Another way to look at time is this: The only correct clock is a broken one which is right twice a day.
Falsehoods Programmers believe about Time
81–90 of 222 posts
Re: Falsehoods Programmers believe about Time
#82"The smallest unit of time is a milli/second" seems a bit silly, as it really depends on your application. Is he expecting programmers to implement time in Planck units?
Re: Falsehoods Programmers believe about Time
#83This is why I really like logical clocks: by abandoning the primitive and outdated concept of "time" altogether, they allow you to deal reliably with causality, which is often all you're really interested in.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamps
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_clocks
That said, UTC timestamps since the epoch are one of the more straightforward ways of dealing with time, if you must sully your hands with the foul concept of time at all.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers believe about Time
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, almost no country outside the British Empire (and not even Scotland inside it) implemented the Gregorian reform at the same time. Britain was pretty late in doing so, too. As for "all modern computer systems", Unix time is completely ignorant about anything except seconds.
Except it doesn't account for leap seconds.
Is that true? Isn't that the responsibility of the whatever component that translates the number of seconds since Jan 1 1970 into a calendar?
Re: Falsehoods Programmers believe about Time
#85Re: Falsehoods Programmers believe about Time
#86Another way to look at time is this: The only correct clock is a broken one which is right twice a day.
You forgot about daylight savings.
If the day is one on which we either spring forward or fall back and the time the clock reads somewhere in the shift hour, then the clock will be right either 1 or 3 times that day. And it's different in different countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#Procedure
Re: Falsehoods Programmers believe about Time
#87This is why I really like logical clocks: by abandoning the primitive and outdated concept of "time" altogether, they allow you to deal reliably with causality, which is often all you're really interested in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_clocks That said, UTC timestamps since the epoch are one of the more straightforward ways of dealing with time, if you must sul…
> That said, UTC timestamps since the epoch are one of the more straightforward ways of dealing with time, if you must sully your hands with the foul concept of time at all.
Definitely. Leave their rendering to the experts, but to store times and dates in any other way is indefensible.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers believe about Time
#88Speaking of timestamps being in recognizable formats, here's a list of interesting timestamps I've seen on (mostly) iOS devices: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11023086/how-do-i-interpr...
If anyone has any idea about what they could possibly mean, I'd much appreciate it.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers believe about Time
#89There needs to be an Internet Standard Time/Date -- at least in terms of formatting.
What about ISO 8601? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
Re: Falsehoods Programmers believe about Time
#90Missed the most important one for this month, minutes always have 60 seconds. Except for the end of this month, when one minute will have 61 seconds, ie, Leap Second.