41–50 of 85 posts
I always joke that time zones and character encodings more or less guarantee programmers will always be able to find jobs.
If we got rid of DST and didn't change the rules too often, time zones wouldn't really be that big of a deal.
Is 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.
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…
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I wish people would quit repeating the farmer myth. No farmer I have met wants daylight savings time. Look at Indiana for some perspective. Farm animals do not have watches.
Farm animals do not have watches. As a parent: Neither do small children.
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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.
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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.
I'd vote for time being defined in terms of some universally observable phenomenon. Say the rate of cooling of the CMB. Anyone with a super spiffy radio telescope anywhere in the universe could then tell what time it is.
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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.
It's really primarily useful when you have enough light for long summer evenings and winter days that are short but are still long enough that it makes sense to fine-tune sunrise and sunset relative to normal work and school times.
Is 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.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
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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.
One second can be a big deal.