Re: New Sky+ HD EPG software "imminent"


"Bob Lucas" <bob@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:gmvi8n$rcl$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

An American would interpret 01/02/2009 as 2nd January 2009, and
01/03/2009 as 3rd January 2009. However, most viewers will understand
that in this country, 01/02/2009 represents 1st February 2009 - and
01/03/2009 represents 1st March 2009. Consequently, a change to Feb or Mar
is unnecessary.

I've never understood the US way. The logical way would be to have year,
month, day, hours, minutes, seconds. That's the way we write decimal numbers
(largest unit to the left). The UK date part is just backwards - day, month
year, which kind of makes sense as you in terms of dates, the day is
probably more important than the month or year in most situations. But the
US way - month, day, year - why? It would be like having a time of
minutes:seconds:hours.

It's not a necesity, no, but it's about clear human readable data. Mentally,
do you conider the month of July, for example, to be "Seven" in your head,
or do you consider it to be July? I'd imagine most people would consider it
to be the latter, and therefore have to convert the number to a month in
their head. Displaying months as numbers on a computer has nearly always
been due to convenience as they're stored as numbers internally, not names,
and lazy programming. As such that's why we're all so used to seeing months
as numbers. Before computers became common, we never used numbers for
months.

How would you feel if the day was also stored as a number? Today's date
(Thursday 12th February 2009) might become 4/12/2/2009. I personally thing
that looks horrid. Whereas even an abbreviated text version (Thu 12 Feb
2009) looks much better to me. On the other hand, I would also agree that
it's perhaps more compact to have Thu 12/02/2009, so on an EPG where I'd
rather use the space for something else, it's probably better like that, and
as I said above, we're probably all used to a numerical month now.

Being of a "certain age", I have no problem coping with the 12 hour or 24
hour clocks (or for that matter, Fahrenheit / Centigrade / Celsius).

I was brought up with both feet and metres, pounds and grams, but just 24
hours and Centigrade/Celsius.

However, I can't accept the use of 12 p.m. (for 12 midday or 12 noon) and
12 a.m. (for 12 midnight). Mr Murdoch appears to be unaware that "a.m."
stands for "ante meridien" (before noon). "p.m." stands for "post
meridien" (after noon).

You didn't say if you felt 12am for 12 noon is correct, bit it isn't either.
Only "12 noon" and "12 midnight" are correct. "Ante-meridiem" literally
means "before the sun has crossed the line", conversely for post-meridiem it
means "after the sun has crossed the line". When it's 12 noon or 12
midnight, the Sun is at the highest or lowest point in the sky, and
therefore is neither AM or PM.

It can get even more consusing when people try to account for this by using
12:00N for Noon and 12:00M for midnight, because there used to be a
tradition of using 12:00M for Noon (M for Meridies in Latin), and 12:00MN
(Media Nox in Latin).

Maybe that is another reason why Sky should adopt the 24-hour clock in the
EPG, because any references to 12 p.m. or 12 a.m. are not only confusing,
they are illiterate.

I agree!

--
Vincent


.

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