101–110 of 122 posts
That's a great precedent! I hope the US abandons winter time, too.
Lousy farmers...
She said we shouldn't adopt DST because the extra hour of sunlight - and I quote directly here - would "fade the curtains".
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But 12 only gains you one more factor that's not a power of 2, and is 30 times more difficult to implement (operation tables have 144 cells for base 12, compared to 4 cells for base 2).
That's why you should use the digits -n/2 to +n/2 for base n. That shrinks the tables by a factor of four.
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This is absolutely incorrect. Except in the singular example of arranging telecommunication across timezones, you have to maintain MORE information under this system. When I currently travel, I can make the assumption that any restaurant will be open by 11 AM, that I have to check out of my hotel by 11 AM and that I can't check in until 3 PM. In your system, standard store hours have become a random regional fluctuat…
You obviously don't travel much. There is huge variation in these sorts of things worldwide. See, for example, http://www.spanish-town-guides.com/Opening_Hours.htm
o Restaurants open at 11:00 AM.
o You check out of your hotel no earlier than 11:00 AM
o You can check in at 3:00 PM.
But, I don't think I've ever been to a country where the checkin/checkout/restaurant opening wasn't generally true.
Admittedly, I haven't been to the "One Time Zone China" - that might throw my theory out the door...
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Most of us have 10 fingers, which makes counting easy (although you can count to 12/20/24/40 on your fingers too, I admit).
Why stop there? Lets have base 1024, you can count to that on your fingers too! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_binary
I've tried to explain it to people before, but we never manage to count past four without someone laughing.
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First, most humans are extremly reluctant to any changes. You see, US are still using imperial units and Fahrenheit scale. Second, timezones are used for globally-recognizable time of a day. No matter where you are on Earth, 08:00 (by 24-hour scale) is certainly in the morning, and 20:00 is evening.
Even China, which is officially on one timezone, has local "un-official" timezone.
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You obviously don't travel much. There is huge variation in these sorts of things worldwide. See, for example, http://www.spanish-town-guides.com/Opening_Hours.htm
Which of the three isn't (generally) true all over the world: o Restaurants open at 11:00 AM. o You check out of your hotel no earlier than 11:00 AM o You can check in at 3:00 PM. Certainly different hotels allow things like Early Checkin (I've checked in as early as 8:00 AM in hotels with a lot of vacancy), and late checkout (most hotels will let you check out at 12:00, and for a small fee, 1:00 is usually no proble…
Restaurant opening hours vary dramatically by country, largely due people tending to eat at very different times in different countries. To pick a restaurant I walked past yesterday: http://www.restaurant-thierry.fr/index.php?p=contact — open 12pm–3pm and 7pm–11pm. From my experience here those lunchtime hours are fairly common, although more restaurants would open earlier than than in the evening (unlike Spain, where lots of restaurants don't open until at least 9pm or 10pm at night).
On the assumption that #2 is "no later than", then where there's consistency at all it would be noon, rather than 11am.
Check-in has almost no consistency at all. I'm currently in France, and lots of the hotels I've been looking at have a 6pm earliest check-in. Many others are noon or 1pm. I haven't seen one yet that's 3pm.
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http://decimalti.me There's a few ways to do it: as you can see, I like to use the 1/100 as the base unit (it's a little under 15 minutes in current reckoning) and go decimal beyond that since you have a neat percentage as a result, and you can drop off precision as needed.
We often (jokingly) measure time in kiloseconds around my office. As rue points out, that's just a bit over fifteen minutes, so its actually a useful unit. "See you in the conference room in 2 ksecs..." Put a bunch of geeks together too long and this is what happens.
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The US DST change in 2007 cost an estimated $500 million to $1 billion: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0307/p02s01-stct.html DST has cost me many hours spent debugging. I will be very happy if/when it is abolished in the US.
Because then the bugs will be rarer and even harder to find, as they'll be caused by interfacing with DST systems when yours isn't.
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Actually the farmers in my family have to reprogram their clocks twice a year to avoid DST, since cows are incredibly sensitive to their milking schedule and the twice-a-year hourly shift really screws with the herd. I would go so far as to say that farmers hate DST more than programmers/sysadmins do.
Why do farmers bother they cows with DST, then? Can't they just get up at the same (real) time?
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First, most humans are extremly reluctant to any changes. You see, US are still using imperial units and Fahrenheit scale. Second, timezones are used for globally-recognizable time of a day. No matter where you are on Earth, 08:00 (by 24-hour scale) is certainly in the morning, and 20:00 is evening.
Even China, which is officially on one timezone, has local "un-official" timezone.