The software company BE Inc.which attempted to impose outdated time and date formats on the world has gone bust. Its OS BEos only allowed the use of MM-DD-YYYY am/pm formats. Be Inc had an office in Paris! Good riddance!
Han ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "ISO 8601" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, 2002-01-21 00:36 Subject: [ISO8601] Re: Message to BE Inc. about their OS BEos. On 2001-Jan-13 Han Maenen wrote: This message went to BE Inc. They did not bother to answer. That says enough: BE Inc. wants this trash to be adopted globally. I have de-installed BEos because of what can be read below and also because it does not support my graphics card: Sir, I have installed BEos, and I am irritated because this OS only has American time and date formats like the AM/PM clock and the format MM-DD-YYYY. I regard these formats as irrational leftovers of the Dark Ages, I do not want to have any truck with them, and I suspect that your company is attempting to impose them on the entire world. BE Inc. knows very well that these formats are not used outside the US. Why won't BE Inc. allow for a choice between them and the ISO 8601 standard which Windows and the Apple OS allow for the use of international settings? The Amiga's Workbench also allowed people to make their own choice in this matter. The first thing I do when installing an OS is this: I throw these American settings away. But BEos does not allow me to do that and that irks me. Please stop trying to impose these outdated settings on the world and make international date and time formats available in BEos. IBM tried to spread the US formats world-wide in the MS-DOS era and failed. The world will never adopt AM/PM and the curious sequence of month-day-year, just because the USA is addicted to these formats. Yours, etc [2002-Jan-20] For those who like to gloat over these things, you can read all about the demise of Be Inc, now a part of history at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23718.html>. So, the news is that Be Inc and BeOS are no more. The remainder of the company is now owned by Palm, and The Register also makes a few pertinent comments about that on their site. Cheers, Ian. <mail:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.qsl.net/g1smd/> http://home.freeuk.net/g1smd/> http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/dstrange/y2k.htm> http://dmoz.org/Science/Reference/Standards/Individual_Standards/ISO_8601/ ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/ham/misc/g1smd.zip ftp://ftp.qsl.net/pub/g1smd/ [2002-01-20]
