12 ms·

I dream of a world where everything is UTC, UTF-8, and metric.

by fletchowns 11y ago

toyg 11y ago
And ISO 8601. Sweet, sweet ISO 8601...
- zdw 11y ago
  Or the even stricter RFC3339 date format, which is ISO8601 without the dumb bits: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3339.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3339.txt
  - rspeer 11y ago
    Neat. I wonder if anyone collects a list of famous standards that have been superseded by compatible, better standards. Another example would be that many people know of ISO 639 language codes, but BCP 47 is a clearer, more relevant standard.
    - krylon 11y ago
      > I wonder if anyone collects a list of famous standards If you really want to know, ask Wikipedia. There are some lists there that make me think somebody has a major case of OCD. There is even a List of Lists on Wikipedia, so ... wait, there is even a List of lists of lists...
nawitus 11y ago
UTC is (as everyone knows) a bit problematic due to leap seconds. Different software systems handle the leap seconds somewhat differently. Handling leap seconds is is actually quite difficult if you want to get it absolutely correct. In 99% of cases the problems are just ignored (e.g. "it doesn't matter if the chart is slightly odd looking when you look at the moment of the leap second"). There's also the problem that every software using UTC must be updated at least once every six months. That may be a lesser problem these days, but is still somewhat relevant especially in various industries. I'd probably go with TAI and just convert the dates to the "human readable" format in the UI. Of course, that's not trivial either.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  For those who don't know about TAI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time International Atomic Time (TAI, from the French name Temps Atomique International[1]) is a high-precision atomic coordinate time standard based on the notional passage of proper time on Earth's geoid.[2] It is the basis for Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is used for civil timekeeping all over the Earth's surface, and for Terrestrial Time, which is used for astronomical calculations. As of 30 June 2015 when the last leap second was added,[3] TAI is exactly 36 seconds ahead of UTC. The 36 seconds results from the initial difference of 10 seconds at the start of 1972, plus 26 leap seconds in UTC since 1972. Time coordinates on the TAI scales are conventionally specified using traditional means of specifying days, carried over from non-uniform time standards based on the rotation of the Earth. Specifically, both Julian Dates and the Gregorian calendar are used. TAI in this form was synchronised with Universal Time at the beginning of 1958, and the two have drifted apart ever since, due to the changing motion of the Earth.
- readstoomuch 11y ago
  Was ist GoogleTime?
  - JD557 11y ago
    I don't have a source at hand but, IIRC, instead of having leap seconds, Google slightly dilates each second to compensate for that. The time eventually corrects itself.
- feld 11y ago
  Easy, we just kill off the idea of leap seconds. Someone please convince Russia and UK to agree so we can do it.
  - LeoPanthera 11y ago
    No thank you. Just store times on computers as $epoch+$offset and then convert to UTC when displayed to the user. That way, only the display routine has to care about leap seconds and it won't break anything.
NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
Metric's nice, but each day being 10 hours in a 10 day week just doesn't work for me. But at least it's Fiveday, and I have a 20 hour weekened to look forward to.
- toyg 11y ago
  You should use the International Fixed Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar The failure to adopt the IFC is the proof that human beings will forever be shackled to their ancestral beliefs.
  - mjevans 11y ago
    Re parent: ~365.25 does not relate at all well to bases of 10, or much else. We can actually thank existing social patterns including religions for locking us in to a '7 day week' which is what many calendar systems try to promote. With (roughly) every 4 years also containing an extra day of correction (the solar orbital period is not quite 365.25 days) the concept of 'leap days' is necessary anyway. 360: 2 2 2 3 3 5 << Oooh shiny 361: 19 19 << Annoying 362: 2 181 << Annoying 363: 3 11 11 << Less Annoying, but weeks are too long 364: 2 2 7 13 << Might be workable, there's a 7 in here. 365: 5 73 The IFC picks the 364 route, and puts the leap day in the middle of the printed year. The decision of where to put that date is pretty arbitrary, but probably based around a 'summer holiday'. 360 is 5 away from the closest integer orbital period of earth. Therefore 5 'extra days' (likely holidays) would need to be added. 5 is also a factor. It would either make sense to have an extra 5 day period as one long holiday set, or an extra holiday spread out through the year 5 times, though arguments for otherwise could be made. 7 and 360 get along poorly though. We'd probably also want to keep '12 months' for sanity/existing contractual structures (esp since we can't be in units of 10), and having 'months' close to current months seems to be an advantage. Taking 2 * 2 * 3 out of the factor set, we're left with 2 * 3 * 5 for each month. Stepping aside for a moment, let's examine a 'perfect' 28 day month in the IFC/current calendars. 2/7ths (0.285714) of the time is 'weekend' time. I'd propose a 10 day 'week' in the new time, I also think 2 days in a row off of work is advantageous, and I think that this time should be time 'normal workers' can expect to share off. I think that this number might actually grow over time as we increasingly approach a more Utopian society based around automation and abundance. The 10 day 'week' would begin with the following structure. * 2 days of work * 4 day period of 3/4th work (on each of these days about 1/4th of workers would have an 'erands' day) * 2 days of work * 2 days off work - weekend On this schedule half the workers would get a 2+5 or 5+2 and the other half would get 3+4 or 4+3; all workers on a 'standard' shift would also see 0.3 weekend time, a slight increase. The extra 5 holiday days could either be divided somehow over the year, or used up all at once as a burst half-week holiday. The necessary leap year correction would be added to one of those periods as a holiday as well. Since this is another example of a 'standards proposal', someone must have thought of this before... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar This link seems to do a decent job of discussing some of the other aspects of converting to a 10 day calendar (many of which also exist for the IFC) http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-it-time-to-overhaul/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-it-time-to-over...
ohitsdom 11y ago
I'd strongly consider voting for a US presidential candidate solely on if moving to metric was a big part of their platform. So much time is wasted in school on the confusing mess that is the imperial system.
- adamrt 11y ago
  The amount of time and money to shift at this point would be astronomical wouldn't it? It would take a few generations as we would continue to have to teach imperial so people could convert when they ran across any existing media referring to the imperial system measurements. Hundred years of machines that use imperial, speedometers, odometers, books, tools, software, air conditioning, heating, manufacturing, construction, plumbing, including regulatory codes for each of those. Not saying its impossible and it's definitely my knee jerk reaction, but at this point I cant imagine it being feasible.
  - fletchowns 11y ago
    The total cost to switch has gotta be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Has anybody done such a calculation?
    - oblio 11y ago
      What's the total cost of not switching? I'm willing to bet it's in the tens of billions each year. All your major trade partners use the metric system: EU, China, India, Australia.
    - ohitsdom 11y ago
      Thing is, we use both systems now. What huge cost is involved by saying "Starting in 2020, the metric system will be the official unit of measurement in the US." Manufacturing companies can switch as soon as they want to. Most consumers' toolsets already have both systems (wrenches, sockets, etc).
    - peterfirefly 11y ago
      "Metrication Matters" (Google TechTalk from 2007) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgtsSM7vN0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgtsSM7vN0M It starts a bit slow but stick with it. I'm currently rewatching it after several years so I'm not sure there is a calculation. I think there is. A lot of the production in the US already is metric so it shouldn't be that expensive. Remember that everybody else also had to change their (many) measuring systems over to metric. It went remarkably well.
peterfirefly 11y ago
IPA would be nice, too.
RexRollman 11y ago
Personally, I wish everyone used the 24:00 clock. Maybe the military has messed me up, but I really prefer seeing something like 18:22 over 6:22pm. It just seems simplier.
- blackbeard 11y ago
  Yes couldn't agree more with that. Also dates in numeric order I.e. yyyy/mm/dd you know like all the other numbers we deal with not dd/mm/yyyy or the crazy mm/dd/yy.
  - qznc 11y ago
    Use minus instead of slash and you have ISO 8601: yyyy-mm-dd
    - blackbeard 11y ago
      Sold.
      - peterfirefly 11y ago
        8601 also gives you proper week numbering (which Europeans tend to like) + weeks start on Monday, after the weekend.
        jethro_tell 11y ago
        Well it's all the weekend. Saturday is the last end of the week and Sunday is the front end of the week.
        FullyFunctional 11y ago
        In the US perhaps, not in Europe
        11y ago
protomyth 11y ago
I'd prefer to skip metric and redefine the foot as the distance light travels in a nanosecond ~ 11.8 inches. The length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second seems a bit arbitrary to me. I would also vote for any candidate that would ban anything but powers of 2 in the definition of computer storage.
- 0x0 11y ago
  You still have plenty of arbitrary-ness in your definition of a (nano-)second. :)
  - protomyth 11y ago
    I'll take one level over two levels. Besides, memorizing that metric fraction is just wrong. Plus, do we really want to go into space with a unit of measure whose origins are tied to the size of the Earth? Let's at least free part of the definition from an Earth-centric bias. I fear a Mars-centric meter might develop.
    - Asbostos 11y ago
      Unlikely. The metric units have a long history of never having been redefined in a way that breaks previous usage. As far as I'm aware, all redefinitions have just improved the precision, so they don't hurt previous users. Your proposal would make all the old feet wrong and anybody seeing "foot" would have to think about which type of foot it might me.
      - protomyth 11y ago
        Oh, I don't know, I bet the future Mars independence movement will try to throw off all the shackles of Earth and switch their units of measure. I jest just a bit, but its not like we humans don't pull stunts like this all the time in the spirit of independence. My proposal is basically the engineering estimate of foot. I would probably name it something different if I were Emperor / Very Powerful Politician. Its small enough to derive the mass and volume units directly.
mythz 11y ago
And \n line delimiters and \s+ tabs!
specialist 11y ago
My dream also includes the Hanke-Henry calender. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanke-Henry_Permanent_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanke-Henry_Permanent_Calendar My pick of the numerous proposals. Mostly because I can understand it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform
- gpvos 11y ago
  Interesting! This one keeps the 7-day week, which means it has a chance of succeeding. But wouldn't inserting an entire extra week every few years cause problems with things like monthly salaries and mortgage payments?
  - kuschku 11y ago
    The financial year assumes 30 days per month, 12 months per year, 360 days per year. That’s what’s the basis for your salary calculation.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - gpvos 11y ago
      Indeed I'm paid the same amount every month. Yet I'm paid on the same day of every 28/29/30/31-day month, i.e., with slightly varying intervals. The differences between the months are currently small enough that it doesn't really matter much, and it always evens out the next month. But if suddenly a wild week appears, I will want to get paid for that week. Either that, or everyone will need to keep to a parallel traditional month system for periodic payments.
      - kuschku 11y ago
        Why would you want to get paid for that week? You don’t get paid for January 31st, March 31st, May 31st, July 31st, August 31st, October 31st or December 31st either. (Actually, you get paid for 2 of them. Still leaves 5 days a year without pay, 6 days in leap years). So, why should you get more? Just because you feel like you deserve it?
bro-stick 11y ago
It would be nice if graphics cards / VM bioses extended text video modes (perhaps new VESA modes) to supported unicode, preferrably utf32 to make buffer offsets easy to compute. Sure it means more fonts and not every codepoint can squeeze into a few pixels, but most additional codepoints will be good enough and better than seeing garbage on the screen.

I dream of a world where everything is UTC, UTF-8, and metric.

toyg 11y ago

And ISO 8601. Sweet, sweet ISO 8601...

zdw 11y ago
Or the even stricter RFC3339 date format, which is ISO8601 without the dumb bits: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3339.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3339.txt
- rspeer 11y ago
  Neat. I wonder if anyone collects a list of famous standards that have been superseded by compatible, better standards. Another example would be that many people know of ISO 639 language codes, but BCP 47 is a clearer, more relevant standard.
  - krylon 11y ago
    > I wonder if anyone collects a list of famous standards If you really want to know, ask Wikipedia. There are some lists there that make me think somebody has a major case of OCD. There is even a List of Lists on Wikipedia, so ... wait, there is even a List of lists of lists...

nawitus 11y ago

UTC is (as everyone knows) a bit problematic due to leap seconds. Different software systems handle the leap seconds somewhat differently. Handling leap seconds is is actually quite difficult if you want to get it absolutely correct. In 99% of cases the problems are just ignored (e.g. "it doesn't matter if the chart is slightly odd looking when you look at the moment of the leap second"). There's also the problem that every software using UTC must be updated at least once every six months. That may be a lesser problem these days, but is still somewhat relevant especially in various industries. I'd probably go with TAI and just convert the dates to the "human readable" format in the UI. Of course, that's not trivial either.

johnchristopher 11y ago
For those who don't know about TAI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time International Atomic Time (TAI, from the French name Temps Atomique International[1]) is a high-precision atomic coordinate time standard based on the notional passage of proper time on Earth's geoid.[2] It is the basis for Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is used for civil timekeeping all over the Earth's surface, and for Terrestrial Time, which is used for astronomical calculations. As of 30 June 2015 when the last leap second was added,[3] TAI is exactly 36 seconds ahead of UTC. The 36 seconds results from the initial difference of 10 seconds at the start of 1972, plus 26 leap seconds in UTC since 1972. Time coordinates on the TAI scales are conventionally specified using traditional means of specifying days, carried over from non-uniform time standards based on the rotation of the Earth. Specifically, both Julian Dates and the Gregorian calendar are used. TAI in this form was synchronised with Universal Time at the beginning of 1958, and the two have drifted apart ever since, due to the changing motion of the Earth.
readstoomuch 11y ago
Was ist GoogleTime?
- JD557 11y ago
  I don't have a source at hand but, IIRC, instead of having leap seconds, Google slightly dilates each second to compensate for that. The time eventually corrects itself.
feld 11y ago
Easy, we just kill off the idea of leap seconds. Someone please convince Russia and UK to agree so we can do it.
- LeoPanthera 11y ago
  No thank you. Just store times on computers as $epoch+$offset and then convert to UTC when displayed to the user. That way, only the display routine has to care about leap seconds and it won't break anything.

NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago

Metric's nice, but each day being 10 hours in a 10 day week just doesn't work for me. But at least it's Fiveday, and I have a 20 hour weekened to look forward to.

toyg 11y ago
You should use the International Fixed Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar The failure to adopt the IFC is the proof that human beings will forever be shackled to their ancestral beliefs.
- mjevans 11y ago
  Re parent: ~365.25 does not relate at all well to bases of 10, or much else. We can actually thank existing social patterns including religions for locking us in to a '7 day week' which is what many calendar systems try to promote. With (roughly) every 4 years also containing an extra day of correction (the solar orbital period is not quite 365.25 days) the concept of 'leap days' is necessary anyway. 360: 2 2 2 3 3 5 << Oooh shiny 361: 19 19 << Annoying 362: 2 181 << Annoying 363: 3 11 11 << Less Annoying, but weeks are too long 364: 2 2 7 13 << Might be workable, there's a 7 in here. 365: 5 73 The IFC picks the 364 route, and puts the leap day in the middle of the printed year. The decision of where to put that date is pretty arbitrary, but probably based around a 'summer holiday'. 360 is 5 away from the closest integer orbital period of earth. Therefore 5 'extra days' (likely holidays) would need to be added. 5 is also a factor. It would either make sense to have an extra 5 day period as one long holiday set, or an extra holiday spread out through the year 5 times, though arguments for otherwise could be made. 7 and 360 get along poorly though. We'd probably also want to keep '12 months' for sanity/existing contractual structures (esp since we can't be in units of 10), and having 'months' close to current months seems to be an advantage. Taking 2 * 2 * 3 out of the factor set, we're left with 2 * 3 * 5 for each month. Stepping aside for a moment, let's examine a 'perfect' 28 day month in the IFC/current calendars. 2/7ths (0.285714) of the time is 'weekend' time. I'd propose a 10 day 'week' in the new time, I also think 2 days in a row off of work is advantageous, and I think that this time should be time 'normal workers' can expect to share off. I think that this number might actually grow over time as we increasingly approach a more Utopian society based around automation and abundance. The 10 day 'week' would begin with the following structure. * 2 days of work * 4 day period of 3/4th work (on each of these days about 1/4th of workers would have an 'erands' day) * 2 days of work * 2 days off work - weekend On this schedule half the workers would get a 2+5 or 5+2 and the other half would get 3+4 or 4+3; all workers on a 'standard' shift would also see 0.3 weekend time, a slight increase. The extra 5 holiday days could either be divided somehow over the year, or used up all at once as a burst half-week holiday. The necessary leap year correction would be added to one of those periods as a holiday as well. Since this is another example of a 'standards proposal', someone must have thought of this before... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar This link seems to do a decent job of discussing some of the other aspects of converting to a 10 day calendar (many of which also exist for the IFC) http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-it-time-to-overhaul/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-it-time-to-over...

ohitsdom 11y ago

I'd strongly consider voting for a US presidential candidate solely on if moving to metric was a big part of their platform. So much time is wasted in school on the confusing mess that is the imperial system.

adamrt 11y ago
The amount of time and money to shift at this point would be astronomical wouldn't it? It would take a few generations as we would continue to have to teach imperial so people could convert when they ran across any existing media referring to the imperial system measurements. Hundred years of machines that use imperial, speedometers, odometers, books, tools, software, air conditioning, heating, manufacturing, construction, plumbing, including regulatory codes for each of those. Not saying its impossible and it's definitely my knee jerk reaction, but at this point I cant imagine it being feasible.
- fletchowns 11y ago
  The total cost to switch has gotta be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Has anybody done such a calculation?
  - oblio 11y ago
    What's the total cost of not switching? I'm willing to bet it's in the tens of billions each year. All your major trade partners use the metric system: EU, China, India, Australia.
  - ohitsdom 11y ago
    Thing is, we use both systems now. What huge cost is involved by saying "Starting in 2020, the metric system will be the official unit of measurement in the US." Manufacturing companies can switch as soon as they want to. Most consumers' toolsets already have both systems (wrenches, sockets, etc).
  - peterfirefly 11y ago
    "Metrication Matters" (Google TechTalk from 2007) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgtsSM7vN0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgtsSM7vN0M It starts a bit slow but stick with it. I'm currently rewatching it after several years so I'm not sure there is a calculation. I think there is. A lot of the production in the US already is metric so it shouldn't be that expensive. Remember that everybody else also had to change their (many) measuring systems over to metric. It went remarkably well.

peterfirefly 11y ago

IPA would be nice, too.

RexRollman 11y ago

Personally, I wish everyone used the 24:00 clock. Maybe the military has messed me up, but I really prefer seeing something like 18:22 over 6:22pm. It just seems simplier.

blackbeard 11y ago
Yes couldn't agree more with that. Also dates in numeric order I.e. yyyy/mm/dd you know like all the other numbers we deal with not dd/mm/yyyy or the crazy mm/dd/yy.
- qznc 11y ago
  Use minus instead of slash and you have ISO 8601: yyyy-mm-dd
  - blackbeard 11y ago
    Sold.
    - peterfirefly 11y ago
      8601 also gives you proper week numbering (which Europeans tend to like) + weeks start on Monday, after the weekend.
      - jethro_tell 11y ago
        Well it's all the weekend. Saturday is the last end of the week and Sunday is the front end of the week.
        FullyFunctional 11y ago
        In the US perhaps, not in Europe
        11y ago

protomyth 11y ago

I'd prefer to skip metric and redefine the foot as the distance light travels in a nanosecond ~ 11.8 inches. The length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second seems a bit arbitrary to me. I would also vote for any candidate that would ban anything but powers of 2 in the definition of computer storage.

0x0 11y ago
You still have plenty of arbitrary-ness in your definition of a (nano-)second. :)
- protomyth 11y ago
  I'll take one level over two levels. Besides, memorizing that metric fraction is just wrong. Plus, do we really want to go into space with a unit of measure whose origins are tied to the size of the Earth? Let's at least free part of the definition from an Earth-centric bias. I fear a Mars-centric meter might develop.
  - Asbostos 11y ago
    Unlikely. The metric units have a long history of never having been redefined in a way that breaks previous usage. As far as I'm aware, all redefinitions have just improved the precision, so they don't hurt previous users. Your proposal would make all the old feet wrong and anybody seeing "foot" would have to think about which type of foot it might me.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      Oh, I don't know, I bet the future Mars independence movement will try to throw off all the shackles of Earth and switch their units of measure. I jest just a bit, but its not like we humans don't pull stunts like this all the time in the spirit of independence. My proposal is basically the engineering estimate of foot. I would probably name it something different if I were Emperor / Very Powerful Politician. Its small enough to derive the mass and volume units directly.

mythz 11y ago

And \n line delimiters and \s+ tabs!

specialist 11y ago

My dream also includes the Hanke-Henry calender. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanke-Henry_Permanent_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanke-Henry_Permanent_Calendar My pick of the numerous proposals. Mostly because I can understand it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform

gpvos 11y ago
Interesting! This one keeps the 7-day week, which means it has a chance of succeeding. But wouldn't inserting an entire extra week every few years cause problems with things like monthly salaries and mortgage payments?
- kuschku 11y ago
  The financial year assumes 30 days per month, 12 months per year, 360 days per year. That’s what’s the basis for your salary calculation.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - gpvos 11y ago
    Indeed I'm paid the same amount every month. Yet I'm paid on the same day of every 28/29/30/31-day month, i.e., with slightly varying intervals. The differences between the months are currently small enough that it doesn't really matter much, and it always evens out the next month. But if suddenly a wild week appears, I will want to get paid for that week. Either that, or everyone will need to keep to a parallel traditional month system for periodic payments.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      Why would you want to get paid for that week? You don’t get paid for January 31st, March 31st, May 31st, July 31st, August 31st, October 31st or December 31st either. (Actually, you get paid for 2 of them. Still leaves 5 days a year without pay, 6 days in leap years). So, why should you get more? Just because you feel like you deserve it?

bro-stick 11y ago

It would be nice if graphics cards / VM bioses extended text video modes (perhaps new VESA modes) to supported unicode, preferrably utf32 to make buffer offsets easy to compute. Sure it means more fonts and not every codepoint can squeeze into a few pixels, but most additional codepoints will be good enough and better than seeing garbage on the screen.