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OpenBSD adds support for Coordinated Mars Time
- Bluestein 6y ago"Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time, now across two planets!" :)
- shpx 6y agoNaming something that only works on one planet "Universal Coordinated Time" was a mistake.
- Arrath 6y agoDamned Earth-centric systems..
- anyfoo 6y agoThis has caused so many mistakes and accidents, you’d get the impression the people who came up with that name have never left their solar system.
- young_unixer 6y ago"This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
- folago 6y agoDon't panic!
- pndy 6y agoIt doesn't matter till we'll be actually able to settle down on Mars permanently, I guess and differentiating from Mars local time and its time zones will be an issue (and all parties involved in colonization will agree that Airy-0 crater will remain the 0° longitude equivalent as proposed by IAU). Beside, the perspective matters - for people on Earth it can be still UTC, for those on Mars it can be whatever term they'll find most suitable. The scifi series Babylon 5 with its titular station used Earth Standard Time [1] while being placed in Epsilon Eridani system. That doesn't sound bad, I think. The another issue the future colonists will have to deal with will be how to track days, months and years. There's Thomas Gangale's suggestion that does look interesting [2]. [1] - https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Earth_Standard_Time https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Earth_Standard_Time [2] - http://ops-alaska.com/time/gangale_mst/darian.htm http://ops-alaska.com/time/gangale_mst/darian.htm
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago> It doesn't matter till we'll be actually able to settle down on Mars permanently Mars is the least useful planetary body in the Solar System for human colonization, so that time may well be "never".
- pndy 6y agoIt's the best thing we have in our neighborhood beside the Moon; Venus is easier to reach but not very welcoming when it comes to atmospheric pressure and temperatures.
- otabdeveloper4 6y agoYou don't need to land on Venus' surface; airships in the atmosphere are the closest thing to Earth in the Solar System. The problem is that there is nothing useful on Mars and its location sucks. Any other planetary body makes more economic sense.
- dsq 6y agoI think one of the most compelling aspects about Mars is the thin atmosphere which enables a high degree of visual clarity, which is very appealing to humans. The atmosphere of Venus is very murky.
- GoblinSlayer 6y agoUh, rename to GMT.
- Legion 6y agoEarthers get their clock. Dusters get their clock. Belters still no get clock of their own.
- yakubin 6y agoDupe of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26664361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26664361>
- umvi 6y agoShould we go ahead and make a SSCT (solar system coordinated time) as well? That way I don't have to constantly be converting lunar timestamps, mars timestamps, etc. back to UTC (or the coordinated time of whichever celestial body I'm currently on) in order to paint a timeline of when events happened between my different devices spread out across the solar system.
- ghshephard 6y agoTime is local to a region though - there isn't any "Solar System Coordinated Time".
- hedora 6y agoJust hold still and avoid gravity wells. It’ll work out.
- nuccy 6y agoWhat is hold still? Relatively to what? Everything moves relatively to each other with a planet, solar system, galaxy, galaxy cluster, supercluster, filament, Universe...
- imoverclocked 6y agoI guess pulsars may be our best bet for a universally coordinated time? We can detect the passage of time in a gravity well and create a well-centric system if need be!
- nuccy 6y agoWell, no, pulsars periods drift due to change of alignment and emission process over time. Thought special and general relativity will drive any "global/solar system/galaxy"-wide precise time useless on long term anyway. The best is to keep track of long enough common measures ("day", "month") with decimal/fractions being connected to actual local times.
- oojuliuso 6y agoMaybe Star Trek-style stardates should be the norm. Then we can have a bunch of Captain’s Logs posted on YouTube that’s starts with the stardate and whether or not the log is supplemental.
- csdtx 6y agoI wonder how time zones on other planets would work once relativistic time dilation has to be considered. Add a multiplier to how fast your clock ticks? I suppose satellites should have this problem already resolved but only in Earth's sphere of influence. Also simply travelling to Mars would desynchronize the time and would have to be resynced.
- jeremyjh 6y agoGPS systems have already had to solve this and from what I can make of it, its a fully general solution that could be ported to mars etc. https://jimlambskeptic.com/gps-and-time-dilation/ https://jimlambskeptic.com/gps-and-time-dilation/
- m463 6y agoIt's interesting that time and date semantics are based on the rotation and orbits of planets. A truly universal time should probably be based on the orbits or other oscillations of atoms, possibly away from a gravity well and at a precise temperature.
- ant6n 6y agoOur solar system is rotating within our galaxy, presumably you have to travel quite a bit before being „away from a gravity well“. But at that „location“, there may be a lot of relative velocity to our solar system, so there will be time dilation effects - for us or them, depending on your reference frame. ...One of the first things you learn in special relativity is that there are no preferred reference frames, I still have trouble wrapping my head around that one.
- inglor_cz 6y agoFor ancient people who constructed the first timekeeping systems, observable changes in the environment (light/dark, frost/rain) were of crucial importance. Sheer cultural inertia since then means that we still use Roman letters and Babylonian time units. The cost of change would be too high, not to mention the risk of some countries refusing to go along. Well, almost certainty, not a risk. A new "truly universal time" could end up, paradoxically, as a niche thing only used by hardcore enthusiasts, much like all the attempts to create an artificial universal language (volapuk, esperanto). Heck, we could not even get the whole world to adapt SI units of measurement.
- Snoonan999 6y ago(fire upon the deep) Just use raw seconds with kilo and mega.
- jeremyjh 6y agoThey actually had me until "Bump the major on every single base library as many interfaces change."
- implements 6y agoA) Is this an April Fools joke? B) If it’s not an AFJ then it sounds like an incredibly unnecessary set of potential bug creating code changes for a security focused operating system!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- inglor_cz 6y agoOn the question A, I am torn. It might be or it might be not. That said, there already are Linux machines operating on Mars and we can expect the number of computers working there to increase substantially within 10-20 years. That means that BSD and other OSes are going to have to implement some kind of Martian timekeeping anyway. So perhaps it is better to start now, when the low-hanging bugs can be ironed out without accidentally bricking an important piece of machinery on another planet.
- devwastaken 6y agoHow exactly would you ensure nanosecond accuracy of time between earth and mars? Does Nasa just run ntp back to earth? Or really expensive atomic clocks made out of special metals?
- blablabla123 6y agoAssuming this is not an April Fools joke, I guess you wouldn't. Probably during travel measurable relativistic time difference has already set in and the nanosecond sync to earth might already differ by that. (If you manage to sync with ns precision anyways, that would be more an earth-like time/clock :)) Also days are a bit longer on Mars so it would be possible to keep in sync with local days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele–Keating_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele–Keating_experiment
- zokier 6y agoI don't think relativistic effects are that great of a problem; I'd imagine that we know the orbital and gravitational characteristics well enough to do pretty decent compensation for relativity. That being said, nanosecond accuracy might be out of our reach, considering that it's bit of a challenge to get that level of accuracy on even on Earth. Also shipping atomic clocks to space is not all that outrageous idea. Few years ago NASA lauched Deep Space Atomic Clock[1], which is exactly what it sounds like. Also modern "chip scale" atomic clocks[2] are pretty small and low power, so I would not be surprised to see those in future missions. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/tdm/clock/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/tdm/clock/index.html [2] https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/embedded-clocks-frequency-references/5207-space-csac https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/embedded-clocks-...
- protoman3000 6y agoThe clock was conceived to align human periodicity to the periodicity of earths day and night cycle (e.g. waking up at the same time every day) but also to synchronize the people around you (e.g. working at the same time every day). When working in an intertimezonal setting, however, that concept of a 24h day felt very weird. While the day and night cycle indeed is roughly 24h, the human productivity cycle appeared longer in duration as some people were having a normal morning work start at 1:00am on my clock and 8:00am their time. This shifts the mental model to what it means for deliverables to be produced “today” or “on day X”. Is it their day or is it my day? It also shifts the perception of much work per day we are putting in, while on the paper it just is a simple per 24h division. Bob worked an 8h shift in a 24h workday which is in a 24h + 8h + 8h (arbitrary numbers chosen only for visualization) global workday, so did he now work enough? Did he work “all day”? I came to the realization that a 24h long workday in such a setting feels arbitrary and off. It should be longer, but how long exactly. This will only get worse once we have clocks running faster the further away we get from the gravitational field of the Sun or work on planets or moons with different day/night cycles. How would one do it inside an Asteroid Mining Colony?
- motiejus 6y ago(where/how) can I see the actual patch set, not only summary of modified files? I have not worked with cvs, so it's non trivial to figure out.
- colinhb 6y agoThis is an April Fools joke, so there’s nothing to see. But if you want a browsable interface to OpenBSD’s repos (no CVS knowledge required), you can use either the project’s CVSweb [1] or the GitHub mirrors [2]. [1]: http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ [2]: https://github.com/openbsd https://github.com/openbsd
- PhillyG 6y agoIt's amazing and embarrassing how far I had to scroll through the comments to realise this was an April Fools. Tbf it's 4:43 on the 2nd of April where I am now, but still