Bug of the Day
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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!
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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!
I think you've just made my point for me with the phrases "the arithmetic was more difficult" and "The SI system is a convenience for scientists." Look at how SI units interlock, and how you can perform one calculation after another, from unit to unit, and it all maintains coherence. The Imperial system can't do that.
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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?
Member 9082365 wrote:
And surely it's legal usage that sets the template for such things not the informal?
I don't think so! I think this is an example of evolution in the same way that changing spellings and pronunciations are. Nobody sat down and thought "Hmm -= what format should we use for dates?" If they had we'd have been using a decimal calendar !
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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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.
Don't know what type of engineering you are referring to but I work in Structural Engineering in the US and nothing gets converted to SI and back. That said, I would much prefer using the metric system.
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I think you've just made my point for me with the phrases "the arithmetic was more difficult" and "The SI system is a convenience for scientists." Look at how SI units interlock, and how you can perform one calculation after another, from unit to unit, and it all maintains coherence. The Imperial system can't do that.
Yes, it can, and did so very successfully for centuries. It would simply need updating with a few additional units to cope perfectly adequately with modern scientific calculations. There are, indeed, many international conventions which still use Imperial such as feet for aircraft heights, knots for boat speeds, and fathoms for water depth. I certainly don't expect the death of horsepower any time soon. And as someone else pointed out backing the metric system has proved to be a complete misstep with the arrival of computers as base 10 is the absolute worst for computer calculations with just two factors (2 and 5) making it all but impossible to express part units accurately in binary code. In the digital age decimal units are the dinosaurs.
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Member 9082365 wrote:
And surely it's legal usage that sets the template for such things not the informal?
I don't think so! I think this is an example of evolution in the same way that changing spellings and pronunciations are. Nobody sat down and thought "Hmm -= what format should we use for dates?" If they had we'd have been using a decimal calendar !
PooperPig - Coming Soon
Well obviously somebody did sit down and think what format should the USA use for dates at some point or there wouldn't be agreement on the standard form used in business etc. (especially so as the format is different to the one that European settlers would have brought with them). It may be lost to us now but somewhere at some time there was a declaration made enshrining the 'new' format.
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Well obviously somebody did sit down and think what format should the USA use for dates at some point or there wouldn't be agreement on the standard form used in business etc. (especially so as the format is different to the one that European settlers would have brought with them). It may be lost to us now but somewhere at some time there was a declaration made enshrining the 'new' format.
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Don't know what type of engineering you are referring to but I work in Structural Engineering in the US and nothing gets converted to SI and back. That said, I would much prefer using the metric system.
This would be mechanical engineering for things like cars, planes, etc. If you start doing fuel/mass/acceleration/... calculations, you'll be wanting SI units for sure.