This article is inspirational.
UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?
201–210 of 321 posts
Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?
#202This is tougher to get then time in general relativity...
I always figured if spacetime was relative, why don't we just report the location we are at and that local time? If I know I was in Lower Manhattan at 2:00pm on November 19th, 2007, somebody else can just do a little math to figure out when that actually was compared to their own local time and place. All times are interpretive. UTC just seems like a giant hack to try to avoid the interpretation.
Who's clock is correct though.
Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?
#203Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?
#204So the article seems to imply you should store all timestamps as UTC (with an additional timezone string ID). But for events in the future that needs to happen on a specific "wall clock point in time", it might be better to actually store the yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss as a string with a timezone next to it, because timezones can and do change often unpredictably. If you pre-calculate what "4.00pm next August 1st" is as a U…
> "wall clock point in time" The tricky thing to realize is that this is not a datetime. This is more of a contract/condition saying "when localtime will be at this value" or better yet "when localtime will have exceeded this value for the first time" because you know someone will put a date on a leap second or missing DST hour at one point.
It depends on the application and what the customer need is.
My son’s friend in school was born on February 29. We could go through the time pedantry and claim that she is 1 year old (she is 6), or pick an arbritrary moment in time (say March 1, except for leap year) and get on with the party.
If you’re plotting a satellite course, the details matter, but many, if not most use cases require consistency over precision.
Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?
#205Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?
#206If you want a technical audience to read your page, get rid of the videos and unnecessary animations.
> It’s so predictable that developers will pooh-pooh having to write timezone code, almost as much as it is predictable that some clueless commenter on Hacker News will complain that this page has autoplaying video on it. And then someone will calmly quote this passage in response, quietly pleased with themselves that the initial commenter was rude and certainly didn’t read the post at all. Then a third person will c…
The author played us all like a fiddle.
Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another example of confusing user-intent is "last X days". I.e Does "Last 2 days" indicate: A. Last 48 hours? B. Yesterday + Today up to now C. Yesterday + the day before.
Even something as simple as "tomorrow" can be ambiguous. I often ask my phone to set a reminder for tomorrow. If I'm asking after midnight, what I really mean is "today" since I haven't gone to sleep yet. Google seems to get this right, thankfully.
> Google seems to get this right, thankfully.
Gets it right for you. If I mean today, I say today. This is especially true when I'm talking to a computer.
Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?
#208Sadly I didn't have enough time to read the whole article... But I wish we could all just use one time. For some, midday would be 12, and for others it might be 19, but we already all use the same dates regardless of whether February is winter for one location or summer for another.
I completely agree. It isn't like we don't deal with this already planning a flight to/from Vegas or having a call with someone on the other coast. Plus we can also get rid of the abomination that is daylight savings. I think there is a simple plan that isn't disruptive. Simply require that all times be listed in both formats. For example, 9:00 am EDT (13:00 UTC) for all printed times on all signs, etc. moving forwar…
> Eventually, we can drop the first as people adjust.
This doesn't help in any way, shape or form. You have pissed off billions of people who have had to re-learn custom times for things, you have caused the weekday to flip in the middle of the day for billions of people, and you STILL haven't solved the problem of "Can I call Uncle Steve in Melbourne, or is he sleeping right now?"
Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 12ths are handy enough that we have a special word for “12 of something” (dozen) even though our numbering system is decimal. My understanding is that the etymology of dozen is originally traced back to duodecim (Latin for twelve) via French dozeine. Which is interesting, but doesn't really explain why it's special beyond your observation that it's a highly composite, but comfortably small, number.
It's special because we don't have a word for, e.g., "13 of something", say, "trezen".
> It's special because we don't have a word for, e.g., "13 of something", say, "trezen".
Hmm, how about 14 of something?
You have a fortnight to respond. Though if you take about a sennight longer to think about it, you'll still get a good score.
Re: UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?
#210"Physicists are still debating on whether or not time actually exists in the universe."
I'm not aware of any physicists debating this. If time didn't exist, there wouldn't be a physical dimension for it, and everything would be at a fixed position in 3-dimensional space.