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'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication

theguardian.com

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Re: 'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication

#41

Post by mrob »

ben_w wrote: post #32
walrus01 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada isn't much better re: feet, miles. Things are officially metric, but because of proximity to the US and inertia, half of everything is still standard. Buying construction supplies and consumables? All in US units. People talk about square footage of condos, buy carpet in square feet, all fasteners are in US units. But gasoline is sold by the liter. People know how tall they are in feet and inches, not cm. Ever…

Interesting. UK is also weird: food is weighed in metric units, people in imperial; Drinks bought in supermarkets are measured in metric, pubs use imperial (by law in both cases, IIRC); Distances on signs can be meters or miles, both initialised as “m” (context being the only clue); fuel is sold by the litre, fuel efficiency is miles per gallon.

Beer and cider is sold in pubs in imperial pints (bigger than US pints), but wines and spirits are sold in milliliters.

See https://www.gov.uk/weights-measures-and-packaging-the-law

Re: 'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication

#42

Post by bsder »

jerf wrote: post #8
yoz-y wrote: post #2

How pervasive is the Japanese calendar in computing actually? I suppose most programs calculate all dates internally using UNIX timestamps or UTC and only convert that to Japanese dates for display purposes. Anybody has any experience with this?

I don't think that's the problem; I think that's the one thing that's not a problem. Monotonic time is not that hard. The hardest thing about it is just convincing programmers to use it, and making sure your libraries use it properly. I don't want to say it's trivial, but it's not that hard once both you and your code base internalize "convert everything to internal UTC representation as quickly as possible, convert…

> I don't want to say it's trivial, but it's not that hard once both you and your code base internalize "convert everything to internal UTC representation as quickly as possible, convert to local time as late as possible on the way out".

It's really not that easy. Recurrences and durations are the killers.

When you schedule that meeting for 4:00PM every Tuesday, what happens when daylight savings time kicks in?

Re: 'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication

#43

Post by oftenwrong »

jerf wrote: post #8
yoz-y wrote: post #2

How pervasive is the Japanese calendar in computing actually? I suppose most programs calculate all dates internally using UNIX timestamps or UTC and only convert that to Japanese dates for display purposes. Anybody has any experience with this?

I don't think that's the problem; I think that's the one thing that's not a problem. Monotonic time is not that hard. The hardest thing about it is just convincing programmers to use it, and making sure your libraries use it properly. I don't want to say it's trivial, but it's not that hard once both you and your code base internalize "convert everything to internal UTC representation as quickly as possible, convert…

>"convert everything to internal UTC representation as quickly as possible, convert to local time as late as possible on the way out".

That's not a good approach to use for future events.

Re: 'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication

#44

Post by ben_w »

mrob wrote: post #41
ben_w wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. UK is also weird: food is weighed in metric units, people in imperial; Drinks bought in supermarkets are measured in metric, pubs use imperial (by law in both cases, IIRC); Distances on signs can be meters or miles, both initialised as “m” (context being the only clue); fuel is sold by the litre, fuel efficiency is miles per gallon.

Beer and cider is sold in pubs in imperial pints (bigger than US pints), but wines and spirits are sold in milliliters. See https://www.gov.uk/weights-measures-and-packaging-the-law

Good point, I’d forgotten wine and beer were different. I wonder what further examples of mixed up units the UK has?

Re: 'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication

#45

Post by hfdgiutdryg »

It's seems silly to compare it to the y2k problem, aside from the bit at the end of the article:

Many older computers, with aspects dating back to before the end of the Shōwa era in 1989, have never been updated to reflect the new era, and still think the year is Shōwa 93. That means Japan could face another mini Y2K problem in 2025, as those systems attempt to tick over to a three digit Shōwa year they can’t cope with.

The real problem with y2k was the amount of compiled code depending on two-digit years. All those conditionals looked exactly like any other integer comparison.

Re: 'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication

#46

Post by NeedMoreTea »

ben_w wrote: post #44
mrob wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beer and cider is sold in pubs in imperial pints (bigger than US pints), but wines and spirits are sold in milliliters. See https://www.gov.uk/weights-measures-and-packaging-the-law

Good point, I’d forgotten wine and beer were different. I wonder what further examples of mixed up units the UK has?

Well there is a tendency to still use Fahrenheit during summer like "it's in the 80s", and "it's in the 90s" this month, but most use Celcius for winters when it gets below freezing. There must be a grey area in the 50s and 60s F. Both approaches often seen in headlines. :)

Re: 'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication

#47

Post by athenot »

jerf wrote: post #8
yoz-y wrote: post #2

How pervasive is the Japanese calendar in computing actually? I suppose most programs calculate all dates internally using UNIX timestamps or UTC and only convert that to Japanese dates for display purposes. Anybody has any experience with this?

I don't think that's the problem; I think that's the one thing that's not a problem. Monotonic time is not that hard. The hardest thing about it is just convincing programmers to use it, and making sure your libraries use it properly. I don't want to say it's trivial, but it's not that hard once both you and your code base internalize "convert everything to internal UTC representation as quickly as possible, convert…

UTC is good but not enough; it may still bite you in the behind.

What's the time difference between these 2 timestamps:

    2016-12-31 23:59:50 UTC    (unix time 1483232390)
    2017-01-01 00:00:10 UTC    (unix time 1483232410)
That's right: 21 seconds, due to the added leap second 23:59:60.

So then your next option is to use TAI (international atomic time). Of course for most applications, this extra/missing leap second doesn't matter.

And that's the crux of the issue. Given a level of abstraction, we're comfortable with a sufficient level of accuracy because it's the most convenient for 99% of the use cases. It takes a widely adopted tooling to bump the abstraction to a more accurate representation. In UNIX land, going from YYYYMMDDHHMMSS to a number of seconds has been a huge improvement. It's comfortable to use because all environments have the tooling to go back and forth from seconds to human-readable dates.

Try to use TAI and you start feeling a lot more lonely (ever tried to read logs timestamped in TAI? fun!) Most OS and server processes are used with the tradeoff that it's not a big deal if we have 2 events spaced a second apart and both timestamped the same (1483232399), since it's not that frequent.

Re: 'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication

#48

Post by innocenat »

amyjess wrote: post #22
Isamu wrote: post #21

How are the eras named? This will be the end of the Heisei era. I grew up in the Showa era (apparently.)

The Japanese emperor picks a regnal name when he takes the throne, just like the Pope. The name is actually the name of the emperor, not the name of the era. In Japan, nobody uses the emperor's birth name; they just use the regnal name. For example, nobody in Japan says "Hirohito"; they refer to him as "Emperor Showa" instead (though nobody calls Akihito "Emperor Heisei" now, because it's considered rude to refer to…

This seems to be common misconception. Akihito is NOT "Emperor Heisei" now. The name is always given posthumously (though it is yet to be seen for Akihito if he will be named immediately after abdication or also posthumously.

It is severely rude simply because it implies that said person is already dead.

Re: 'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication

#49

Post by darkerside »

hfdgiutdryg wrote: post #45

It's seems silly to compare it to the y2k problem, aside from the bit at the end of the article: Many older computers, with aspects dating back to before the end of the Shōwa era in 1989, have never been updated to reflect the new era, and still think the year is Shōwa 93. That means Japan could face another mini Y2K problem in 2025, as those systems attempt to tick over to a three digit Shōwa year they can’t cope wi…

It's much like Y2K if you think of the emperor as a digit in a unique numbering system (empero-decimal?)

Re: 'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication

#50

Post by blattimwind »

rspeer wrote: post #24
amyjess wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Japanese emperor picks a regnal name when he takes the throne, just like the Pope. The name is actually the name of the emperor, not the name of the era. In Japan, nobody uses the emperor's birth name; they just use the regnal name. For example, nobody in Japan says "Hirohito"; they refer to him as "Emperor Showa" instead (though nobody calls Akihito "Emperor Heisei" now, because it's considered rude to refer to…

Is it generally true that, if the Emperor has to refer to himself by name, he'll use his birth name? The one case I've seen that seems this way is that the first author of this paper on fish genetics [1] is listed as "Akihito". [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26475939

"The Imperial Residence, 1-1 Chiyoda, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100-0001, Japan."

Is his phone number 001-0000-0001?

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