Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday July 30 2018, @01:20AM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 30 2018, @01:20AM (#714557) Journal

    Well, there is no sane way for picking the zero point, except the one that other people are using. Network effects matter.

    FWIW, I normally use CE and I don't believe that there ever was a historical Jesus, at least not within a century of the "official date", but that CE and AD use the same zero point and year length that doesn't bother me. I do, however, normally write dates in the format yyyy-mm-dd, because it makes sorting easier. (ISO 8601)

    Now if they want to source their calendar with a different zero point, that's no real problem as long as they define the correspondence to CE. But if they want to change the starting day of the year, they're asking for problems.

    According to what I've read, most Japanese applications appear to also use CE dates internally, so the problem will be limited to display and entry. Many programs seem to be planning on handling this by allowing dates to be entered in CE form as well as in nation-specific form. That should be an easy enough approach. The problem will be those programs that aren't, possibly because they can't be, updated.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2