Bug of the Day
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Neither imperial nor metrics system makes sense. Check the very basic physics for this ;)
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I'm trying to set a value to the maximum smalldatetime allowed in SQL, yet what's appearing is "6 June 1979". Nothing I do seems to work: ensuring Culture is OK, ensuring I'm passing dates around in a sensible format, ensuring the data I'm setting is the actual date I'm setting. In the debugger I see
_datewith a value of "6/06/2079 12:00:00 AM" (see rant below). The date is fine. I pass this into a formatter to turn it into "dd-MMM-yy" format. That works perfectly and the output is correct. This string goes to the user, they hit submit, it comes back and is parsed fine. Everything works perfectly. Except the date always comes back as 1979. ARGH. And then I spot it. 15 years too late I've been hit by the Y2K bug. 6/06/2079 12:00:00 AM is 6 Jun 2079 -> "6-Jun-79" which is parsed as 6-Jun-1979. /more coffee, then better formatting. As a side note: The American date format (mm/dd/yyyy) is painfully and dangerously ambiguous so given that OS installs are often set with US as the region, surely debuggers should display dates and times as dd-MMM-yyyy or even better, yyyy-mm-dd to account for the Rest Of The World who wants to scream everytime they get an email saying "the date is 4/7/2015".cheers Chris Maunder
Grew up with the imperial system, in grade 7 or so when metric was introduced, so I've used both. For dates? I write out the date, as in July 22, 2015 - no ambiguity. This is probably the format that gave rise to mm/dd/yy.
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I lived through the transition from the imperial system to the metric system in South Africa so I do have some experience in both systems. As far as I am concerned there is no choice: Metric is head and shoulders better than imperial! I also experienced the transition of the monetary system from pounds/shillings/pence to the current metric equivalent in SA and the UK. In SA the transition was overnight. Pounds were withdrawn from circulation in a matter of days. In the UK it took months as they chose to run a dual system for months. Very painful! Nobody will ever convince me that imperial is better!
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need, when their violent passions are spent? - The Lost Horizon
Cornelius Henning wrote:
I lived through the transition from the imperial system to the metric system in South Africa so I do have some experience in both systems. As far as I am concerned there is no choice: Metric is head and shoulders better than imperial!
I likewise lived through the transition in Canada, and agree that metric is better than Imperial or US. One exception though: the country was surveyed in chains, yards, feet and inches, and changing "travelling" distances to metric was a bad idea. Anything that was in round numbers when surveyed, bought or sold is now in fractional units (meters, hectares, ...) and this is nothing less than a mess.
I'm retired. There's a nap for that... - Harvey
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Neither imperial nor metrics system makes sense. Check the very basic physics for this ;)
0x01AA wrote:
Check the very basic physics for this
Yup. We should measure speeds in fractions of the speed of light, time as a multiple of a basic physical frequency, and distance at the distance travelled by light in a time unit. Come to think of it, that's how the meter and second are defined!
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack. --Winston Churchill
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How does the metric system make more sense? It's no less arbitrary and the assumption that people will find the arithmetic less difficult is highly doubtful (shortly after we decimalised currency in the UK I was delayed by several minutes in a shop because the assistant needed to fetch a calculator to work out a 10% discount!) The imperial weights fit particularly well with the quantities of things that people might want to buy - I know exactly what I'm getting in a quarter of mushrooms, an ounce of yeast or a pound of mince and so that's what I continue to ask for despite the EU's attempts to homogenise us all with baffling amounts. Long live the pound, the pint and the mile, I say. And to return the date. It is of course the departure from the Imperial norm made by Americans (when and why I have yet to discover) that causes all the problems. Who else could come up with a system that takes a unit from its rightful place in between the lower and the higher and sticks it at the front? You don't do mm:hh:ss so why MM:dd:yy Bewildering!
I think the reason it was done is plain - Americans (and some others) tend to say When speaking it is rare to include the Year It is sensible to speak the largest part first So - June 5th narrows down the target as it is spoken - ideal! So Yanks take that as 6/5 Then slam the date on the wrong end because it seems less important to them. Idiotic - but then so is belief that the constitution means you can own an arsenal many a small country would be proud to own...
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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As far as date is concerned, I prefer the "July 22, 2015" format. There is no room for ambiguity. However, when it comes to Imperial v. Metric. I am strictly in the Metric for science, Imperial for every day use camp. For instance, I have an intuition for how far a mile is, or how much a 50lb bag of sand weighs, but I have no clue how far a kilometer is or how much a 50kg bag of sand might weigh. Yes, I know what the conversion factors are, but I have to think about it, then convert to Imperial, just so I can be in the right ballpark. You could say, "Oh, well to Hell with current adults, we should do it for the children." But that creates a problem, because then you have two generations, who are in close proximity (parent/child relationships), using two different systems, and if the Common Core Math standards have taught us anything, it's that parents get really pissed when they're too stubborn and/or stupid to learn how to do their children's math homework.
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
it's a narrowing thing. It is (in principal) better to start with the biggest entity and narrow it down, than to start with an arbitrary portion. Like with addresses (which are almost universally written in exactly the opposite way) England > West Midlands > Sutton Coldfield > Four Oaks > Kenilworth Close > 2 2015 > July > 22nd The only reason for using July 22nd, 1988 would be if generally the dates you are looking at are for the same year, and so the year portion is of less import. So it depends on the use -case
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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I'm trying to set a value to the maximum smalldatetime allowed in SQL, yet what's appearing is "6 June 1979". Nothing I do seems to work: ensuring Culture is OK, ensuring I'm passing dates around in a sensible format, ensuring the data I'm setting is the actual date I'm setting. In the debugger I see
_datewith a value of "6/06/2079 12:00:00 AM" (see rant below). The date is fine. I pass this into a formatter to turn it into "dd-MMM-yy" format. That works perfectly and the output is correct. This string goes to the user, they hit submit, it comes back and is parsed fine. Everything works perfectly. Except the date always comes back as 1979. ARGH. And then I spot it. 15 years too late I've been hit by the Y2K bug. 6/06/2079 12:00:00 AM is 6 Jun 2079 -> "6-Jun-79" which is parsed as 6-Jun-1979. /more coffee, then better formatting. As a side note: The American date format (mm/dd/yyyy) is painfully and dangerously ambiguous so given that OS installs are often set with US as the region, surely debuggers should display dates and times as dd-MMM-yyyy or even better, yyyy-mm-dd to account for the Rest Of The World who wants to scream everytime they get an email saying "the date is 4/7/2015".cheers Chris Maunder
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How does the metric system make more sense? It's no less arbitrary and the assumption that people will find the arithmetic less difficult is highly doubtful (shortly after we decimalised currency in the UK I was delayed by several minutes in a shop because the assistant needed to fetch a calculator to work out a 10% discount!) The imperial weights fit particularly well with the quantities of things that people might want to buy - I know exactly what I'm getting in a quarter of mushrooms, an ounce of yeast or a pound of mince and so that's what I continue to ask for despite the EU's attempts to homogenise us all with baffling amounts. Long live the pound, the pint and the mile, I say. And to return the date. It is of course the departure from the Imperial norm made by Americans (when and why I have yet to discover) that causes all the problems. Who else could come up with a system that takes a unit from its rightful place in between the lower and the higher and sticks it at the front? You don't do mm:hh:ss so why MM:dd:yy Bewildering!
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I'm trying to set a value to the maximum smalldatetime allowed in SQL, yet what's appearing is "6 June 1979". Nothing I do seems to work: ensuring Culture is OK, ensuring I'm passing dates around in a sensible format, ensuring the data I'm setting is the actual date I'm setting. In the debugger I see
_datewith a value of "6/06/2079 12:00:00 AM" (see rant below). The date is fine. I pass this into a formatter to turn it into "dd-MMM-yy" format. That works perfectly and the output is correct. This string goes to the user, they hit submit, it comes back and is parsed fine. Everything works perfectly. Except the date always comes back as 1979. ARGH. And then I spot it. 15 years too late I've been hit by the Y2K bug. 6/06/2079 12:00:00 AM is 6 Jun 2079 -> "6-Jun-79" which is parsed as 6-Jun-1979. /more coffee, then better formatting. As a side note: The American date format (mm/dd/yyyy) is painfully and dangerously ambiguous so given that OS installs are often set with US as the region, surely debuggers should display dates and times as dd-MMM-yyyy or even better, yyyy-mm-dd to account for the Rest Of The World who wants to scream everytime they get an email saying "the date is 4/7/2015".cheers Chris Maunder
Sure, blame it on the Americans. ;)
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The American date format of MM/DD/YYYY is simply idiotic, as is our ridiculous clinging to Imperial measurements, when the metric system makes so much more sense. Why? I believe we Americans are just too lazy to adapt to a new system, despite the fact that it just makes sense to do so! OK, I have my coat and am long gone! ;P
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need, when their violent passions are spent? - The Lost Horizon
Now I prefer YYYYMMDD because it's great for easy sorting of things, even as text. But as for the metric system being better? Nonsense. The US system is far more savvy with the modern way of doing things. Start with an OUNCE. 2^2 Ounces is a Gil 2^3 Ounces is a Cup 2^4 Ounces is a Pint 2^5 Ounces is a Quart 2^7 Ounces is a Gallon. Quarts can also, by powers of 2, be expanded to bushels and pecks. So - obviously - the US system of measurements is perfect for the computer age. Clean, efficient, and fast (one can even use shift operators - try that with metric). No roundoff errors. No approximations.
PERFECTION
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
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As far as date is concerned, I prefer the "July 22, 2015" format. There is no room for ambiguity. However, when it comes to Imperial v. Metric. I am strictly in the Metric for science, Imperial for every day use camp. For instance, I have an intuition for how far a mile is, or how much a 50lb bag of sand weighs, but I have no clue how far a kilometer is or how much a 50kg bag of sand might weigh. Yes, I know what the conversion factors are, but I have to think about it, then convert to Imperial, just so I can be in the right ballpark. You could say, "Oh, well to Hell with current adults, we should do it for the children." But that creates a problem, because then you have two generations, who are in close proximity (parent/child relationships), using two different systems, and if the Common Core Math standards have taught us anything, it's that parents get really pissed when they're too stubborn and/or stupid to learn how to do their children's math homework.
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
Colin Mullikin wrote:
For instance, I have an intuition for how far a mile is, or how much a 50lb bag of sand weighs, but I have no clue how far a kilometer is or how much a 50kg bag of sand might weigh.
Only because you've been brought up using the Imperial scale. I was born decades after India went metric and I have no idea how "long" a mile is or how much 5 lb "weighs".
Cheers, विक्रम "We have already been through this, I am not going to repeat myself." - fat_boy, in a global warming thread :doh:
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I lived through the transition from the imperial system to the metric system in South Africa so I do have some experience in both systems. As far as I am concerned there is no choice: Metric is head and shoulders better than imperial! I also experienced the transition of the monetary system from pounds/shillings/pence to the current metric equivalent in SA and the UK. In SA the transition was overnight. Pounds were withdrawn from circulation in a matter of days. In the UK it took months as they chose to run a dual system for months. Very painful! Nobody will ever convince me that imperial is better!
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need, when their violent passions are spent? - The Lost Horizon
In the UK, pounds were not withdrawn. A pre-decimal pound and a post-decimal pound were the same. Only the sub units were changed from good mini radix numbers or 20 and 12 to very poor calculation number 100. Even now, the UK is consistent - a pound is a measure of money and a measure of weight. What could be simpler than using the same unit name for multiple types of unit? But, you could buy a lot more with a pre-decimal £1 than you can buy now.
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I'm trying to set a value to the maximum smalldatetime allowed in SQL, yet what's appearing is "6 June 1979". Nothing I do seems to work: ensuring Culture is OK, ensuring I'm passing dates around in a sensible format, ensuring the data I'm setting is the actual date I'm setting. In the debugger I see
_datewith a value of "6/06/2079 12:00:00 AM" (see rant below). The date is fine. I pass this into a formatter to turn it into "dd-MMM-yy" format. That works perfectly and the output is correct. This string goes to the user, they hit submit, it comes back and is parsed fine. Everything works perfectly. Except the date always comes back as 1979. ARGH. And then I spot it. 15 years too late I've been hit by the Y2K bug. 6/06/2079 12:00:00 AM is 6 Jun 2079 -> "6-Jun-79" which is parsed as 6-Jun-1979. /more coffee, then better formatting. As a side note: The American date format (mm/dd/yyyy) is painfully and dangerously ambiguous so given that OS installs are often set with US as the region, surely debuggers should display dates and times as dd-MMM-yyyy or even better, yyyy-mm-dd to account for the Rest Of The World who wants to scream everytime they get an email saying "the date is 4/7/2015".cheers Chris Maunder
Depending on your SQL version - check your 2 digit year cutoff option: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189577(v=sql.105).aspx[^] As for internationalization of date formats - we've been using dd-Mmm-yyyy for years, but much of our industry is going to the ISO-8601 standard yyyy-mm-yy. (even our sales/support people use "ISO-8601" in conversation now.) I know this was supposed to be a rant thread, but I get worked up about date formats.
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I think the reason it was done is plain - Americans (and some others) tend to say When speaking it is rare to include the Year It is sensible to speak the largest part first So - June 5th narrows down the target as it is spoken - ideal! So Yanks take that as 6/5 Then slam the date on the wrong end because it seems less important to them. Idiotic - but then so is belief that the constitution means you can own an arsenal many a small country would be proud to own...
PooperPig - Coming Soon
But .. but ... when you ask someone the date they usually just give you the day, assuming that you're not so divorced from temporal reality that you can't pinpoint the month for yourself. And in formal situations such as a legal document you'd have to say 'this third day of September in the year of our Lord 1784' because 'September, this third day of' etc. just doesn't make sense. And surely it's legal usage that sets the template for such things not the informal?
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But .. but ... when you ask someone the date they usually just give you the day, assuming that you're not so divorced from temporal reality that you can't pinpoint the month for yourself. And in formal situations such as a legal document you'd have to say 'this third day of September in the year of our Lord 1784' because 'September, this third day of' etc. just doesn't make sense. And surely it's legal usage that sets the template for such things not the informal?
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How does the metric system make more sense? It's no less arbitrary and the assumption that people will find the arithmetic less difficult is highly doubtful (shortly after we decimalised currency in the UK I was delayed by several minutes in a shop because the assistant needed to fetch a calculator to work out a 10% discount!) The imperial weights fit particularly well with the quantities of things that people might want to buy - I know exactly what I'm getting in a quarter of mushrooms, an ounce of yeast or a pound of mince and so that's what I continue to ask for despite the EU's attempts to homogenise us all with baffling amounts. Long live the pound, the pint and the mile, I say. And to return the date. It is of course the departure from the Imperial norm made by Americans (when and why I have yet to discover) that causes all the problems. Who else could come up with a system that takes a unit from its rightful place in between the lower and the higher and sticks it at the front? You don't do mm:hh:ss so why MM:dd:yy Bewildering!
Look at SI Units: the metric system makes more sense simply because things equate to one another properly, and everything matches up. Imperial units just don't work that way: when you're trying to do anything with mechanical engineering involving equations, the calculations fail because the results are numbers which don't match the measurements they're supposed to be expressed in. When American engineers want to build complex systems, they have to measure everything in imperial units, convert to SI units, do the work, then convert everything back to imperial units again in order to build whatever it is they're going to build. I choose to believe that this is why American car engines need four litres of displacement to produce less power than European or Japanese engines half the size can generate.
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Look at SI Units: the metric system makes more sense simply because things equate to one another properly, and everything matches up. Imperial units just don't work that way: when you're trying to do anything with mechanical engineering involving equations, the calculations fail because the results are numbers which don't match the measurements they're supposed to be expressed in. When American engineers want to build complex systems, they have to measure everything in imperial units, convert to SI units, do the work, then convert everything back to imperial units again in order to build whatever it is they're going to build. I choose to believe that this is why American car engines need four litres of displacement to produce less power than European or Japanese engines half the size can generate.
I find it very difficult to believe that that's what any engineer does in reality but then this is the weirdest pro point I've ever come across. The equations that were created using SI units don't work with Imperial measurements? Gee, how did they ever do science before SI units then. Oh ... right ... they used equations that were created using Imperial units. The fundamental physical relationships don't change because you change the units that you measure values in, and in most cases there isn't even any need to modify the equation; s = d/t and F = ma whether you measure in metres, feet or cubits, kilograms, pounds or (idealised) chihuahuas!
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How does the metric system make more sense? It's no less arbitrary and the assumption that people will find the arithmetic less difficult is highly doubtful (shortly after we decimalised currency in the UK I was delayed by several minutes in a shop because the assistant needed to fetch a calculator to work out a 10% discount!) The imperial weights fit particularly well with the quantities of things that people might want to buy - I know exactly what I'm getting in a quarter of mushrooms, an ounce of yeast or a pound of mince and so that's what I continue to ask for despite the EU's attempts to homogenise us all with baffling amounts. Long live the pound, the pint and the mile, I say. And to return the date. It is of course the departure from the Imperial norm made by Americans (when and why I have yet to discover) that causes all the problems. Who else could come up with a system that takes a unit from its rightful place in between the lower and the higher and sticks it at the front? You don't do mm:hh:ss so why MM:dd:yy Bewildering!
Why do Americans call it the 'Fourth of July' and write 07/04/2015? So much simpler if we all used the ISO 2015-07-04. I work with financial data that often can't be directly copied and pasted from web sites and PDF documents into other programs. I thought that was going to be fixed in the Windows 3.1 upgrade.
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I find it very difficult to believe that that's what any engineer does in reality but then this is the weirdest pro point I've ever come across. The equations that were created using SI units don't work with Imperial measurements? Gee, how did they ever do science before SI units then. Oh ... right ... they used equations that were created using Imperial units. The fundamental physical relationships don't change because you change the units that you measure values in, and in most cases there isn't even any need to modify the equation; s = d/t and F = ma whether you measure in metres, feet or cubits, kilograms, pounds or (idealised) chihuahuas!
Wrong. There's a concept of coherence in systems of measurement: as described here[^]. Before this, doing science was significantly harder. The imperial system is NOT a coherent system of measurement, and thus calculations don't work. So, as I said before, you have to convert everything into SI units, do the calculation and then convert it all back again afterwards, otherwise you're forever trying to figure out how many of each unit of whatever measurement you started with end up figuring into whatever units you want to end up with.
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Wrong. There's a concept of coherence in systems of measurement: as described here[^]. Before this, doing science was significantly harder. The imperial system is NOT a coherent system of measurement, and thus calculations don't work. So, as I said before, you have to convert everything into SI units, do the calculation and then convert it all back again afterwards, otherwise you're forever trying to figure out how many of each unit of whatever measurement you started with end up figuring into whatever units you want to end up with.
No. The arithmetic was more difficult. The science was completely unaffected. Almost all the significant engineering formulae were discovered before the metric system was even a glint in someone's eye and more than a few even predate the Imperial system. Ultimately the mathematics of science is always shoehorned into the measurement system of the day which is always arbitrary. There is no such thing as a coherent measurement system whatever way you cut it. There is no more logic to making your measuring stick the length of a fraction of the Earth's circumference (which in itself is an idealised length) than the average length of a male adult's foot. Simply because you have a name for a derived unit such as the newton doesn't change the fact that it is a derived (and arbitrary!) unit. There is no more coherence to the concept it disguises, it is a measure of mass multiplied by acceleration. 1N = 1m/s^2 is no more nor less consistent and coherent than 1 Tortoise Pull = 0.0013 dog tails per eyeblink ^2. The only difference is the speed of calculation (measured in camel heartbeats, obviously)! Anyone who thinks that SI units are any less arbitrary than any other measuring sytem or fit more closely the natural spans of the Universe and the laws of physics they clearly haven't taken a look at the definition of those units recently (the second is a doozie!). The SI system is a convenience for scientists. It no more reflects the real world and how it's put together than the scribblings of a madman!