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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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 30 2018, @08:23PM (1 child)
Oh, absolutely. They should join the completely rational system based on the year some magician dude that raised himself from the dead was supposedly born... Er, not supposedly, because it's actually several years off because some other random dude several centuries later miscalculated.
Oh, yeah, that completely rational system that's a combination of bases 60, 24, and a random jumble of month lengths based on an old Roman system that was originally lunar but then was massively screwed up for political reasons and then standardized by imperial decree into the random jumble of 28 to 31-day months that never align with the 7-day cycles people actually organize their lives around. Oh except for every fourth year (except for every year in 100 except for every year in 400), when we add a day NOT at the end of the year (which might make some sense) but at the end of month 2, which was the last month of the year millennia ago, but the random mash-up of resurrected dudes, erroneous monks, and emperors creating a mess of things doesn't really care about stuff like that.
Yeah, Japan obviously should switch to that calendar.
[TL;DR -- Japan's calendar is just as screwy as the one the West seems to have settled on. You're just more used to the stupidity of the one familiar to you.]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday August 01 2018, @03:20AM
There is precedence... I understand you can trace a modern railroad's track spacing all the way back to the spacing of Roman Chariot wheels. [naciente.com]
I imagine reference points for keeping time are just as set in precedence. Look at ours... Anno Dominii. Year of our Lord. We have to drop a reference point somewhere, and we've been referencing that point in time ever since the Church laid it down over two millenia ago. Then we have POSIX time as well... referenced to January 1, 1970 , which is coming up on a 32-bit signed int overflow in 2038, which has been of significant concern to me, as I am designing some stuff I intend to last long beyond that.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]