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>people from other countries might enter it backwards without thinking about it

people from other countries might enter it correctly without thinking about it

English: let's have separate sizes for fasteners vs the rest of the world let's use a separate standard for every physical measurement let's write dates backward let's drive on the wrong side of the road

Frankly I'm surprised that we didn't use big endian for x86.

Except it didn't happen like that.

More like: "Let's pioneer this field." Later: "Sure there are international standards now, but we won't change how we do things because money."

The pioneering arguments is correct in some fields. For example TV sets and computer/phone screens are still measured in inches all around the world. I'm in Italy and I think gas pipes in houses are still measured in inches [1] and some bicycle components come with metric and imperial sizes. The imperial ones are getting rare. On the other side engines are measured in cubic centimeters even in the USA.

But the pioneering argument doesn't apply to everything. Every country or area inside countries had their own units of measurement for basic stuff like mass of things, weight of food, volume of cups, length of poles, exactly like every city had its own time before time zones. There is no pioneering in the size and weight of containers for wheat. It's stuff people have been doing since before writing.

Basically every country standardized most units but the USA didn't. I think that having the larger economy in the world played a role in that. There are no incentives to adapt when the rest of the world will build a slightly different size of everything only for the US market.

[1] Check this conversion table for gas pipes http://www.azzistudio.it/tavola.html and notice the weird values for the metric sizes (millimeters). Nobody would build pipes with those diameters if they started metric centuries ago.

TL;DR x86 is little-endian for compatibility with the Datapoint 2200.

From Stan Mazor's 1995 survey article "The History of the microcomputer - Invention and Evolution" from Proceedings of the IEEE, pp. 1601-1607, Dec. 1995,

  A. Little Endian

    Some have wondered why the addresses in the 8008 were
  stored "backward" with the little end first, e.g., the low
  order byte of a two byte address is stored in the lower
  addressed memory location.  I (regrettably) specified this
  ordering as part of the JUMP instruction format in the spirit
  of compatibility with the Datapoint 2200.  Recall that their
  original processor was bit serial; the addresses would be
  stored low to high bit in the machine code (bit backward).
  Other computer makers organize the addresses with the "big
  end" first.  The lack of standardization has been a problem
  in the industry.

I think you mean American, especially for the measurements, where American measurements are different even from the old British/Commonwealth system.

A pint of beer or cider in Britain is 568mL, in the USA 473mL, but everything else in a British bar is sold in metric units. And today is "the third of April", 3/4/2016.

In conversation would you say "I'll be going home on April fourth" or "I'll be going home on the fourth of April"?

From the Midwest, USA and I'd would always refer to the date in the first way (and subsequently, it is logical to write the date in month/day format).

Still agree that day/month/year makes more sense.

"On the fourth of April" when spoken, "on 4 April" when written.

Example with lots of written dates: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/29/article-50-brexit... (but I could equally choose a formal document, like my birth certificate, or something very informal, like a handwritten note).

When spoken, the "of" is always included, and the number is always an ordinal (-th etc).

There are a few choices of order in use in various parts of the world. Only one is unambiguous as a string of numbers: Year, month, day (where year is four digits, not two.) Because year/day/month does not seem to be in use anywhere.

I say both. You coming over on July 4th for our big Forth of July Celebration?

And year/month/day/hour/minute/second is best as its largest to smallest and if you name your documents / fields in this format it sorts better.

>In conversation would you say "I'll be going home on April fourth" or "I'll be going home on the fourth of April"?

The latter. "April fourth" would sound very odd in a British accent.

It sounds fine in an Irish accent: "Early morning, April fourth, shot rings out in the Memphis sky..."

Today is the 93rd of Checkuary, 2016. That is equivalent to the 3rd of April, 2017.

Checkuary is the unofficial 13th month of every year. It lasts until you remember to write the correct year number on all of your checks.

As an American, I write it as 3Apr2017 to avoid ambiguity. I can't stand how the traditional all-numeric date format is neither big-endian nor little-endian.

As a British person living in Denmark, I haven't written a cheque for about... well... a long time.

My current British bank account didn't come with a cheque book, but the one I had when I was a student did. So probably 2009 or so; maybe one or two per year before that.

The American banking system is still in the 1990s. We have no direct person-to-person transfers here.

When you use your bank to pay a bill on-line, unless it's a major utility that worked with your bank to setup an ACH payment means, the bank will typically still print a paper check and send it to its destination.

We have electronic transfer (ACH) using the bank (ABA or routing number) and account number, but it's not available to regular people. People often keep these two numbers secrete to prevent identity theft.

Most other countries, you put your friends bank num, account num and name and it will show up in their account the very next day (even on holidays!) for free. In the US, you have to use 3rd party payment systems like PayPal, which charge fees and don't really do bank-to-bank transfers.

The time for an electronic transfer to go through is now seconds in the UK, Denmark and several other European countries.

(The UK system guarantees two hours, but it's usually seconds.)

You can also use a mobile phone number instead of knowing the bank account numbers. This is extremely common in Denmark, including for purchases; the same system exists in the UK but it is less often used.

I just wrote a check - pretty much the only check I write any more, to pay my lawn guy.

The only other time I've used a check in the recent past has been to void one for direct deposit at an employer.

I wish there was a way around both of these - I hate writing checks.

I've written one ever here in NZ and it bounced - the bank cancelled the account due to me not using it ever and didn't tell me. It was for a house too, so that was fun.

> It was for a house too, so that was fun.

As in a home loan deposit are an outright house purchase?

In Australia when I did this it was done via a different kind of cheque, I forget what it was called because I haven't used one before or since, but I had to the bank in person to get it.

It was the deposit (pains on going unconditional) and was a cheque from a cheque book. The whole thing was a farce. The bank rang and gave me a hard time for not having a cheque book, whilst having the cheque in their hand.

A cashier's cheque is what you're looking for.

It lasts until you remember to write the correct year number on all of your checks.

What's a "check"?

Please always write your date fields with the correct number of leading zeros.

You've also written it in "outer right hand side of a ledger" notation instead of the more correct ISO-8601

https://xkcd.com/1179/ (ISO 8601)

I was describing how 99% of British people would write the date, particularly in handwriting. It's how I was taught to write it on schoolwork.

Official forms in Britain (and most of Europe) use the leading zeros, DD/MM/YYYY, though the separator can be / - . or a mixture.

It's less broken than the mixed insanity that is popular in America, and as I described, there is a functional situation in which the ordering might even be preferential.

Never the less, the one true date format is ISO 8601, and it should be used everywhere there isn't a clear and over-riding reason to use another format.

I don't really understand the opposition to using a national identification number. It's a (non-secret) code to uniquely identify people, exactly what would've been needed in the Lisa Davis case, and exactly what quite a few countries are using without problems.

Just don't use it for any kind of authentication, ever, because it's not a secret. Also, add a checksum to avoid typos.

A simple explanation of the opposition is that a national identification number will be assigned, and then we go cashless, then only people with those numbers will be able to do commerce of any type. Add in a bit of requirements that would require a violation of someone's religion and you got the story. Preventing a national id number stops part of the problem. Expect a lot of push back on any attempt to get rid of cash.

Yes there are advantages. But a loss, too.

When I was young there was privacy. Believe it or not, you could start a new life somewhere else if you wished, and leave the old one behind, without any great effort. Move and get an unlisted number and you might as well have vanished from the face of the earth. Freedom as I knew it then required privacy, these were not concepts that could be separated.

I'm not sure what the West means by freedom now; since I'm no longer in a practical sense free to do so much that I was once free to do, without scrutiny. No doubt crime rates are down as a result; but reducing crime wasn't the purpose of freedom. Of course, it would take real effort to maintain privacy in a digital world. I think the time will come when we make that effort.

In my case, it's someone with a different name, but they think the car belongs to me. It's my old car that I sold to a dealer, who then sold it to this person. I'm pretty sure the DMV knows because I updated the registration, but the SF MTA doesn't appear to know, so I get tickets threatening me with really bad things if I don't pay or contest them each time.

By "updated the registration," did you fill out a release of liability form after you sold it? It's probably too late now, but most states have a form you fill out after the sale of a car to indicate it's no longer in your possession (so they don't charge you for things like parking tickets; toll roads, red light cameras).