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Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

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Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#181

Post by coldpie »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #171
IgorPartola wrote: post #149

I know this is a popular sentiment here but it bears repeating: timezones need to go away. Time according to timezones measures the position of the sun. Except when we clearly decide with daylight savings time that we don’t care about the position of the sun, we just want it to be a certain time. When the sun is directly over NYC it is usually 1pm or 2pm, depending on time of year, but 5pm or 6pm in London. Why? Are…

May I recommend you read this article titled "So You Want To Abolish Time Zones"? https://qntm.org/abolish

I like the point of this article, but it takes a very long, winding, roundabout way to get there. I wish there was a better written article we could copy-paste when people make this suggestion.

I guess what I mean is, I should write one.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#182

Post by ninalanyon »

Horffupolde wrote: post #134
fouronnes3 wrote: post #24

What I like about the tz database is that's it's technically a diff of a diff. It stores the difference across history, of the difference of each timezone with UTC. Right? So it's a diff^2. But! The tz database gets updates! So those commits are diffs of diffs of diffs, or diff^3. Can we go further? You bet! It has a changelog, and that changelog is stored in git, so commits to the tz changelog are diff^4: they are c…

A diff of a diff is just 2 diff. It’s not a product of diffs.

Spoilsport!

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#183

Post by ta1243 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #156
aniforprez wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you can propose a proper way to locally represent time where a person is currently present in relation to the position of the sun then no, time zones will never go away. I know time zones suck for us as programmers but it's a practical way to separate different regions that will experience different times of day differently. As long as we have clocks and times with "midnight"s and "noon"s, time zones will exis…

Just because you personally are used to a specific type of clock doesn’t mean you can’t imagine a different kind. Submarines use 24 hour clocks and give no hecks about where the sun is. The solution is to just use UTC. That’s it. That means in NYC you’d get to work at 13:00 and go home at 21:00, which used to be 9am-5pm. That’s it. Your whole transition has been completed. The rest is just what your calendar says. Ni…

OK, you're in LA. You finish work at 2300 on Monday.

You have plans to go to the theatre on Tuesday after work.

Is that 0100 on Tuesday (after finishing at 2300 on Monday) or 0100 on Wednesday (after finishing at 2300 on Tuesday)

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#184

Post by aquova »

hprotagonist wrote: post #96
guidedlight wrote: post #18

Nah, the weirdest time zone is Africa/Addis_Ababa, which nobody in Ethiopia follows. Instead the locals offset the time by 6 hours. So the AM cycle starts at dawn (i.e. 6am), and the PM cycle starts at dusk (i.e. 6pm). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ethiopia

Ethiopian time keeping is peculiar all over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_calendar The Ethiopian calendar has twelve months, all thirty days long, and five or six epagomenal days, which form a thirteenth month.

I'm actually quite a fan of perennial calendars like that, I think the Ethiopian calendar is a much more logical system than the Gregorian system.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#185

Post by tankenmate »

cube00 wrote: post #122
tankenmate wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well assuming that the gates don't move timezones. But obviously jobs that need to run for a given timezone should be configured to run in that timezone.

Unless the gates need to open at 2:30am and in the case of daylight savings time that hour is skipped.

Not if that cron file (you can have multiple cron files per user/system) is configured to run in the local timezone.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#186

Post by ta1243 »

michaelt wrote: post #157
IgorPartola wrote: post #149

I know this is a popular sentiment here but it bears repeating: timezones need to go away. Time according to timezones measures the position of the sun. Except when we clearly decide with daylight savings time that we don’t care about the position of the sun, we just want it to be a certain time. When the sun is directly over NYC it is usually 1pm or 2pm, depending on time of year, but 5pm or 6pm in London. Why? Are…

> Timezones are 19th century thinking. We can do better. That's why I only use Swatch™ Internet Beats [1] for timekeeping. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a @583.32 meeting to get to. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

Meetings tend to start at most at quarter-hour intervales, or about 1/100th of a day.

If everyone used swatch times meetings would tend to start at intervals of 20, or maybe tens. Your meeting would start at @580 and last until @600 rather than 1300 to 1330 or whatever.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#188

Post by IgorPartola »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #171
IgorPartola wrote: post #149

I know this is a popular sentiment here but it bears repeating: timezones need to go away. Time according to timezones measures the position of the sun. Except when we clearly decide with daylight savings time that we don’t care about the position of the sun, we just want it to be a certain time. When the sun is directly over NYC it is usually 1pm or 2pm, depending on time of year, but 5pm or 6pm in London. Why? Are…

May I recommend you read this article titled "So You Want To Abolish Time Zones"? https://qntm.org/abolish

Look at it from the other direction for a moment: say we started with universal time. The whole world used UTC. Now try suggesting timezones. The idea would look absolutely insane. It would be a non-starter discussion.

On the other hand the transition from timezones to UTC has some challenges but the idea itself is very worth considering. What does this tell you?

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#189

Post by angrygoat »

prmoustache wrote: post #14

In my opinion, the best way to see it is not to pretend their are weird timezones. It is not because most of the world do summer time and that when they do they have a 1h transitions that we should take it for granted. This article do not mention the Chatham Standard Time Zone from Chatham Islands archipelago in NZ which is 45 minutes ahead of New Zealand Daylight Time, nor the Central Western Standard Time (Australi…

The great thing about Australia/Eucla is that it’s not officially gazetted, and yet there are road signs informing travellers about it. I love that people just do it and everyone goes along

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#190

Post by [deleted] »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #24

What I like about the tz database is that's it's technically a diff of a diff. It stores the difference across history, of the difference of each timezone with UTC. Right? So it's a diff^2. But! The tz database gets updates! So those commits are diffs of diffs of diffs, or diff^3. Can we go further? You bet! It has a changelog, and that changelog is stored in git, so commits to the tz changelog are diff^4: they are c…

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