3 ms·
For humans our current time system works pretty well. But for machines and the software that manages them, our human implementation of time is rife with inconsi
by aezell 9y ago
For humans our current time system works pretty well. But for machines and the software that manages them, our human implementation of time is rife with inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies. All the edge cases certainly waste time and money and, at their worst, might even be life-threatening.
- wongarsu 9y agoDST is complicated and has very questionable benefit. The length of months is inconsistent but not a big deal. Other than that I find our time system very straight forward: about 9 billion cesium phase transitions make a second, sixty seconds make a minute, sixty minutes make an hour, etc. Every six months check in with IERS whether a leap second is scheduled (or find it yourself by calculating mean solar timbre and checking its deviation from your atomic clock). If a leap second is due, the minute 23:59 has 59 or 61 seconds (displayed as 23:59:60). To get local time look up the local UTC offset and add it. If you calculate in local time, time may repeat one hour due to DST, so just stay in UTC and convert for display. We have a homemade problem because computers pretend that every minute has 60 seconds, but that's not the fault of the time system.