11 ms·
Time zone news
- tempodox 11y agofork(2) me, Optima for display & body text. Say what you will, it looks beautiful.
- tempodox 11y agoApparently, some time zone fans are opposed to the praise of beautiful fonts. Have it your way.
- dijit 11y agoIs there still a valid reason to have timezones altering between states? is it just for agriculture? While we're, talking about changing time monitoring systems, can't we have 13 months with 28 days each? (and an extra day every 4 years added on to december?) :( Simple things, but that would allow us to follow the lunar cycle.
- germanier 11y agoIt's a bit cumbersome to have the calender date changing during our work period. Just consider all the contracts that end on a given date.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y agoThey did that many moons ago.
- halefx 11y agoI really like the Hanke-Henry calendar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanke-Henry_Permanent_Calendar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanke-Henry_Permanent_Calend...
- hellbanner 11y agoI asked farmers about this. They said it was stupid now that we have electricity. And even then, with the shorter days.. it was still stupid. (I'm quoting them)
- protomyth 11y agoI wish people would quit repeating the farmer myth. No farmer I have met wants daylight savings time. Look at Indiana for some perspective. Farm animals do not have watches.
- ctdonath 11y agoFarm animals do not have watches. As a parent: Neither do small children.
- acacia314 11y agoUgh, time changes with children...suck.
- hellbanner 11y agoCan we start a movement to end this nonsense?
- mikestew 11y agoJust because Indiana doesn't have DST now (for most of the state, anyway) doesn't mean they've always never had it. There was DST when I was growing up in the 70s, and they got rid of it long after agriculture was no longer the primary industry in Indiana. Having grown up in Indiana farm country, I'm of the opinion that "DST because farmers" has always been a myth. One gets up with the sun no matter the time. You quit work when it's dark. Oh, wait, that's not true, either. With the advent of electric lighting on vehicles about, oh, 100 years ago, lack of sun no longer need keep one from the fields. I recall many a late night that the farmer that owned the field next to us was out either tilling or harvesting, lights ablazin' on the front of the tractor or combine. So we've eliminated the farmer myth, why do we have DST? Few like it, do I...follow the money?
- jcranmer 11y agoThe main justification for DST is that it saves energy. The actual evidence of this claim is rather mixed, although even reports that show that DST saved energy aren't necessarily finding that the reduced costs make up for the mere cost of having to switch clocks twice a year (which itself isn't particularly well-quantified).
- DanAndersen 11y agoOur timezone/calendar system is convoluted, but that's because there are inherent issues with any calendar reform. I recommend looking at the following articles: http://qntm.org/abolish http://qntm.org/abolish ("So you want to abolish time zones") http://qntm.org/calendar http://qntm.org/calendar ("You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform")
- Navarr 11y agoAll of these are valid points but when we get the ability to force the earth's rotation, orbit, and the moon's orbit to specifics then I WILL SHOW YOU.
- fweespeech 11y agoHey, when you have the power to hold the whole Earth for ransom, remember to ask for $1 million dollars. ;)
- jerf 11y agoThat's just a special case of http://qntm.org/destroy http://qntm.org/destroy . qntm's got you comprehensively covered here.
- bostonpete 11y agoIn Northern areas, there's a lot of practical value that gets overlooked. In Boston, the sun is rising close to 5:00 AM as it is at the height of summer. Without daylight savings time, it would be rising at 4:00 AM. I think most people would rather have extended daylight late in the day than have all that extra sunlight wasted when we're sleeping. The counter to that is -- well, let's always stick with daylight savings time then. That has problems of its own. For example, sunset is a little after 4:00 PM in Boston in late December. If we stuck with daylight savings time, it'd be a little after 3:00. That would pose risks for school children walking home, etc. Yes, I realize that people in Fairbanks Alaska have it much worse and daylight savings doesn't fix the problem for them, but there are a lot of people who live in the northern parts of the lower 48 that benefit from the time shift.
- BookmarkSaver 11y ago> For example, sunset is a little after 4:00 PM in Boston in late December. If we stuck with daylight savings time, it'd be a little after 3:00. This seems backwards. Sunset would be after 5 if they kept daylight savings. I used to live in Boston, and I despised how early the sun would set. It made getting off of work demoralizing. I always liked the idea of just switching to Atlantic time. Whatever the case may be, I strongly value daylight later in the day rather than in the morning.
- bostonpete 11y agoYou're right, I got it backwards. The problem would be that kids would be walking to school in the dark -- not any less of a problem though. As it is sunrise is after 7 in the winter (it'd be after 8). In New York it would be even later since they're further west.
- ghaff 11y agoYou're backwards. The problem with year-round daylight savings in Boston (which, personally, I'd prefer) is kids going to school in the dark in the winter. Boston's both relatively northernly and very far east in a timezone because eastern time wraps up the northeast-jutting coast of the US to avoid New England being in its own timezone. [Edit: It wouldn't be in its own timezone; it would be in Atlantic time, which is used in parts of Canada. But it would put Boston in a different timezone from NYC and other major east coast cities.]
- jahewson 11y agoYou're confusing time zones with daylight savings. Time zones exist so that the same part of the solar day has approximately the same time associated with it wherever you are in the world (prior to the railroads, that was the only time - local time). So I can say "it's 4am in China" and you'll know it's the middle of the night without having to consult Google. They can also achieve the opposite, keeping neighbours on the same time when their solar days are actually different, e.g. within China. Sometimes that's useful. Daylight savings exist for saving power (and were introduced in the war to do just this), providing more daylight hours for school children, and longer days for agriculture (now historic). There is debate about whether any of those reasons are actually valid.
- eterm 11y agoExcept China has a single timezone, so "4am in China" doesn't mean as much as you think it might.
- fweespeech 11y agohttp://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-has-one-time-zone-and-thats-a-problem/281136/ http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-... Ah yes, but they didn't always.
- mjevans 11y agoThe fact that you just said this, in this context, shows me how clearly embedded the AM/PM 'standard' is for people. Though that doesn't mean it's still a good idea to use it for meetings. It just signals to me that the only way of displacing this imprecise messy standard is to teach people to schedule meetings differently; and to have their smartphones display both the AM/PM time, and the standard meetings time. Unfortunately that would probably still be as a 'timezone', and if we're doing that it may as well just be UTC since every timezone library I've every used already has that and best of all is only off by a few seconds at most without updates. (Close enough for applications that care about timezones instead of leap seconds.)
- phirschybar 11y agoHa. What is your solution for existing birthdays?
- sdkmvx 11y agoNot that I would advocate confusing matters by changing the calendar again, but you just move the birthdays same as last time. From Wikipedia: George Washington (February 22, 1732 [O.S. February 11, 1731] – December 14, 1799) Notice the year is different. In the British Empire before 1752, March 25th was the first day of the year. March 24, 1751 was the day before March 25, 1752. Then September 2, 1752 was the day before September 14, 1752 The last day of 1752 was December 31, and the calendar has continued how we consider normal ever since. The British custom of starting the tax year on April 6th survives as a relic of the old calendar (March 25th plus the missing 12 days in 1752).
- qntm 11y agoActually you'd need December to have one extra day every year and a second extra day every 4 years. And the months still wouldn't sync up with the synodic month, because the synodic month doesn't evenly divide the solar year no matter what you do.
- harryh 11y ago13 * 28 = 364 not 365. So you'd need an extra day every year and 2 extra days every 4 years. What we really need to do is use some rockets to slightly slow down the rotation of the earth so that a day is exactly 1/360th of a year. All kinds of numbers divide evenly into 360 so that should make building a good calendar easy.
- Roodgorf 11y agoWhile it wouldn't exactly follow the lunar cycle as the parent mentions, there are already proposed calendars similar to what you mention[1]. Of course, with any calendar readjustment come just as many drawbacks, as the wiki entry mentions some. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
- harryh 11y agoI'm disappointed that this wiki page mentions no drawbacks to my plan to slow down the rotation of the earth. I've no idea what they would be, but I'm guessing that this might come with some negative repercussions.
- Roodgorf 11y agoIf Wikipedia doesn't know about it, it's probably not important. In light of this new information, I hereby pledge my support for these reformations.
- davidw 11y agoI'm reminded of this quote: "I was in favour of space exploration until I realised what it'd mean for date time libraries" https://twitter.com/joe_jag/status/510048646482894848 https://twitter.com/joe_jag/status/510048646482894848
- diminish 11y agoAll space time clocks may run at GMT+00 with no regional differences. Actually we may remove time zones all together too. So the day time of 3pm will be different everywhere. For calendar months and seasons we already have it like that, in both hemispheres. The only issue is backward incompatibility with legacy movies, books who talk about breakfast at 8am. Similarly, a love song which talks about April/May being a sunny warm time sounds weird in southern hemipshere. Let's get rid of Roman legacy code in our civilization :)
- ryanbrunner 11y agoRemoving time zones terrestially, while seeming attractive on the surface, generates more problems than it solves: http://qntm.org/abolish http://qntm.org/abolish There's a lot that could be improved with how we handle things like Daylight Savings Time today, but eliminating time zones is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
- scrollaway 11y agoThis article was pretty thoroughly debunked last time it was linked here. It focuses on how we'd remove timezones and not actually offer alternatives to their most basic uses.
- hedgehog 11y agoOh no, it's much worse than that. On Earth you can generally treat time as being the same speed everywhere. If you start a timer at T1 UTC and run it for a locally observed 60 seconds you can expect the current UTC time to be T1+60 seconds. In space relativistic effects stop being negligible and you might find that UTC time is T1+61 seconds.
- icehawk219 11y agoI've always joked that the more I work with i18n and l10n the more I become a fan of one world language, currency, and time zone. I know that would be rife with its own problems but hey, an exhausted developer can dream.
- a3n 11y agoAn exhausted developer can also pay the rent.
- Sevzinn 11y agoWilling to move to Arizona to not deal with timezone changes.
- bostonvaulter2 11y agoOr Hawaii!
- donatj 11y agoI wish this site had an RSS feed. I'd subscribe right now.
- mildweed 11y agoYou could Watch https://github.com/eggert/tz https://github.com/eggert/tz or subscribe to this mailing list https://www.iana.org/time-zones https://www.iana.org/time-zones
- time_is 11y agoWe now have an RSS feed. Thanks for your requests! http://time.is/rss/time_zone_news.rss http://time.is/rss/time_zone_news.rss
- kseistrup 11y agoThanks for you swift attention! :)
- gerjomarty 11y agoFor anyone interested in time zones, I had a terribly unproductive afternoon the day I started looking through both the time zone mailing list[1], and the raw zoneinfo files. I love the history that lies beneath all of the changes. [1]: http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/ http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/
- jarcoal 11y agoSituations like Turkey's DST extension reminds me why storing dates in UTC with no further information is not good enough.
- mildweed 11y agoCan you explain the complication you're thinking about? And what additional information you'd store?
- 0x0 11y agoLots of events needs to be scheduled in local time. If your calendar app stores a given UTC timestamp for your meeting with a customer on friday at 5PM and the time zone rules database change inbetween, you're going to have an angry customer.
- lucb1e 11y agoTime for governments to just make up their minds?
- scrollaway 11y agoAnd what would meta-metadata about the datetime solve? What you're looking for is faster updates to timezone libraries. And for governments to stop being idiots — "I'm delaying DST because it inconveniences me", pah, what a load of garbage. It's a symptom of how much DST sucks. If anything, this couldve been a good occasion to repel DST in turkey.
- 0x0 11y agoIf you stored it in the DB as "2015-10-30 17:00:00 SOMETIMEZONE" then it would be unambiguous when the event is going to happen. If you stored an UTC timestamp, well, then you'd get two different values depending on whether you had the updated tzdata or not when the value was entered and converted to a timestamp. If you think this problem can be solved by declaring today's version of tzdata immutable and final, then I'm afraid you're not being realistic. Timezones, DST rules, country borders will change and always have.
- bkjelden 11y agoI always joke that time zones and character encodings more or less guarantee programmers will always be able to find jobs.
- nulltype 11y agoUnicode hurts workers, families, & community! Shame on the Unicode Consortium! If we got rid of DST and didn't change the rules too often, time zones wouldn't really be that big of a deal.
- MichaelGG 11y agoIt'd still be an issue, because people lose their minds when thinking about time zones. Example: .net XML serialization. The PM wanted to "do the right thing" and thus would encode all dates in XML with an offset determined by looking at some local setting. Hence the exact same code would produce a different XML document depending on the selected time zone. They 'fixed' it by using a couple bits of the date to note if it was UTC or 'local'. But for a version or two, there was no way around corrupting data. The PM lamented the fact, saying "if only machines all had GPS, then we'd know the right offset to use", further demonstrating the lack of understanding. Some folks just can't resist thinking in local time, instead of letting the dev handle time zones additionally. Even the great tzinfo database is weird. Instead of using the names of time zones, it uses a random city. Which means if a time zone does split up in the future, you might end up with an incorrect timezone. (Like if I select Denver, but Denver switches to New Mountain Time, but my city doesn't.)
- nulltype 11y agoI'm sure there's no problem that can't be created by a sufficiently bad PM. I think you can treat the name of the city as the name of the timezone. Seems like you'd have the same problem either way. If you used "Mountain Time" and then your city switches to "New Mountain Time" you still have the incorrect timezone. Instead of cities it could use polygons on the surface of the earth, but that's starting to get complicated at that point.
- samhoggnz 11y agoThe Turkish change affected me over the weekend. The local mobile carriers didn't update their settings and thus my phone automatically updated to EEST. Fortunately my flight was much later in the day and it was rectified by that point.
- BorisMelnik 11y agoIs it me or does it look like some countries / states are moving towards abolishing daylight savings? I hate to revisit this topic but I would love to see this horribly archaic system abolished ad infinitum.