The Next Three Days are the x86 Days

Pinky wrote in to note that "Today, tomorrow and the next day are the only days we'll get dates like this: 2/8/6 3/8/6 4/8/6 like the x86 computers :-)" And yes folks, in the August news cycle vortex, even this strikes my fancy. In recent years we've seen numerical giants like 3/1/4, 6/6/6 and 1/2/3, but now really, what do any of us have to look forward to? Is our future dull and meaningless without cool numbers in dates? Oh the humanity of it all ...

ISO 8601 Please!

[Optic]

Abolish weird date formats!

What about yesterday?

[bcat24]

The 80186 was also an Intel processor, wasn't it?

Re:Psht!

[octaene]

http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime [w3.org]

Concur.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[middlemen]

just curious...how many places do it d/m/y vs. m/d/y. I'd never seen the d/m/y thing till a couple of years ago....
Most places follow dd/mm/yy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DD-MM-YY>. Only places with USA influence follow the mm/dd/yy format. India for example uses dd/mm/yy. And yes, if you did not know this until a couple of years ago, i am shocked. In India, they taught us this when we were kids in school.

Re:What about yesterday?

[gatkinso]

It still is, and is still popular with the embedded crowd.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[yfkar]

Dd/mm/yy seems to be far more common than mm/dd/yy.

Here's a list [wikipedia.org] of used date formats in various countries. Looks like Canada has them all. ;)

m/d/y (month, day, year) is used by:

* Canada (Although most official documents use the y-m-d format, the m/d/y format is also understood due to influences from the United States.)
* Federated States of Micronesia
* Palau
* Philippines (formerly d/m/y. May still be found in certain contexts)
* United States (Although Independence Day is often referred to as "the Fourth of July.")

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[rastan_saga]

Australia / New Zealand uses dd/mm/yy. Always got me, why America and other countries use mm/dd/yy. Why do you need to know the month first everytime you look at the date. Isn't the day of the month the most important thing you look at first, so it's written to the left first. Just seems logical, the day / month / then the year. It's in order :)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[amliebsch]

That's what the military and most "with it" government organization use. I've also adopted myself because (a) it is completely unambiguous and (b) I'm an asshole.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[sholden]

Every place that speaks English does too, except the USA (and a handful of Pacific nations who caught it from the US).

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[stunt_penguin]

Yea, in the UK and Ireland we use dd/mm/yyyy ; we say 'The twenty-ninth of july two-thousand and six' more than we say something like 'July twenty-ninth two thousand and six (unless we're talking along to the Daily Show intro.

Apart from that, doing it dd/mm/yy make logical sense, as the values are ordered in order of significance/magnitude like a numerical system (albeit in reverse order).

Also it makes ordering dates in a list via computer easy, as they'll naturally order themselves chronologically in a list if the list is sorted alphanumerically.

Crazy Americans ;)

Re:SORRY!

[karot]

I look at it differently again, so perhaps we have to agree to disagree...

2006/8/2 is I agree then "best" way to represent a date - The majority of human-use number systems put the least-significant information to the right hand side. This has the bonus that sorting on a computer (mechanical or electrical) is simplified. Systems that include this are HH:MM:SS and good 'ol decimal numbering Hundreds-Tens-Units.

An alternative in the LSB/MSB world is 2/8/2006 - Computers can be (and are) architected to deal with this type of reversal. Humans can deal with the LSB being at the left hand end of the information. This is still "useful" as processing left-to-right and right-to-left are not really that different. I consider this to be "next best" as it retains a certain amount of logic.

The final option is to ignore whether your data has an order or significance, and just jumble it up. How is MM/DD/YYYY differnt to YYYY/DD/MM ? Would you consider YYYY/DD/MM valid or useful? I am afraid that I personally would not, and but the same token consider MM/DD/YYYY to be not-useful. Perhaps we should just switch to MM/YYYY/DD for fun? :)

I would be seriously interested to know where/why the different system in the USA originated, and by what measure you determine the USA system to be next-best and the European system to be "Fucked up"

Re:Sortable Dates

[ros0709]

The US did once use the dd/mm/yy form. This is still evident in "4th of July".