291–300 of 321 posts
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How do you update the tzdb?
It looks like it's embedded in the PostgreSQL source, tho I imagine there's probably also a way to update it without upgrading PostgreSQL itself: - [postgres/src/timezone at master · postgres/postgres]( https://github.com/postgres/postgres/tree/master/src/timezon... )
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The goal is to always keep UTC within one second of UT1. Short of very drastic events I don't think it will ever be neccessary to introduce more than one leapseconds in a fairly long time interval. And even if it was, I would think that they would do seperate leapseconds events some time apart.
The Earth's rotation is slowing down. In a few hundred years with the current system, we will need more than 1 leap second per 6 months. How many centuries is hard to tell, since it is affected by many things, including global warming.
> The Happy Monday System, which honestly I just loved based on the name of it alone. Shows how Japan has moved their holidays schedules around just to make people happier with a longer weekend. In countries with significant amounts of legal leaves (e.g. most of europe), tuesdays and thursdays are also very nice as "burning" a single leave day provides for a 4 days weekend (and 3 days week). French even has an expres…
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But then people will notice a few decades later that noon in UTC-minus-leap-seconds is not noon.
But it _is_ noon. You are probably thinking of sun transit time, "solar noon", the moment in each day when the sun appears to be "highest" in the sky. This varies of course by position on the Earth, it's how people set "noon" when they didn't need to agree with anybody more than a horse ride's distance away what the time was. So, let's say at least 200 years or more ago. Do you know when solar noon is where you live…
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We spent weeks on this for our new conference calling app to determine when a user says "Setup a call at 10am for my group every week" that come October 29th 2018 the call takes place at 10am, not 9am following a DST change. After a heckuva lotta research and reading we determined that we needed to store the scheduled meeting time using two values; the local datetime and the desired timezone eg. scheduledAt: 2018-05-…
Yep, that's my conclusion too: storing timestamps for events in the past and up to present time - unix timestamp with optional tzid, and re-calculate local time formatting from scratch for display every time. Events in the future, do the opposite: store as yyyymmddhhiiss + tzid, and re-calculate utc from scratch for calculations every time. As a rule of thumb, at least.
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How does that fail? I have an integer for an appointment. I am at that appointment at that given integer. This applies for all timezones. If the timezone changes, the integer does not. What you are saying is that the timezone changes and the integer changes aswell, but then it's not the same appointment anymore.
Your integer is wrong because it was computed by translating from the current offset of the timezone. What we are saying is that the timezone definition might change in the future (ex. Government no longer honor DST). At that point when you translate back your timestamp into local time it no longer matches the original schedule that the user set.
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The Earth's rotation is slowing down. In a few hundred years with the current system, we will need more than 1 leap second per 6 months. How many centuries is hard to tell, since it is affected by many things, including global warming.
source?
But internal changes in the Earth can also cause changes in the rotation period. For instance the 2011 Tohoku earthquake shortened the day by 1.8 us [1].
[1] https://www.earthobservatory.sg/blog/how-did-2011-tohoku-ear...
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> 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?" https://qntm.org/abolish
No one has to be pissed off, they will slowly adjust and learn. Eventually people will only think in UTC. If that never happens then, leave both times. I think over time people will develop an intuitive sense of UTC the same way we do now for timezones but we lose all of the issues with having more than one truth. There is no way to solve that problem of Uncle Steve (imo). But there is no difference in saying Steve i…
Your idea will not work. Here is why:
(X) "7am" is a social construct
(X) social constructs are actually very important
(X) the day of the week shouldn't change in the middle of the solar day
(X) this would further ambiguate the word "day"
(X) local "midnight" should be the middle of the local night
(X) timetables would become unreadable
(X) nobody would agree to pick your time zone over theirs
(X) how will I know when I can call you?
(X) time zones exist specifically to resolve the problems with that scheme
Specifically, your plan fails to account for:
(X) humans
(X) rational hatred for arbitrary change
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) sorry, but I don't think it would work
(X) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it
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No one has to be pissed off, they will slowly adjust and learn. Eventually people will only think in UTC. If that never happens then, leave both times. I think over time people will develop an intuitive sense of UTC the same way we do now for timezones but we lose all of the issues with having more than one truth. There is no way to solve that problem of Uncle Steve (imo). But there is no difference in saying Steve i…
https://qntm.org/calendar Your idea will not work. Here is why: (X) "7am" is a social construct (X) social constructs are actually very important (X) the day of the week shouldn't change in the middle of the solar day (X) this would further ambiguate the word "day" (X) local "midnight" should be the middle of the local night (X) timetables would become unreadable (X) nobody would agree to pick your time zone over the…
Why ruin a good post with that last, grossly inappropriate line?