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Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

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Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#41

Post by pavel_lishin »

dhughes wrote: post #22
GiraffeNecktie wrote: post #18

China also maintains the same time year round.

Yes but for the entire country! That's a lot of real estate under one time zone, it may be silly to have summer and winter times but having one time zone for a country approximately the same size as Canada (5,000km wide) seems silly, Canada has six time zones.

> having one time zone for a country approximately the same size as Canada (5,000km wide) seems silly

Why?

In America, people already get up at 7am (insert your own time here, obviously) regardless of what the local sunrise actually is - which varies based on how far north or south you live.

It's pretty arbitrary. But one time zone at least makes the arbitraryness easier on coders.

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#42

Post by weinzierl »

nathanb wrote: post #20

I think the title of this post is incorrect; they're not abolishing DST, they're permanently moving to DST.

I'd rather say that they are changing their time zone from UTC+3 to UTC+4. It's not that they will have permanent DST, but rather standard time is now UTC+3 and will be UTC+4.

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#43

Post by kinofcain »

furyg3 wrote: post #28

Can we all just have a 24 hour clock based on GMT, no other timezones, and no daylight savings time? It seems a whole lot easier to change our time format just once and get used to it... instead of half of us changing the clocks twice a year, the other not, drawing all these weird lines all over (grumble India grumble), and keeping track of it all.

The problem is, if you ever need to deal with events before the Big Switchover to 24-hour time, you'd still need to have all the knowledge of previous zone boundaries, offsets and seasonal rules. Any 24 hour time still has to handle leap years and leap seconds.

Time is a pain in the ass.

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#44

Post by rue »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #31
evgen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One timezone covering enough longitudinal variation to want five timezones is a dumb idea. Doing the same thing in a country with enough east-west span to cover ten timezones would be an incredibly dumb idea.

What, why? Does waking up at 6 have any different intrinsic value than waking up a 3.5 or 11 ? Ever since time zones, there hasn't been an intrinsic meaning to time (who uses sun dials?) We should all just be on the same time, the whole world around.

Indeed. It can also be explained as a matter of simple efficiency: Currently when synchronising something, two pieces of information must be known (the time, and the timezone). If using a single timezone, only one is required (whether it's night or day at either end is inconsequential, only the party at that end really needs to worry about it and can provide a range of hours suitable to them).

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#45

Post by drdaeman »

furyg3 wrote: post #28

Can we all just have a 24 hour clock based on GMT, no other timezones, and no daylight savings time? It seems a whole lot easier to change our time format just once and get used to it... instead of half of us changing the clocks twice a year, the other not, drawing all these weird lines all over (grumble India grumble), and keeping track of it all.

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.

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#46

Post by zeteo »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #37
furyg3 wrote: post #28

Can we all just have a 24 hour clock based on GMT, no other timezones, and no daylight savings time? It seems a whole lot easier to change our time format just once and get used to it... instead of half of us changing the clocks twice a year, the other not, drawing all these weird lines all over (grumble India grumble), and keeping track of it all.

No! Even better! "Metric time" - a minute has 100 seconds, an hour 100 minutes, a day is 10 hours (100,000 seconds). Makes perfect sense on a space station so we'll have to face it sooner or later.

Well while we're at it, what's the fetish with 10? We should use powers of 2 for everything :)

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#47

Post by ig1 »

weinzierl wrote: post #29
ig1 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Every piece of software that deals with time in any kind of sophistication needs to have logic to handle it. I used to work on a share price alerting system where you could say "if the price of stock X goes up by 10% during these hours than alert me", that creates a nightmare when it comes to DST changes. Do you use the timezone of the person who setup that alert (what if they're now in a different timezone do yo…

Unix-like systems like Linux and OSX handle that very well. The hardware real time clock ticks in UTC, file timestamps and the like are stored in UTC. The OS knows everything about time zones and DST and therefore can display the time the way you expect it.

Current time is only a small part of time handling, practically every crontab implementation handles DST differently due to the ambiguity in the posix standard which just states that time stamps have to be in local time taking no account that this can mean a scheduled task can incorrectly get run twice or never.

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#48

Post by rue »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #37
furyg3 wrote: post #28

Can we all just have a 24 hour clock based on GMT, no other timezones, and no daylight savings time? It seems a whole lot easier to change our time format just once and get used to it... instead of half of us changing the clocks twice a year, the other not, drawing all these weird lines all over (grumble India grumble), and keeping track of it all.

No! Even better! "Metric time" - a minute has 100 seconds, an hour 100 minutes, a day is 10 hours (100,000 seconds). Makes perfect sense on a space station so we'll have to face it sooner or later.

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.

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#49

Post by rottencupcakes »

rue wrote: post #44
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, why? Does waking up at 6 have any different intrinsic value than waking up a 3.5 or 11 ? Ever since time zones, there hasn't been an intrinsic meaning to time (who uses sun dials?) We should all just be on the same time, the whole world around.

Indeed. It can also be explained as a matter of simple efficiency: Currently when synchronising something, two pieces of information must be known (the time, and the timezone). If using a single timezone, only one is required (whether it's night or day at either end is inconsequential, only the party at that end really needs to worry about it and can provide a range of hours suitable to them).

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 fluctuation instead of a strictly maintained standard. I still need to maintain timezone information, but I ALSO need to do math in my head to figure out if it is an appropriate time to go to a certain kind of store.

Re: Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

#50

Post by exit »

drdaeman wrote: post #45
furyg3 wrote: post #28

Can we all just have a 24 hour clock based on GMT, no other timezones, and no daylight savings time? It seems a whole lot easier to change our time format just once and get used to it... instead of half of us changing the clocks twice a year, the other not, drawing all these weird lines all over (grumble India grumble), and keeping track of it all.

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.

your second point seems interchangeable with the difficulty of knowing what timezone some random location falls into.

i think it might be slightly worse in that "solar noon"-zones would stick to straight bands.

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