Via Dane Carlson, MSNBC: "When just about every other dot-com was going more than a bit nuts, the Google kids kept their focus: to become the best search engine in the world—and make a profit while doing it.... Brin says that he’d feel weird having to tell a blind date that he’s president of an operation that’s in the red. "Sergey has this attitude that you’re not a real company unless you generate cash," says Page."
The only date formats that should be allowed to be displayed anywhere:
"19-Mar-2002" (usually preferred)
"2002-03-19" (ISO 8601) (also see this)
Some form of "Tuesday, March 19, 2002", "Tue, Mar 19, 2002", "March 19, 2002", etc. (human readable)
And maybe RFC2822 dates: "Tue, 19 Mar 2002 03:56:54 -0500" (is it also valid to have the three letter time zone code instead of the offset from GMT?) Update, darn, I just realized that these dates aren't necessarily fixed width... that darn FWS!
Obviously things like 20020319 are ok for machines to read, but the formats above are the only ones people should be expected to read.
Notice that I specifically didn't include things like "3/19/2002". The date happens to be unambiguous, since "19/3/2002" is still clear, but the first 12 days of every month aren't. Since half the world uses "day/month/year" and we in America use "month/day/year", if I give you 4/1/02, what's the date? Is it April first or January fourth? No dates should ever be displayed in either format on the Internet.
Anything I forgot? Oh, one more pet peeve. Whenever you give a time, always try to include the time zone! People on the Internet don't necessarily know where you are. And don't get me started on Beats (Sorry, "Internet time" - how pretentious).
And why people like stuff like "1998-05-12T14:15Z" (with the T in the middle) I'll never understand (maybe for machine readability?), although I don't mind the 'Z' (Zulu (zero) time - meaning UTC or GMT)
I just got to try out OSX for the first time at my friend's house. Very impressive! It's a shame it's not open source... give KDE and Gnome a few more years and they still won't have as usable or polished a system as OSX is right now. It really is nice.
Adam: "I'm not exactly sure why it's a shame that OS X is not open source. (And by OS X we're talking about the UI layer, Aqua, as the underlying unixy stuff is open as Darwin.)"
I said why it's a shame OSX isn't open source above. It's a powerful unix based OS with a beautiful interface that's as easy to use as a Macintosh (you don't even notice the /usr folder because it's called "Users", etc., and it's got other good interface features I've never seen anywhere), but it's tied to Apple hardware and the Linux community won't have anything as good as Aqua for years. I'm not saying it should be open source, as in "Apple is evil for not releasing the source" - they've actually been very good in the open source arena with Darwin. It's just that it would be nice for all of us if it was (though not necessarily for Apple - which is why it isn't open source.)
It's sort of like other things, such as REBOL that aren't open source. It would be nice for everybody if it was, but the company has to try to make money.
Tuesday, March 19, 2002
Permalink
new⇒Timesheet Calculator
Hadn't seen it before now, but mycompany already uses a timetracking prog...
Keith: Oct 7, 10:44am