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 ...

what about the lucky sevens?

[metasecure]

In Canada, where m/d/y is more common we already experienced this on February 8, March 8 and April 8, respectively.

Life is good living three steps ahead of the taco.

Personally I look forward to the lucky 7's, 7/7/7, a day where CmdrTaco and I can celebrate our slot machine winnings together.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Murodese]

But would you rather a three-day celebratory holiday, or three one-dayers? :o

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[metasecure]

I don't think celebrating either will get me any action so...a moot point indeed =)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[WedgeTalon]

Only two days? C'mon, you just move the holiday to a Monday so it's a three day holiday. Then you'll want to leave on Friday to take full advantage of it. But everyone's leaving on Friday and everyone wants to beat the traffic, so leave on Thursday. And if you're leaving on Thursday, why not Wednesday night? And you can't come back on Monday, that's still a holiday. And you can't come back on Tuesday, cause everybody comes back on Tuesday, so you outsmart everybody and you come back on Wednesday. So now you're leaving on Wednesday and coming back on Wednesday and suddenly a one day holiday is now a week! (Apologies to Scott Adams)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Moby Cock]

I've lived in Canada my entire life, and everyone I know uses dd/mm/yy.

In fact, I recall being taught to do it that way in grade 2.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cayenne8]

" I've lived in Canada my entire life, and everyone I know uses dd/mm/yy."

Ok...guess it is early...I was wondering what the hell planet these posts were from...

I looked at the date on my calendar and on my computer desktop, and it said 08/02/06...cobwebs cleared and I remembered that in other places, they switch the day and month around.

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....

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Red Alastor]

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....

Every place that speaks French use d/m/y. It's because it's the way it's naturally spoken in French : 2 août 2006.

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?

[cayenne8]

I've wondered if this is because in other languages...they often put the description after the object. For example, in English you'd day 'red car'. In Spanish, it would be 'Coche rojo'...which is basically 'car red'.

I wonder if this might be similar to how we speak the dates differently. 22nd is the day...and the month is synonymous to the descriptive part of the date?

Sounds strange, but, was just trying to figure out why the difference. In Europe, the English speaking nations are close together with nati

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[araemo]

"The month then day format is much nicer though. Every try to sort a list of files that are similar but have a different date. Good luck sorting them nicely by that date."

Actually, neither m-d-y nor d-m-y are good for that. y-m-d is the simplest way to sort by date when you are naming files, that way they're all sorted by year first, then month, then day. d-m-y makes logical sense, but in america most people say/see august 2nd, 2006... so we get confused when we see 2-8-06. ;P

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[kimvette]

In software one should sort using this date format:

YYYYMMDD-HHMM

Also: HH should be military/24-hour time, NOT HHMM(a|p)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cvdwl]

I've been brainwashed in california to use ddMMMyy (eg. 02Aug06) for all my dates. They do that in the international Pharmacuetical/BioTech industry to cut down on this exact confusion.

Which begs the question: is 02Aug06 the 2nd of August 2006 or the 6th of August 2002. Are my pills just expiring or 4 years out of date? Any possible format that leaves ambiguity WILL be misunderstood. Two digit years are an abomination!

And, to reply to a previous poster, do you alphabetize your dictionary by last letter of the word? yyyy-mm-dd is, by systems of ordering that have been around for millenia, the most logical.

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 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?

[rahrens]

I imagine it's like the poster said above - in english, when you speak the date, you say, "It's August the 2nd, 2006." Thus, compressing it into a shorter format, you write 8/2/2006, or 8/2/06. I rarely see the year shortened to a single digit, tho... unless you're trying to get a story posted on /. ;)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Tower]

>I am a native English speaker and have said "It's the 2nd of August, 2006" all my life.

Well, then... congratulations - For the first time in your life, you are correct!

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[ReplicantSD1]

All my life, in my surroundings, if someone asked you the date something was going to happen, you'd say "August 22nd"

Wow, what a boring place. What did you guys do for the other 364 days?

Replacing code dates with international dates

[GodWasAnAlien]

Again, don't confuse international dates (ISO 8661) with European dates.

Sometimes when I am updating some code documents with dates, I will replace the US Y99 dates with international dates,

So:

01/02/03 - code creation

becomes:
2003-01-02 - code creation
2006-08-02 - fixed a bug

International dates are significantly in order, as times are.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[idontgno]

Nope, in the US, if you asked what time it was, you would most likely get the answer "three-twenty".
Occasionally you'll get it the way you mentioned (twenty after three), but, most of the time I hear it hour-minute.

And that raises a couple of interesting points.

• Brevity. "Three twenty" is less of a mouthful than "Twenty past three". "August 8th, 2006" is somewhat shorter than "The 8th of August, 2006" (no possessives or articles; their function is implied in the shorter pharaseology.) Are we Americans hasty?
• The "decline" of the analog clock. Does anyone in the US say "A quarter till 4 PM?" A quarter of a what? The notion of an hour as a divisible entity (vice an integral entity, accompanied by an integral entity called the minute) is most intuitive if you can see the quarter-circle of the full-circle hour, as marked by the "big hand". I'm middle-aged; I was taught to read the classic analog clock, but now I have to think about it because the digital "hour:minute" format dominates. I wonder if my babies, as they grow up, will be taught in school to read analog clock faces at all? (I'll see to it that they learn, but I wonder if it won't fall out of public school curriculum.)
• The format of shortcut dates in the US verus elsewhere. I think it matches the syntax of the abbreviated US spoken date. That's speculation, but I find it fascinating that some of our English correspondents in this topic tend to speak out dates in ISO (or traditional European) numerical date format order, even if it requires the use of syntactic glue words. ("the 8th of August, 2006." I guess you could drop the glue, but it would sound funny and a bit spastic to me. But maybe that's how we 'merkans look to y'all anyways.)
• So, what of the notable US exception, the Fourth of July? I think it stopped being just a date a long time ago. If, God forfend, the government here in the US tries to make this holiday another "federally observed on the Monday of the week it falls on" holiday, it'll still be called "The Fourth of July" even if it's observed on the 30th of June.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[carnifex0]

Maybe we should all use the "Official" ISO [w3.org] date format - YYYY-MM-DD and avoid confusion. I have a system that I administer that uses the ISO dates, and every single one of my users hates it.

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.

ISO date vs DoD date

[DragonHawk]

"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."

You don't say whose military or government. The US DoD, at least, is large enough that there are multiple "standards". I've seen MM/DD/YY (08/02/06) and YYYY-MMM-DD (2006-AUG-02) most often, I think. The ISO date form is YYYY-MM-DD (2006-08-02) or YYYYMMDD (20060802).

Personally, I find the mixed number/letter forms like "2006 AUG 2" and "2 Aug 2006" work best when dealing with other humans who speak the same language. It's unambiguous -- there's only one sane way to interpret it -- and the letter/number distinction stands out more than dashes. For computers and other kinds of filing, though, the ISO form definately wins. It makes sorting so much easier.

Long live the UNIX timestamp

[toofast]

Today is 1154536012. None of this mm/dd/yy bullcrap.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[grub]

YYYY-MM-DD is the best. I keep logs, pics, whatever named like that so a date sort by name is simple.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[Cyberax]

Well, d/m/y is used in:
- Lots of European countries.
- Russia
- Japan
- China
- South Korea ...

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[cHALiTO]

Add to the list Argentina, and I guess also a fair number of other latin american countries ...

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?

[IngramJames]

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

And it looks like those blaming the USA for the nefarious spread of m/d/y have been shown to be wrong.

Quite obviously, it's the blasted Federated States of Micronesia again, exerting their subtle yet vast power.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[ben there...]

I prefer:

2 Aug 2006
2006 Aug 2
2006-08-02

The first 2 separate the numbers with letters, making it easier to read, and it's entirely unambiguous, at least to those who can read English.

The last is better for sorting lists, and makes the most sense when you're dealing with a set of information that spans several years, making the year the most prominent.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[1u3hr]

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....

Basically, everywhere except the USA. You don't get out much do you?

If you do plan on travelling, also note that in the rest of the world we use degrees Celsius for temperature -- 30 degrees is hot, not cold, so pack appropriately. But most surprising of all, not everyone in the world speaks English!

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[1u3hr]

If you knew how much hassle I've had with American software that always defaults to MDY dates, and somtimes can't be changed, you might excuse my getting a dig in. If Americans spent a few minutes to consider that their way isn't the only way of doing things, a lot of problems could be avoided, and I'm not just talking about software.

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[BitterOak]

I was born, raised, and live in Canada, and I use mm/dd/yy. I have lived in the States, and most people there also use mm/dd/yy. Is dd/mm/yy a European thing? I thought they use yyyy-mm-dd. Who uses dd/mm/yy?

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[wootest]

I know most people here (Sweden) who *must* use xx/xx/xx use dd/mm/yy.

I don't see why we can't all just switch to YYYY-mm-dd. You can't confuse it with any existing format. It's logical (they all come in order). It keeps mm/dd/yy's only benefit (as far as I'm concerned; I don't see keeping the year at the back a benefit) by letting months come ahead of days. With AM/PM vs 24 hour, at least there's a valid argument in that people think "five in the afternoon", not "seventeen"; with YYYY-mm-dd there's no such

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[shinnie]

No kidding. This guy must of lived to close to the US border and was using their format. Remember the first time I crossed the border to legally buy beer in the US. The clerk looked at my ID and asked how I could have been born in the 13th month. I told her Canada has 13 months in its year as we have an extra month of winter :)

Re:what about the lucky sevens?

[SamSim]

This is like the famous "interesting numbers" problem. If you stretch your interest far enough, you can't get away from them at this time of the millennium. Personally, I was a big fan of 8:02pm on February 20th, 2002 (20:02 20/02/2002), which is a pattern which won't repeat for another 106 years - and after that, not until CE 3003. Rarity is a good thing.

But you'll never have 13/3/7!

[Animaether]

In all the sensible word, 'leet' day will be on the 13th of March, 2007.

You would have had it on the 33rd of January or the 3rd of the 13th calendar month... -if- they existed.

It's funny. Laugh.

[linvir]

Behold:

It's funny. Laugh.

Stay your flamethrower, thou saucy fellow. Nay, let us instead rejoice in the most accurate story in the history of this fine website.

Re:It's funny. Laugh.

[linvir]

I just noticed that all four zoo.pl icons appear next to your name from my account. It looks like a military decoration [linuxvirus.net].

Re:It's funny. Laugh.

[andrewman327]

I guess there is a "-1 Offtopic." Touche' mods.

I personally think that Intel and AMD are missing out on a great marketing ploy. Considering how close the competition is right now, they could gain publicity through some special event for the days.

Re:It's funny. Laugh.

[linvir]

It won't be a dupe, it'll be an "update". It'll tell us that 4/8/6, 5/8/6 and 6/8/6 are coming up, and it'll even link back to this story to prove that it's really not a dupe.

Holy crap!

[Demon-Xanth]

This is either a very slow news day, or the OP is way too bored.

Re:Holy crap!

[Alfred, Lord Tennyso]

Welcome to August. The US Congress is out of session, grinding one of America's main news sources to a halt. France basically shuts down, and much of Europe follows its lead. August is vacation time, and nobody makes news, at least in the West.

If it weren't for those hard-working Middle Easterners busily killing each other, the presses would have to shut down entirely.

Februrary, March and April

[TobascoKid]

"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 :-)"

That all depends on your locale settings - other people had thier x86 days several months back

Saturday

[The G]

Instead of getting dates of their own, Saturday and subsequent days will be known as "Pentium", "Pentium II", "Pentium IV", "Pentium 5", "Pentium 6", and of course "Xeon".

Re:Saturday

[ToxikFetus]

Of course, Itanium already had its day on April 14, 1912.

Re:Saturday

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

shouldn't that be more like Pentium IV, Pentium IV Northwoods, Pentium IV Extreme Edition, Pentium IV D, Pentium IV Extreme Edition D, Pentium Core Duo

Please excuse the accuracy of this post, I don't actually have all of the core codenames remebered, or the versioning thats part of the joke: who on earth can? In Haiti, the kids knew about pentium IV andthat it cmae out a long time ago so they assume tha we are on Pentium 7 by now. Why would we be stuck on Pentium IV for six years?

Re:Saturday

[CellBlock]

Why would be stuck on Pentium IV for six years?

Because Intel keeps adding 1 to 4 and getting 4.9999056489, so it isn't quite 5 yet.

I'm a Mac user...

[Blakey Rat]

I'm a Mac user, how long do I have to wait for 6/80/40?

ISO 8601 Please!

[Optic]

Abolish weird date formats!

Re:ISO 8601 Please!

[Timesprout]

Whats ISO 8601? Here in Europe we use ISO 0186 for date formats.

Re:ISO 8601 Please!

[MindStalker]

Damn you for making me google just to realize there is no spoon.

Free clue.

[pair-a-noyd]

Get a life.

A slight oversight it would seem

[A Dafa Disciple]

"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"

Ummm... you mean this century right?

I'm still surprised this made the front page. I mean, I'm a geek, but even I think this is lame.

What about yesterday?

[bcat24]

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

Re:What about yesterday?

[gatkinso]

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

Go eat pie

[hrieke]

3/14 of course

Some more?

[Barny]

Really 5/8/6 and 6/8/6 should be there, they were the designations on some of the "other brand" (then, amd and cyrix) CPUs, of course 8/08/6 should be noted too as should the year 4004... will anyone remember a humble lil adding machine then?

Re:Some more?

[Overzeetop]

Sadly, 6/5/02 has already passed, as that was the computer I learned my first high level language (basic), low level language (assembly) and machine code on.

Re:Some more?

[fbjon]

I'll have a party on 6.12.8, for my old Amstrad.

3/8/6 ? Bah, humbug!

[Willeh]

Never mind 3/8/6, I'm still baked from celebrating 4/2/0 !

The Best Day Already Was...

[Snowcap557]

I still remember 12:34 pm on May 6, 1978 as the best such thing of all time. It was 1234 on 5/6/78!

That's nice.

[Minwee]

Except that tomorrow is 2006-08-02, followed by 2006-08-03 and 2006-08-04.

thank god

[Pliep]

Thank god for this newsitem. I had been wondering the past few weeks why I visit Slashdot anyway.

8/2/6 Brighton MetroBus

[digitaldc]

Today we celebrate the Brighton 826 MetroBus. [busphotos.co.uk]

Yes, I realize it has the route number 273 on it, but really it is the 826!

Let's all celebrate the wonders of mass transit!

What about the 586?

[eno2001]

The i586 DOES exist. Same as the i686. I don't care what Intel marketing pushed down people's throats, I still call them 586 and 686 systems. So does the Linux kernel...

Re:What about the 586?

[theonetruekeebler]

The i586 DOES exist

The problem is that there's no date for 5/8/5.99996546

Date formats

[Rik Sweeney]

It's all well and good people saying the correct date format is yyyy-mm-dd, but how do people actually pronounce it?

I for one certainly don't say it's 2006, August the 2nd. I'd either say it's 2nd August 2006 or August 2nd 2006...

Oh dear

[martinmarv]

It's sad that these are the only kind of dates we have to look forward to :o(

d/m/y?

[Digital Vomit]

"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 :-)"

Has Y2K taught you nothing? Using a single digit to store the year? You are among programmers! Hang your head in shame!

Best graduation year ever: 1961

[RobertB-DC]

My father is especially proud to be a member of the Class of 1961. His class ring reads the same right-side-up or upside-down!

The usual suspects [wikipedia.org] note that the condition won't happen again until the Year of our Lord 6009 (that is, if man is still alive, if woman can survive... [wikipedia.org]).

Next Palindrome Day...

[GuruBuckaroo]

January 2nd, 2010 (01/02/2010) for Americans, February first for the rest of you. Last one was October 2, 2001 (10/02/2001) here - I threw a party (any excuse, really).

in 31 years...

[lcde]

we can have 1/3/37

heh.

March 10th

[NekoXP]

So okay, this is news?

Every year March 10th comes around and we don't get a bunch of news posts from Nintendo fans because it's MAR10 day yet again.

It can't be that slow on a Tuesday in August. What is the world coming to?

Donald Becker quote

[DragonHawk]

In a discussion involving both 3Com's 3C509 and 3C905 network cards, Donald Becker came up with this gem:

"3Com only purchased rights to the numbers '3' '5' and '9'. Intel
owns '4', '8', '6', and '2'. '0' and '1' are still in the public
domain."

What about time for pi ?

[Asprin]

3/14/15 9:26:53

Mmmmmm.... pi...

See, there's still stuff to look forward to!

Re:Except..

[Pharmboy]

Like the USA? I thought Slashdot was unappologetically US centric.

(insert "We don't use dates like that, you insensitive clod" comment here)

Re:Except..

[jo_ham]

We covered this story back then.

This is the obligatory dupe.

Re:Except..

[fbjon]

Actually, this is a dupe from way back in '86.

Re:Except..

[linvir]

Nuh-uh! They ran a story about this back in 6 too, but back then we were still pretty bummed about jesus' death, so we didn't really celebrate it much.

Re:Except..

[dfn5]

Unless of course you're live in a place that uses the MM/DD/YY scheme for recording dates. Then you already encountered these dates in February, March, and April.

You mean like in America? Nobody from there reads Slashdot.

Re:Except..

[Intron]

Everyone on /. knows the correct way to write the time and date: 1154526200

Re:Except..

[oliverthered]

And for those people living in japan the dates passed in 2003, 2004 and 2005

Re:Except..

[Hrodvitnir]

Please... any place that uses that date format doesn't have the attention span to celebrate three related dates each a month apart.

Re:Except..

[MindStalker]

Because we like to write the way we talk. English speakers prefer to say July 7th instead of 7th of July.

 

Re:Except..

[plumby]

English speakers prefer to say July 7th instead of 7th of July

American English speakers might - I don't know anyone who says July 7th (maybe July the 7th though). Anyway, I say "half past six", but I wouldn't write that time down as 1/2 - 6 (or even 30:6).

MM/DD/YYYY as a numeric representation makes no logical sense. DD/MM/YYYY is small/medium/large date units, whereas MM/DD/YYYY is medium/small/large. Who orders things by putting the smallest unit of measurement in the middle? Do you write your time as hh:

Re:Except..

[lovebyte]

That's rich coming for a dutch person (if you are dutch!)! Dutch and Germans use this weird way for numbers. To say 86 (and thus stay on topic) you say in Dutch 6 and eighty. So for 286, you say two hundred six and eighty. If that's not confusing, what is? Oh yes, I know, the way Dutch and Germans say the time! for 5h30, you say "half six"!
Every culture has their idiosyncrasies.

Re:Psht!

[sk8king]

Some ISO standard that no one else seems to want to use. mm/dd/yyyy is just silly. Most significant to least significant makes the most sense by far.

YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss is the way to go.

Re:Psht!

[octaene]

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

Concur.

Re:Psht!

[HaydnH]

"A real nerd uses a logical date format - yyyy/mm/dd. What kind of a date format puts the 1st of February before the 2nd of January when sorted?

While I agree with the yyyy, mm & dd order, a real nerd doesn't use path seperators in dates! What kind of date format uses /'s?? =P

Psht! Psht!

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Real Nerd? hardly, you've just reordered the numbers. Anyone can do that. We need it more obscure, nerder way of doing it. Check the following out:

Todays date is:

114415202

Plus, I think we should all just refer to all dates as a stardates.

Re:Psht!

[MindStalker]

a computerized one duh. 20060802 is on day less than 20060803 the same as 1000 is 1 less than 1001.

Unless of course one speaks hungarian

[szo]

In this case one write and talk the same way: YYYY/MM/DD. And I'm sure there are plenty of other languages does that too.

Re:its not the only time

[LaughingCoder]

!taht tneser I ,yeH

Re:its not the only time

[twistedsymphony]

I'll give you the date and the imperial system. But are you telling me you move your switch down for on and up for off? That makes no sense at all. Also driving on the right side of the road makes more sense; it places the driver on the left side of the car meaning the right hand (since most people are right handed) can be used for performing more articulate tasks such as shifting, tuning the radio and adjusting the HVAC. You're living in a world of left-handed drivers!

Re:its not the only time

[Ohreally_factor]

Well, there will be math coprocessor day next year, at least.

Re:e Day

[mopslik]

What about 2/8/8 (e Day)?

e=2.71828183, so this would have happened long ago, say 2/7/2 or 2/7/18.

Re:SORRY!

[Spad]

Sorry, but here in Europe, where the current calendar system was invented, we put the day first, so today is 2/8/6!

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:SORRY!

[roystgnr]

2006/8/2 is the only logical and correct format.

Close, but it doesn't sort alphabetically, and the / character has a double meaning on Unix systems and in URLs. 2006-08-02 is better, with the added bonus that it's part of the ISO standard.

Of course, it's harder to get interesting date numbers when you've got 8 digits to work with, two of them can't take many values and two or three more only change values very infrequently. 2011-11-02 20:11:11.02 is coming up, I guess.

Re:we will always have 4/20

[OzPeter]

Under the fear of having Godwin [wikipedia.org] invoked .. you do know that April 20 is Hitler's birthday?