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

Post by anigbrowl » Tue, Feb 08, 2011, 11:45 PM UTC

dedward wrote: post #76

pavel_lishin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's arbitrary to a degree, but having a single timezone for Russia, or even the US, would amplify the effect. It's no big deal now because you are used to season changing, sunrise changing, etc - but if suddenly you had to get up for work and endure, say, 5 hours of darkness, or perhaps only 1 hour of daylight left..... it would be ugly. That's why we have timezones.

Post by zeteo » Tue, Feb 08, 2011, 11:56 PM UTC

baddox wrote: post #80

BrandonM wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would prefer base-12; it has a lot of benefits. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal , especially http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal#Comparison_to_other_... Instead of changing our clocks, we could just change our numbering system. Having 50 (that's 5 x 12) seconds per minute, 50 minutes per hour, and 20 hours per day seems perfectly reasonable.

Choosing a radix is a balance between the number of prime factors (and brevity) and the number of symbols to keep track of. I think twelve strikes a good balance as well.

Post by rdtsc » Tue, Feb 08, 2011, 11:57 PM UTC

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.

Post by Groxx » Wed, Feb 09, 2011, 12:20 AM UTC

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.

Post by InclinedPlane » Wed, Feb 09, 2011, 12:35 AM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #77

meese_ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Powers of ten are easy to manage in base 10?

Yeah, but once you move everything to base 2, you won't have to deal with those pesky powers of 10 anymore ;)