41–50 of 174 posts
Not the worst example I've heard. In 2016 the Haitian president canceled daylight savings by decree two days before the changeover. I was flying out of the country the morning after the change, and had a really hard time explaining to airline customer service (who hadn't gotten the memo) what exactly the problem was. "When does my flight leave?" "At the scheduled time." "According to what clock?" "Huh?" I just showed…
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Well... https://qntm.org/abolish Time zones are fine. Random time zone offset changes are not.
"Random time zone offset changes are not." Are you saying that our computer systems are so inflexible that we cannot make them do our bidding? The issue here has nothing to do with whether daylight saving is appropriate or not, rather it's about the inability of computers to adapt quickly. When I was studying computing I had a textbook titled Problems for Computer Solution, it was about how to get computers to do our…
Yes, of course that is the case. Any non-internet connected clock (microwaves, cars, toys, $10 alarm clocks, wristwatches, etc) will not be able to respond to these types of changes.
Calling these computers may be significantly overstating their abilities.
"it was about how to get computers to do our bidding - not vice versa"
It's much easier to declare that problems ought not exist, than to actually solve them in a practical, global manner.
In many cases, the owner of the device also isn't aware of the change. This is not a problem specific to software.
Not the worst example I've heard. In 2016 the Haitian president canceled daylight savings by decree two days before the changeover. I was flying out of the country the morning after the change, and had a really hard time explaining to airline customer service (who hadn't gotten the memo) what exactly the problem was. "When does my flight leave?" "At the scheduled time." "According to what clock?" "Huh?" I just showed…
And when did it depart?
Italy has not yet made a decision on a whether DST will ever end this year and I suppose the situation is similar in other European countries. I can't even imagine the chaos if each EU country makes their own choice last minute
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That's a nice rant, and I don't entirely disagree with you, but it has little to do with my comment.
Politics can change faster than the time it takes to lick a postage stamp and can do so in the most unpredictable ways. That's been a fact of life for the whole of human existence. That said, a processor can do billions of operations in the time it takes to lick a stamp. Thus, there's plenty of leeway there to ensure that computers don't even enter the political equation.
The fastest processor ever created can't do anything with information it doesn't have.
Italy has not yet made a decision on a whether DST will ever end this year and I suppose the situation is similar in other European countries. I can't even imagine the chaos if each EU country makes their own choice last minute
I don't think they can do that on their own, can they? There's still an EU wide rule on DST. They never revoked it, AFAIK.
No doubt changing daylight saving rules at short notice is difficult but we should be asking ourselves why is it so. The major problem adjusting to daylight saving should be as it's always been - that of human adaptation to the sudden change of time. That our computers cannot adapt at a moment's notice simply says there's fundamental problem with their design. Moreover, the problem should have been long solved by now…
I think that the problem is that DST is a really, really bad idea. So you have a process that starts at 1:30am on November 6, 2022. If that's in Ontario, is that the first 1:30am or the second one? (At 2:00am, clocks go back to 1:00am, so we do that hour again. If the process is supposed to start at 2:30am on March 12, 2023, that's too bad, because at 2:00am the time jumps to 3:00am, so no times from 2:00am to 2:59:5…
Chilean here. Unfortunately our governments have had the bad habit of changing the date DST starts on every two-three years, and that wreaks havoc everywhere in the country. We are kind of used to having a couple of days where we assume everyone will run an hour late because of this. I just hosted some Peruvian friends this week and were amazed at the kind of power the government wields just by having the ability to…
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The user interface can be akward, but you can ask them for the timezone of the event. If it's for a live event in another place, they would ideally put in the local time in the other place and the timezone there. Or if it's a fixed time, not to be moved by DST changes anywhere, they could specify it in UTC. It's also a good idea to calculate and save the offset when editing. Then, if the offset changes later, you can…
I can’t even get employees at the company where I work to understand and communicate EDT instead of EST. I don’t think calendaring tools are going to have much success asking people what timezone they want.