Don't cry for me [for 24 hours] Argentina....

(Apologies to Andrew Lloyd Weber for my post title!)

Carlos Alloatti asked right in the Suggestion Box:

This is not actually a topic sugestion, but a request.

How about in Vista you (MS) get it right and set the time Format for Argentina to the 24 Hs format?

MS got it right in Windows 95, and wrong ever since. We do not use the AM/PM standard, we use the 24 Hs standard.

No one at MS Argentina ever told you guys at Redmond?

Nice blog, by the way.

Carlos 

This is definitely one of those cases where "right" is a four letter word. :-)

Even in XP this is one of the potential options for the time format:

It is just not the default one. This does not change in Vista:

(Everyone can now see by the way that my new Dell Latitude D820 with the "Vista Capable" sticker can run Vista RC2 and supports glass!)

Now of course I was just talking about replacement locales earlier today, and anyone can use a replacement locale to make this kind of a change system-wide. They can even use the Locale Builder to make the construction easier! Shawn talks about this kind of case explicitly in his When Does Someone Replace a Windows (or .Net) Locale? post.

For future versions beyond Vista, we can always re-visit the best defaults for such situations. But until then it is quite easy for anyone who is in the group that wants different settings to actually make those different settings happen on a system-wide basis.

This post brought to you by H (U+0048, a.k.a. LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H)