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Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

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Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#381

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

tuoret wrote: post #109
rozenmd wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like pretty timeless content to me.

There's a couple of things that made me think the article was way older than it actually is (and made me mildly irritated that it doesn't include the publication date). First off, the author starts off by talking about GMT and goes on to educate the reader how UTC is actually the current standard. Maybe it's just me but I thought this would be common knowledge by now, while the author frames this as some sort of a re…

Leap seconds are also set to be removed eventually. UTC will become UT1 with a fixed offset, at least until enough seconds add up for the BIPM to care about the offset and insert a leap minute or hour or something TBD.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#382

Post by zokier »

michaelt wrote: post #26
squiggleblaz wrote: post #19

I kind of thing a half hour daylight savings difference instead of an hour is a pretty low bar for the weirdest timezone. Almost any of the others are weirder: Antarctica/Troll definitely sounds weirder. The Moroccan and Gazan timezones that can't be expressed by the system as it was written because at least that means that they have some different kind of a rule, even if lunar time is well known. Same with the ones…

> But I do agree with leap seconds: it's absolute trivia, not a useful thing for a programmer to know. By and large, I agree with this. But I've always found it a bit funny when a large organisation [1] says "our servers have sub-millisecond timing accuracy, thanks to GPS synchronization and these PCIe rubidium atomic clock cards we've developed" while at the same time saying [2] "we smear leapseconds over the course…

I think the irony comes to full circle when you then use `unsmear` library to reverse the leap smearing in ntp

https://github.com/google/unsmear

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#383

Post by IggleSniggle »

antod wrote: post #337
IggleSniggle wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not odd as in a more unusual system, but odd in that it is widely incompatible with the calendar of most of the world, but still official calendar. Kinda like the Kodak calendar (which was instead 13 28-day months (364 days), and iirc does the off-day adjustments over the corporate winter holiday...actually pretty reasonable)

Not reasonable at all... it's Corporate Summer Holiday around here.

You take that back!

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#384

Post by dfc »

lozf wrote: post #298
dfc wrote: post #97

Does anyone understand what was meant by "This is because almost every standard (except ISO8601, whatever) is just a file, and you can read it." Initially I thought it was because the PDF of ISO-8601 is not a file commonly distributed with operating system. But that's not unique to ISO8601, you won't find IEEE 1588-2019 or NMEA 0183 v4.11 on your computer either. For ~20$ I think I can buy a PDF of the standard from…

> For ~20$ I think I can buy a PDF of the standard from ISO. You might find most standards for ~20 USD, but ISO8601 direct from iso.org will set you back 173 CHF (~200 USD) for part 1¹, 194 CHF (~220 USD) for part 2². For $20 you get only the latest amendments from them. Meanwhile the Estonians will gladly sell you their version of part 1 for just under 30 USD.³ ¹: https://www.iso.org/standard/70907.html ²: https://w…

Thank you. I was a little surprised by the price but I guess I naively hoped it was a change of heart from big standards.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#385

Post by zokier »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #381
tuoret wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a couple of things that made me think the article was way older than it actually is (and made me mildly irritated that it doesn't include the publication date). First off, the author starts off by talking about GMT and goes on to educate the reader how UTC is actually the current standard. Maybe it's just me but I thought this would be common knowledge by now, while the author frames this as some sort of a re…

Leap seconds are also set to be removed eventually. UTC will become UT1 with a fixed offset, at least until enough seconds add up for the BIPM to care about the offset and insert a leap minute or hour or something TBD.

> UTC will become UT1 with a fixed offset

I'm not sure what you mean, but this sounds wrong. The whole thing about leap second abolishment is to effectively disconnect UTC from UT1, i.e. allow DUT1 to grow unbounded and make UTC a fixed offset of TAI.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#386

Post by layer8 »

ascorbic wrote: post #357
layer8 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly could if they had started that way, but changing it now will disadvantage at least one of the countries (Spain for example), and those countries’ politicians don’t want to risk the ire of their voters for the greater good. And DST is regulated on the EU level, so can’t be changed by individual EU members without breaking EU law, like apparently individual US states can. It’s status quo bias and loss av…

Spain should take the opportunity to move to WET like Portugal

They have more economic relations with the rest of the CET countries combined, so it’s more beneficial to stay in the same time zone.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#387

Post by zokier »

jmbwell wrote: post #282

Those interested in this kind of pedantry might also take care to note that it’s called “daylight saving time,” with no “s.” It is a system of time for saving daylight. It is not a sales event promising “savings.” Frustrating to read an otherwise excellent and detailed article that makes this error throughout.

Both forms are widely used and accepted. Wikipedia has whole section about that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#Terminolo...

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#388

Post by tankenmate »

sib wrote: post #314
tankenmate wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But then wouldn't the job run twice when time "falls back"?

no, it would run either twice at the "same time" as it is read out, but obviously 60 minutes apart time duration wise; but this can't be helped as this time "existed" twice in that time zone. Or conversely in spring that time wouldn't happen at all, but the cron job will still run 60 minutes apart time duration wise. But this is the downside of local time, just make sure if you want to open a door at 01:30 local time that that is what you really want, because the unintended consequences could be a bit strange.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#389

Post by lizmat »

autarch wrote: post #348

> It’s not like programming languages support representing 61-second minutes anyway This is not true. Someone already noted that Raku supports leap seconds. I think this may be partly my fault, because Perl 5's most popular datetime library, `DateTime.pm`, supports leap seconds. It's my fault because I created `DateTime.pm` and implemented its leap seconds support. In retrospect, this was almost certainly a mistake.…

Raku has the [Instant](https://docs.raku.org/type/Instant) class:

"An Instant is a particular moment in time measured in atomic seconds, with fractions. It is not tied to or aware of any epoch."

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#390

Post by Cyphase »

FateOfNations wrote: post #108
imrejonk wrote: post #39

I find it slightly ironic that a blog that’s educating (and entertaining) us on time and timezones does not itself mention when its blogposts were published, at least on mobile. This one appears to have been published in the summer of 2024.

For a while (currently?) there was SEO "wisdom" going around about not putting dates on content so that search engines would treat the content as "evergreen" rather than "stale".

There's a related trend of updating the publish date so it's always today, or recent.
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