6 ms·

>people from other countries might enter it backwards without thinking about it people from other countries might enter it correctly without thinking about it

seanp2k2 10y ago
English: let's have separate sizes for fasteners vs the rest of the world let's use a separate standard for every physical measurement let's write dates backward let's drive on the wrong side of the road Frankly I'm surprised that we didn't use big endian for x86.
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  Except it didn't happen like that. More like: "Let's pioneer this field." Later: "Sure there are international standards now, but we won't change how we do things because money."
  - pmontra 10y ago
    The pioneering arguments is correct in some fields. For example TV sets and computer/phone screens are still measured in inches all around the world. I'm in Italy and I think gas pipes in houses are still measured in inches [1] and some bicycle components come with metric and imperial sizes. The imperial ones are getting rare. On the other side engines are measured in cubic centimeters even in the USA. But the pioneering argument doesn't apply to everything. Every country or area inside countries had their own units of measurement for basic stuff like mass of things, weight of food, volume of cups, length of poles, exactly like every city had its own time before time zones. There is no pioneering in the size and weight of containers for wheat. It's stuff people have been doing since before writing. Basically every country standardized most units but the USA didn't. I think that having the larger economy in the world played a role in that. There are no incentives to adapt when the rest of the world will build a slightly different size of everything only for the US market. [1] Check this conversion table for gas pipes http://www.azzistudio.it/tavola.html http://www.azzistudio.it/tavola.html and notice the weird values for the metric sizes (millimeters). Nobody would build pipes with those diameters if they started metric centuries ago.
- Symbiote 10y ago
  I think you mean American, especially for the measurements, where American measurements are different even from the old British/Commonwealth system. A pint of beer or cider in Britain is 568mL, in the USA 473mL, but everything else in a British bar is sold in metric units. And today is "the third of April", 3/4/2016.
  - mjevans 10y ago
    Please always write your date fields with the correct number of leading zeros. You've also written it in "outer right hand side of a ledger" notation instead of the more correct ISO-8601 https://xkcd.com/1179/ https://xkcd.com/1179/ (ISO 8601)
    - Symbiote 10y ago
      I was describing how 99% of British people would write the date, particularly in handwriting. It's how I was taught to write it on schoolwork. Official forms in Britain (and most of Europe) use the leading zeros, DD/MM/YYYY, though the separator can be / - . or a mixture.
      - mjevans 10y ago
        It's less broken than the mixed insanity that is popular in America, and as I described, there is a functional situation in which the ordering might even be preferential. Never the less, the one true date format is ISO 8601, and it should be used everywhere there isn't a clear and over-riding reason to use another format.
  - germinalphrase 10y ago
    In conversation would you say "I'll be going home on April fourth" or "I'll be going home on the fourth of April"? From the Midwest, USA and I'd would always refer to the date in the first way (and subsequently, it is logical to write the date in month/day format). Still agree that day/month/year makes more sense.
    - 10y ago
- tjalfi 10y ago
  TL;DR x86 is little-endian for compatibility with the Datapoint 2200. From Stan Mazor's 1995 survey article "The History of the microcomputer - Invention and Evolution" from Proceedings of the IEEE, pp. 1601-1607, Dec. 1995, A. Little Endian Some have wondered why the addresses in the 8008 were stored "backward" with the little end first, e.g., the low order byte of a two byte address is stored in the lower addressed memory location. I (regrettably) specified this ordering as part of the JUMP instruction format in the spirit of compatibility with the Datapoint 2200. Recall that their original processor was bit serial; the addresses would be stored low to high bit in the machine code (bit backward). Other computer makers organize the addresses with the "big end" first. The lack of standardization has been a problem in the industry.

seanp2k2 10y ago

English: let's have separate sizes for fasteners vs the rest of the world let's use a separate standard for every physical measurement let's write dates backward let's drive on the wrong side of the road Frankly I'm surprised that we didn't use big endian for x86.

theandrewbailey 10y ago
Except it didn't happen like that. More like: "Let's pioneer this field." Later: "Sure there are international standards now, but we won't change how we do things because money."
- pmontra 10y ago
  The pioneering arguments is correct in some fields. For example TV sets and computer/phone screens are still measured in inches all around the world. I'm in Italy and I think gas pipes in houses are still measured in inches [1] and some bicycle components come with metric and imperial sizes. The imperial ones are getting rare. On the other side engines are measured in cubic centimeters even in the USA. But the pioneering argument doesn't apply to everything. Every country or area inside countries had their own units of measurement for basic stuff like mass of things, weight of food, volume of cups, length of poles, exactly like every city had its own time before time zones. There is no pioneering in the size and weight of containers for wheat. It's stuff people have been doing since before writing. Basically every country standardized most units but the USA didn't. I think that having the larger economy in the world played a role in that. There are no incentives to adapt when the rest of the world will build a slightly different size of everything only for the US market. [1] Check this conversion table for gas pipes http://www.azzistudio.it/tavola.html http://www.azzistudio.it/tavola.html and notice the weird values for the metric sizes (millimeters). Nobody would build pipes with those diameters if they started metric centuries ago.
Symbiote 10y ago
I think you mean American, especially for the measurements, where American measurements are different even from the old British/Commonwealth system. A pint of beer or cider in Britain is 568mL, in the USA 473mL, but everything else in a British bar is sold in metric units. And today is "the third of April", 3/4/2016.
- mjevans 10y ago
  Please always write your date fields with the correct number of leading zeros. You've also written it in "outer right hand side of a ledger" notation instead of the more correct ISO-8601 https://xkcd.com/1179/ https://xkcd.com/1179/ (ISO 8601)
  - Symbiote 10y ago
    I was describing how 99% of British people would write the date, particularly in handwriting. It's how I was taught to write it on schoolwork. Official forms in Britain (and most of Europe) use the leading zeros, DD/MM/YYYY, though the separator can be / - . or a mixture.
    - mjevans 10y ago
      It's less broken than the mixed insanity that is popular in America, and as I described, there is a functional situation in which the ordering might even be preferential. Never the less, the one true date format is ISO 8601, and it should be used everywhere there isn't a clear and over-riding reason to use another format.
- germinalphrase 10y ago
  In conversation would you say "I'll be going home on April fourth" or "I'll be going home on the fourth of April"? From the Midwest, USA and I'd would always refer to the date in the first way (and subsequently, it is logical to write the date in month/day format). Still agree that day/month/year makes more sense.
  - 10y ago
tjalfi 10y ago
TL;DR x86 is little-endian for compatibility with the Datapoint 2200. From Stan Mazor's 1995 survey article "The History of the microcomputer - Invention and Evolution" from Proceedings of the IEEE, pp. 1601-1607, Dec. 1995, A. Little Endian Some have wondered why the addresses in the 8008 were stored "backward" with the little end first, e.g., the low order byte of a two byte address is stored in the lower addressed memory location. I (regrettably) specified this ordering as part of the JUMP instruction format in the spirit of compatibility with the Datapoint 2200. Recall that their original processor was bit serial; the addresses would be stored low to high bit in the machine code (bit backward). Other computer makers organize the addresses with the "big end" first. The lack of standardization has been a problem in the industry.