once in a forever

[Lichen]

There's certainly a difference between a UK and a US billion. I think it's as follows: a US billion is hundred million, a UK billion is a thousand million. I suppose the same ratio applies to trillions.

 

[Freakaholic]

There's certainly a difference between a UK and a US billion. I think it's as follows: a US billion is hundred million, a UK billion is a thousand million. I suppose the same ratio applies to trillions.

thats it.

so whats a UK hundred million? a hectamillion? millimillion? centimillion?

 

[tryptych]

There's certainly a difference between a UK and a US billion. I think it's as follows: a US billion is hundred million, a UK billion is a thousand million. I suppose the same ratio applies to trillions.

No - it used to be that a UK billion was a million million, and a US billion was a thousand million. Thi change in fact originated in the 17th C in Italy and France, or so Wikipedia tells me. Now most countries use a thousand million as standard, and so does the scientific community.

A trillion is a million million in the modern system.

 

[nomos]

d/m/y (day, month, year) is used by:

* Canada

m/d/y (month, day, year) is used by:

* Canada

for god's sake! this country can't take a stand on any damn thing. of course you know it'll be a whole truckload of the latter now that the bloody conservatives are back in.

 

[nomos]

the ISO recommendation is far more logical, and useful when arranging things in modern filesystems (computers, mainly):

year/month/day hours/minutes/seconds

2006.04.05 01.02.03

i use it

yes! good! order!

 

[bruno]

here is the ISO 8601 standard.

you can reduce date and time to something like this: 20060407T202942. beautiful! i'm trying to figure out how to have this added automatically to files (on os x), but so far no luck.

 

[michael]

so whats a UK hundred million? a hectamillion? millimillion? centimillion?

Assuming you meant a thousand million, it's a milliard. But yeah, everyone I've spoken to in the UK uses billion for this measure now. Not that it comes up too much in conversation, of course.

I have to say, I was quietly excited when I found out the Japanese do the yyyy/mm/dd thing. One small step for nerd-kind. Although, of course, they do have two different names for each year...

 

[droid]

Here's a new one:

On the 4th of May 2006 at 2 minutes and 3 seconds after 1 o' clock in the morning, the time and date will be 01: 02: 03, 04/05/06.

This would not happen again in our lifetime. It will be approximately 400 generations before this occurs again.

 

[woops]

Who's Ready?!?!?!?1

here it comes.....

 

[woops]

That Was Fucking Wicked!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[tryptych]

This would not happen again in our lifetime. It will be approximately 400 generations before this occurs again.

Bollocks - who's writing this stuff?

It'll happen in 100 years time - which is not 400 generations.

 

[droid]

 

[Ness Rowlah]

here is the ISO 8601 standard.

you can reduce date and time to something like this: 20060407T202942. beautiful! i'm trying to figure out how to have this added automatically to files (on os x), but so far no luck.

OS/X is Unix (some BSD or other) is it not. So in a shell script it would
look something like this (parameters might be slightly different / check your man
page):

year=`date +%Y`
month=`date +%m`
day=`date +%d`
hour=`date +%H`
minute=`date +%M`
datestamp=$year$month${day}T${hour}$minute

cp -p myfile myfile.$datestamp or
touch myfile.$datestamp to just create a file

 

[Ness Rowlah]

And then there is 06/06/06 soon - get ready for all those babies
being named Damien ...

 

[bruno]

OS/X is Unix (some BSD or other) is it not. So in a shell script it would
look something like this (parameters might be slightly different / check your man
page):

year=`date +%Y`
month=`date +%m`
day=`date +%d`
hour=`date +%H`
minute=`date +%M`
datestamp=$year$month${day}T${hour}$minute

cp -p myfile myfile.$datestamp or
touch myfile.$datestamp to just create a file

thanks for the tip, ness. finally an excuse to overcome my 'fear of the terminal'.

 

[matt b]

Here's a new one:

does this mean that wayne rooney now has more time to recover?

i'm confused

 

[bassnation]

Bollocks - who's writing this stuff?

It'll happen in 100 years time - which is not 400 generations.

depends whether you are talking about humans or rodents. actually, 400 is a bit low for mice - a single one can have 1000 descendents in its own lifetime. i can't be bothered to do the maths, but you get the idea.

 

[Rambler]

Is that American mice or UK mice?