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Timezone Bullshit

blog.wesleyac.com

281–290 of 334 posts

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#281
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, your applications don't have user input asking for a time?

We do have one case where we do have to capture the hour of day for an IT activity. In this situation, we present the UI in the timezone configured by the customer's server and additionally display this timezone information in the UI as reference/confirmation for the user. Once the user submits their input in terms of server-local time, we immediately convert it to UTC for storage in our system. Note that because we…

> I still don't understand the arguments about a future date requiring a timezone.

It's not that a future date requires a time zone, you are right that can be 100% represented with a fixed timestamp. But there is the extreme case that time zone rules may change from the time you schedule the event to the time it happens, and in that case your event is now at the wrong time.

Consider the case where you have a weekly meeting at 9:00 AM on Tuesdays in an America/Chicago office. You could surely calculate the next N weeks of meetings and save them as UTC timestamps, taking into account that we shift into daylight savings time at some point, so you end up with a nice list of timestamps at 9:00 local time. But if the time zone rules change at any point (say, Chicago decides not to observe daylight savings time any more), now all of your meetings are an hour off.

If you had saved the meetings in a more verbose but true-to-intent format that properly captures "Every Tuesday at 9:00 AM America/Chicago", then at the time those rules changed you would either automatically have updated meeting timestamps, or some consolidation process could go and update the meeting times.

Even without sweeping changes like that, we still have unscheduled leap seconds, minutes, etc. every once in a while, which will also mess up your timestamps. I'm actually excited to see the day my calendar somehow ends up with a meeting at exactly 9:00:01.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#282
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For once pretty much no one is aware of this supposed change. There was like a couple of articles on the day it was voted and that's it. This will 100% not happen, it's another one of those things that the EU parliament votes that everyone ignores, and it's perfect ammunition for those complaining that it makes laws without popular consultation. Trying to go forward with this change will generate massive anti EU back…

> it makes laws without popular consultation That's not accurate. > This online consultation, which ran from 4 July to 16 August 2018, received 4.6 million responses from all 28 Member States, the highest number of responses ever received in any Commission public consultation. According to the preliminary results (see annex), 84% of respondents are in favour of putting an end to the bi-annual clock change.

In other words, an internet poll in which less than 1% of the population participated, 2/3 of which were from Germany.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#283
post #106
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> And then you have the UK problem. Having variable time offsets between EU and UK would add yet another layer of disruption on top of Brexit. It's worse than just EU/UK offset. You would have Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in different timezones.

Portugal and Spain manage it, but it would be extremely contentius among around half of the NI community.

Issues with the NI/IE border are always delicate, due to obvious reasons in the recent past. Let's say Portugal and Spain's quarrels are much much farther in the past!

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closer one is to the poles, the more the number of hours of daylight shifts over the seasons. So at/near the equator, in a place like Panama, you will get roughly 12 hours of daylight in both the December and June Solstices. * https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/panama/panama Whereas in the Edinburgh you go from having 7 hours of daylight in December to over 17 hours in June: * https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/edin…

The infuriating thing is that our solution to this is to change the clock instead of just changing our schedules. It's completely ridiculous.

Times get written down or otherwise recorded, it would be a lot of work to update or duplicate entries for opening hours on signs and websites, times in laws, and various other things to account for the time of year. Instead we can just update the clock and have all the references preserved.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#285
Rather than discrete time zones my ideal would be a continuous system which keeps sunrise at the same local time every day, backed by a universal coordinate system like UTC. "Dumb" clocks are set to UTC, "smart" clocks show local time and adjust daily. Sunrise at 8am, just go to bed at the end of the day (midnight) and you'll get a full rest. Call it Adjusted Local Time or something.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#286
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, your applications don't have user input asking for a time?

We do have one case where we do have to capture the hour of day for an IT activity. In this situation, we present the UI in the timezone configured by the customer's server and additionally display this timezone information in the UI as reference/confirmation for the user. Once the user submits their input in terms of server-local time, we immediately convert it to UTC for storage in our system. Note that because we…

> I still don't understand the arguments about a future date requiring a timezone.

A future event at local time requires a location, because the timezone may yet change at that location. Suppose we meet Nov 1st 2017 in Istanbul and decide to repeat this the year after. We agree to meet again Nov 1st 2018 in Istanbul 10:00 local time. This meeting would have been projected to happen at UTC 8:00, because Turkey was scheduled to switch to UTC+2 on October 30 2018.

However, the government decided to not change the timezone and stay on UTC+3. So our meeting, being scheduled for 10:00 local time, would move from UTC 8:00 to UTC 7:00 at the stroke of a pen. If your software had recorded UTC time, it would be ignorant of this change and consequently it would show the meeting at 11:00 local time. You'd be one hour late.

This change in the tz DB is a little window into the questionable cultural achievement that is local time: https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/e15ef79a603a2fba89ad8f38...

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer the sun out when I'm awake.

Yes? The sun is out in the morning for sure.

Don't tell them the USA tried yearly DST in 1976 and people hated it, resulting in no yearly DST coming back with all its issues. No sun in the morning sucks more than no sun in the evening.

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#288

Rather than discrete time zones my ideal would be a continuous system which keeps sunrise at the same local time every day, backed by a universal coordinate system like UTC. "Dumb" clocks are set to UTC, "smart" clocks show local time and adjust daily. Sunrise at 8am, just go to bed at the end of the day (midnight) and you'll get a full rest. Call it Adjusted Local Time or something.

everything is discrete if you look fine enough. locally (household-fine) what you say would be nice, however the moment you start travelling informational nightmares would ensue due to human nature, nobody (in the grand scheme) would use the UTC time since local is more useful/frequent so all travellers need translators which can seamlessly translate local time to be as useful as current narional timezones are. such a translator would either be manually preprogrammed(cumbersome) or GPS, computer-powered which brings its own troubles. I think countrywide(as in european country or american state) is a pretty good scale tradedoff between ease of use and accuracy which is here to stay until GPS and computation are ubiquitous(as in every grandma has access to a smart device with GPS she can leave on all day and can be read as easily as a wall clock while having dough all over her hands) sorriez for wall of text :)

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#289
I can't call someone in India without looking up their timezone and figuring out if they are at work or still sound asleep. Time zones made sense when the only people we could talk to lived close by.

Why not just use one universal time? At least we would know what time to agree on when planing a call. If I already have to look up the time zone in India before I call, it wouldn't be any harder to look up when people in India go to work or have lunch.

While we are at it I think we should move to a decimal time system. 100 seconds in minute, 100 minutes in hour, and 10 hours in a day. Naturally the second would be a bit shorter; the new seconds would be .864 current seconds. Then meetings could be scheduled in tenths of an hour, 0.2 hrs or 0.5 hrs etc.

We'd have to give this new world wide system a name, so that old time wouldn't be confused with new ones. I suggest saying something like 5.00-T8T (which stands for Todd8 Time) perfect!

Re: Timezone Bullshit

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closer one is to the poles, the more the number of hours of daylight shifts over the seasons. So at/near the equator, in a place like Panama, you will get roughly 12 hours of daylight in both the December and June Solstices. * https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/panama/panama Whereas in the Edinburgh you go from having 7 hours of daylight in December to over 17 hours in June: * https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/edin…

The infuriating thing is that our solution to this is to change the clock instead of just changing our schedules. It's completely ridiculous.

No, the worst is that date outputs wrong data without error. Wrong input is silently ignored, and the output 3 letter code is also wrong. Bug report pending
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