day of the week.
The rest of use could memorise this ditty:
On March the 7th, May, July,
October too, the Nones you spy;
Except in these, those Nones appear
On the 5th day of all the year.
If to the NONE you add an 8
Of every IDE you'll find the date.
-- E. Cobham Brewer.
I like the poem, and I’d like to add to the confusion by pointing out that the Roman system counted dates backwards from the nones,ides, calends, and years were measured by rulers. Ie: the date was stated as - 3 days before the ides of April in the year of the Consulship of Maximilian and Octavius
Or similar (caution: date and Consuls may not match with your reality. Handle with care. May not survive translation into Latin)
That one is even worse than you imagine
If {Language == English}
then paper size == "Letter"
elseif {Language != English}
then paper size == "A4"
fi
It's hardcoded into the original postscript document definitions and everything derived from it (Which is a major pain in the arse when you're trying to manage printers)
No consideration to the vast majority of the English speaking world using A4 _AND_ chunks of the non-English speaking world using Letter - Particularly if you happen to be a Spanish-speaking USA territory such as Puerto Rico
The USA-unique focus of various "standards" is a fundamental problem that is unlikely to ever be fixed
Fun fact: the french had sent an envoy to the US to extoll the virtues of the metric system, I think he was even travelling with a sample meter and kilogram. However we (the fiendish British) captured the boat, and he never made it.
So we have no-one but ourselves to blame that our American cousins still count in scroats per furlong, or whatever it is.
On behalf of these United States, we apologize for inventing almost all the technology you use today (including PostScript and the computer it runs on). Please accept our deepest condolences for having ambiguity in dates, and feel free to establish an Important Commission to write a Letter Concerning the Matter. Meanwhile we'll be at work creating the next wave of technological progress.
Which technology?
The ARM processor that is in almost every smartphone, tablet, games console, IoT device, hard drive, smart TV and many other devices was designed by a small team in Cambridge let by trans women Sophie Wilson.
https://medium.com/a-computer-of-ones-own/sophie-wilson-architect-of-the-modern-world-5d538af7eac7
She has since moved on to work at Broadcom, but nobody is perfect.
Estimates are over 325 billion ARM CPUs have been produced as of September 2023. So likely well over 350 billion now.
>> On behalf of these United States, we apologize for inventing almost all the technology you use today
Nope. Both the abacus and the slide rule were invented before the USA existed. There's a difference between inventing and refining. Babbage was 2 centuries ago. Then there's adding machines (1600s, again before the USA existed). And the first programmable computer was by Konrad Zuse of Germany in 1938. And the Colossus, invented by the brits during ww2, to break code - the world's first programmable electronic digital computer.
Most of that comes from the software and hardware having been started and manufactured in the US in the beginning. Much like the English alphabet list several characters and had speeding changes rooted via German type setters for early printing presses.
Similar for many programming languages and syntax itself.
This post has been deleted by its author
Microsoft has offered separate English-US and English-International versions of Windows for more than a decade. The International version defaults to UK spelling, and I'm pretty sure also to sensible dates. If you don't want US spelling then don't install the US version.
I've disliked US date formats as long as I've been into computers (several decades) mostly in that dated doc makes don't sort....
I really prefer iso-8601 store date(time) or: yyyy-mm-dd where there is no confusion.
Or at least shouldn't be. Worked on one project where an early dev used yyyy-dd-mm for some weird reason and got stuck with it. Which isn't a standard of any kind anywhere.
"Worked on one project where an early dev used yyyy-dd-mm for some weird reason and got stuck with it" - ha, brilliant. I wonder what the total cost in lost man-hours was of that decision.
You've inspired me to try something like "ymyd-yd-my" and see how long I could get away with it.
Another unconscious bias that appears here in the US is that Microsoft assumes everyone lives in the Pacific timezone like they do. Windows 7 and earlier would ask you what timezone you lived in. Not anymore. Because Redmond is in the Pacific timezone, they assume you do as well.
Windows Server 20whatever does that as well
Going back to the main point, it obviously escaped there notice that in some parts of the world, ie between the tropics, the seasons beginning with an equinox don't really mean much at all, there being only two seasons: hot & wet, and hot & wetter.
Well, to be fair I did say some parts between the tropics, but generally, East Africa aside, it does get quite soggy in that zone. When we were still living in KL, some parts of the year I could guarantee that, picking my daughter up from school, we'd be wading across the road to get into our block, end of the school day so nicely coinciding with the afternoon cloudburst.
"Another unconscious bias that appears here in the US is that Microsoft assumes everyone lives in the Pacific timezone like they do"
That's not an unconscious bias. It's a deliberate software decision to implement that. At worst, it's deliberately uncaring, at best lazy, sloppy or ignorant
Everyone in the UK understands what an American means when they say 'Fall'. Some might pretend not to, but they're just being difficult.
I've read the origin being that it's when the leaves fall from the trees, but this always seemed a bit simplistic. To me the word is the opposite of Spring - after the year has grown and reached it's peak it declines, or falls, into it's death in Winter. To me there's a certain romanticism in the image that this idea paints.
Looking up the etymology of "autumn", it sadly doesn't solve the connotation of seasonal passing in the northern hemisphere.
Any terms from languages spoken around the equator we can compromise on? Originally, I mean, if such (still) exist. Not the ones imposed by later conquering or colonial powers.
To be fair it not just Microsoft - the entire US doesn't seem to know why seasons happen - maybe its a case of if the Earth is tilted at 23.5 degrees, why don't I fall over (more often).
A certain US SaaS system we use has finally shifted to using numbers for updates based on year.
Prior to this they confused EVERYONE because they had Winter and Summer releases.
Being based in the Northern Hemisphere , I had to ask so Winter 2024 is what? January or February or do you mean December? Same problem for the Southern Hemisphere with regards to Summer.
"I think you mean the programmers introduce new bugs, the people in India do customer service, and people get paid silly money for coming up with stupid names for things."
Also explains why the only half decent Windows versions are (version+2) ~ 0 (mod 3)
Win12 and Win15 ? Might be a long wait....
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2026
