jmarsh wrote on 2020-01-02, 02:42:

Were they the same guys who decided the first hour of each day would use the biggest number (12)?

Thank god that the better part of the world uses 24h system, that starts with 00:00:00 and ends with 23:59:59.

Ok, I love this one 😀
https://xkcd.com/2249/

xjas wrote on 2020-01-01, 20:29:

Personally, I don't care what some church bureaucrats decided about when their prophet lived and died hundreds of years after the fact
...

Consider then the situation of e.g. muslims. Their calendar is currently in 1442 and their year starts around August. Since most electronics can't accept less than 1901 or 1970 for year, they have to use the western year, but set the month and day according to muslim calendar. This "hybridization" caused some confusion when Iran hacked and crash-landed the CIA's RQ-170 stealth drone and published photos of it made with a Canon DLSR: since the date field was set mixed, world press initially believed the affair to be fake. The japanese and jewish people also have problems maintaining use of their traditional calendars vs the western calendar pushed by widespread digitization.

Less seriously, here is a pic of a small add-on card which promised to fix the dreaded "Y2K bug" through PC BIOS manipulation. I wonder how much of that was snake oil?

Why would it be snake oil? It has an address selector for the standard external ROM locations, all it would need to do is hook some BIOS interrupts to replace the bugged functions.

xjas wrote on 2020-01-01, 20:29:

Personally, I don't care what some church bureaucrats decided about when their prophet lived and died hundreds of years after the fact & got wrong because the number '0' hadn't been imported from Sanskrit yet.

That reminds me of a fascinating science-fiction story that I once read.
In this story, a little crew does set out to explore the stars with humanity's first near light-speed drive. Inofficially, kind of (it was just intended as a test).
Due to time dilation, when they come back to earth much much later, they are greeted via radio by an automatic space port.
In order to not get shot, etc, they report back their time of departure in old Christan time, but also in "time after Gagarin".
I find that idea very interesting and reasonable. Makes me wonder why this wasn't adopted in reality.
Oh, and they also find a cinema at the port that showed human evolution.
How humans reached so-called "perfection" and became robots. 😉
Anyway, in the end, they meet the survivors of another, much later earth ship and became friends with them, while the remainings of the robots rust away in the jungles.