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posted by martyb on Sunday July 29 2018, @09:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the Unicode-12.1 dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheRealLuciusSulla

Emperor's 2019 exit will be first era change of information age, and switchover could be as big as Y2K say industry figures

[...] On 30 April 2019, Emperor Akihito of Japan is expected to abdicate the chrysanthemum throne. The decision was announced in December 2017 so as to ensure an orderly transition to Akihito's son, Naruhito, but the coronation could cause concerns in an unlikely place: the technology sector.

The Japanese calendar counts up from the coronation of a new emperor, using not the name of the emperor, but the name of the era they herald. Akihito's coronation in January 1989 marked the beginning of the Heisei era, and the end of the Shōwa era that preceded him; and Naruhito's coronation will itself mark another new era.

But that brings problems. For one, Akihito has been on the throne for almost the entirety of the information age, meaning that many systems have never had to deal with a switchover in era. For another, the official name of Naruhito's era has yet to be announced, causing concern for diary publishers, calendar printers and international standards bodies.

It's why some are calling it "Japan's Y2K problem".

"The magnitude of this event on computing systems using the Japanese Calendar may be similar to the Y2K event with the Gregorian Calendar," said Microsoft's Shawn Steele. "For the Y2K event, there was world-wide recognition of the upcoming change, resulting in governments and software vendors beginning to work on solutions for that problem several years before 1 Jan 2000. Even with that preparation many organisations encountered problems due to the millennial transition.

[...] A much harder problem faces Unicode, the international standards organisation which most famously controls the introduction of new emojis to the world. Since Japanese computers use one character to represent the entire era name (compressing Heisei into ㍻ rather than 平成, for instance), Unicode needs to set the standard for that new character. But it can't do that until it knows what it's called, and it won't know that until late February at best. Unfortunately, version 12 of Unicode is due to come out in early March, which means it needs to be finished before then, and can't be delayed.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/25/big-tech-warns-japan-millennium-bug-y2k-emperor-akihito-abdication


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Monday July 30 2018, @12:54AM (1 child)

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Monday July 30 2018, @12:54AM (#714548)

    That actually puts the problem in a bit of perspective. These unicode shitheads (and I'm not inserting the damn poop unichode here) will happily pull whatever random symbols out of their asses and ram them in to the unicode standards at the whim of Apple just to keep their consumertard masses entertained. But when an actual genuine need for a new one comes up... well fuck that.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 30 2018, @05:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 30 2018, @05:54PM (#714845)

    These unicode shitheads [...] will happily pull whatever random symbols out of their asses

    ISO/IEC 10646 is the trademark equivalent of patent pools. They catalog and list all the symbols, emojis and characters ISO associated industries agreed upon for use in their documents and products. They don't tell those companies what to do. They're descriptive rather than prescriptive. Unicode was originally a reduced selection of ISO/IEC 10646 maintained solely to contend with the memory constraints of the early 90s. However, they've grown to become far more politically influential over the process. Now, the ISO guys are afraid they'll lose thier jobs to Unicode. The Unicode guys are afraid they'll lose their jobs to obsoleteness. And there's no one left feeling safe enough in their positions to resist when some Google Japan guy wants a poop emoji since they had those on their feature phones and want to shoe horn it into the the telecom standards through the Unicode standard.

    Welcome to the corporate-led world government: Where poop is ISO standardized to prevent the competition from trademarking it. May the floods take us all.