Situations like Turkey's DST extension reminds me why storing dates in UTC with no further information is not good enough.
Can you explain the complication you're thinking about? And what additional information you'd store?
Time zone news
31–40 of 85 posts
Re: Time zone news
#32I wish this site had an RSS feed. I'd subscribe right now.
You could Watch https://github.com/eggert/tz
or subscribe to this mailing list https://www.iana.org/time-zones
Re: Time zone news
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our timezone/calendar system is convoluted, but that's because there are inherent issues with any calendar reform. I recommend looking at the following articles: http://qntm.org/abolish ("So you want to abolish time zones") http://qntm.org/calendar ("You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform")
All of these are valid points but when we get the ability to force the earth's rotation, orbit, and the moon's orbit to specifics then I WILL SHOW YOU.
Hey, when you have the power to hold the whole Earth for ransom, remember to ask for $1 million dollars. ;)
Re: Time zone news
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're confusing time zones with daylight savings. Time zones exist so that the same part of the solar day has approximately the same time associated with it wherever you are in the world (prior to the railroads, that was the only time - local time). So I can say "it's 4am in China" and you'll know it's the middle of the night without having to consult Google. They can also achieve the opposite, keeping neighbours on…
Except China has a single timezone, so "4am in China" doesn't mean as much as you think it might.
http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-...
Ah yes, but they didn't always.
Re: Time zone news
#35Situations like Turkey's DST extension reminds me why storing dates in UTC with no further information is not good enough.
Can you explain the complication you're thinking about? And what additional information you'd store?
Lots of events needs to be scheduled in local time. If your calendar app stores a given UTC timestamp for your meeting with a customer on friday at 5PM and the time zone rules database change inbetween, you're going to have an angry customer.
Re: Time zone news
#36Is there still a valid reason to have timezones altering between states? is it just for agriculture? While we're, talking about changing time monitoring systems, can't we have 13 months with 28 days each? (and an extra day every 4 years added on to december?) :( Simple things, but that would allow us to follow the lunar cycle.
13 * 28 = 364 not 365. So you'd need an extra day every year and 2 extra days every 4 years.
What we really need to do is use some rockets to slightly slow down the rotation of the earth so that a day is exactly 1/360th of a year. All kinds of numbers divide evenly into 360 so that should make building a good calendar easy.
Re: Time zone news
#37I always joke that time zones and character encodings more or less guarantee programmers will always be able to find jobs.
Re: Time zone news
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
All space time clocks may run at GMT+00 with no regional differences. Actually we may remove time zones all together too. So the day time of 3pm will be different everywhere. For calendar months and seasons we already have it like that, in both hemispheres. The only issue is backward incompatibility with legacy movies, books who talk about breakfast at 8am. Similarly, a love song which talks about April/May being a s…
Oh no, it's much worse than that. On Earth you can generally treat time as being the same speed everywhere. If you start a timer at T1 UTC and run it for a locally observed 60 seconds you can expect the current UTC time to be T1+60 seconds. In space relativistic effects stop being negligible and you might find that UTC time is T1+61 seconds.
We have clocks that are wrong all the time already, I'm not sure how that makes date time libraries worse. GPS satellites are in space, they have to deal with relativity effects, and mostly everything seems fine.
Re: Time zone news
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Northern areas, there's a lot of practical value that gets overlooked. In Boston, the sun is rising close to 5:00 AM as it is at the height of summer. Without daylight savings time, it would be rising at 4:00 AM. I think most people would rather have extended daylight late in the day than have all that extra sunlight wasted when we're sleeping. The counter to that is -- well, let's always stick with daylight savin…
You're backwards. The problem with year-round daylight savings in Boston (which, personally, I'd prefer) is kids going to school in the dark in the winter. Boston's both relatively northernly and very far east in a timezone because eastern time wraps up the northeast-jutting coast of the US to avoid New England being in its own timezone. [Edit: It wouldn't be in its own timezone; it would be in Atlantic time, which i…
> kids going to school in the dark in the winter
Daylight Savings Time can’t fix that in most places either.
Where I live, right now (today), sun rises around 8am, and sets around 4pm.
Kids will go to school around 7:20, and come back home around 15h.
In mid december, it’s even worse – most people never see the sun during that time.
Re: Time zone news
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
All space time clocks may run at GMT+00 with no regional differences. Actually we may remove time zones all together too. So the day time of 3pm will be different everywhere. For calendar months and seasons we already have it like that, in both hemispheres. The only issue is backward incompatibility with legacy movies, books who talk about breakfast at 8am. Similarly, a love song which talks about April/May being a s…
Oh no, it's much worse than that. On Earth you can generally treat time as being the same speed everywhere. If you start a timer at T1 UTC and run it for a locally observed 60 seconds you can expect the current UTC time to be T1+60 seconds. In space relativistic effects stop being negligible and you might find that UTC time is T1+61 seconds.
Or you can change the relative speed with which it tracks its time. Smearing is already used for additional seconds, it should be possible to be used here, too.