A 11:34 99-06-25 -0700, Markus Kuhn a écrit :
>The problems of the US time notation
>are obvious and numerous:
>
> - It is longer than the normal 24h notation ("12:00 A.M." versus "00:00").
>
> - It takes somewhat more time/effort for humans to compare two times
> in 12h notation.
>
> - It is not clear, how 00:00, 12:00 and 24:00 are represented.
I must admit that, having 3 VCRs at home (it may look maniac but it is
sometimes less expensive to buy a new one than having to repair a function
you only occasionally use!) with "on screen programming", the one with 12h
notation (U.S. made, even if the menu is in French) puzzles me so much each
time that when a program begins on midnight, I now make it begin at 11:59P,
as I so many times "missed the train" in the beginning because of the
illogical system...
Fortunately my most recent VCRs all work on 24h system (with multilingual
on-scren programming)... and have a VCR+ system, where I only have to enter
a single n-digit number (given in the TV schedule in my newspaper) to
program the whole thing... (; I even guessed that one of the reasons why
VCR+ is so popular in North America is because of the illogical way the 12h
system is handled and misunderstood by people. Of course, I am not an
English-speaker in my everyday's life, and I can't judge 100%, but I have
difficulty to imagine that most North Americans do not have the same
problem I have with the 12h system at precisely noon and midnight...
Alain LaBonté
Québec
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