4 ms·

Who would even think to check if the system is counting from 1970/01/01 you’re not using their products?

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
This is an established standard. It's really not any stranger than starting dates at 1 CE, or array indexes starting at 0.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago
  > This is an established standard. Established doesn't mean it is understandable without documentation. Anyone who is not familiar with it doesn't know why it starts in 1970 and counts seconds. You need to actually open the documentation to know about that, and it's name (be it unix time, epoch, epoch time or whatever) doesn't help in understanding what it is and what unit it is using.
  - hannasanarion 5y ago
    The metric system is also not understandable without documentation, byt you don't need to explain it every time because every living person should have gotten that documentation drilled into them at age ten. UNIX time is an easy international standard, everybody with computer experience knows what it is and how to work with it.
    - justsomehnguy 5y ago
      > everybody with computer experience knows what it is and how to work with it. Thanks for the laugh. The only ones who needs to know about unixtime is: developers when they do something which takes it/produces it *nix sysadmins Everyone else with "computer experience" could live all their life without the need to know what unixtime is.
      - hannasanarion 5y ago
        Yeah, that's what I meant. People who program or do sysadmin, ie anybody who will ever need to call a sleep function, should know what a unixtime is.
        justsomehnguy 5y ago
        > anybody who will ever need to call a sleep function Bullshit. I never needed to know what unixtime is when I wrote anything with sleep(). All I needed to know is how long in seconds I want the execution to pause for, never ever I needed to manually calculate something from/to unixtime, even when working with datetimes types.
        hannasanarion 5y ago
        No, but as a person who has had a need for sleep() before, you are also the type of person who could be expected to know what unix time is. Nobody is saying that the two things need to be connected, the point is that it can be name dropped in a type definition, and you would know what it means.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090306-00/?p=18913 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090306-00/?p=18... Windows uses the Gregorian Calendar as its epoch.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
If they’re using ISO format I don’t really care what they’re counting from. But I care if some ISO dates are preserved exactly and some are rounded to another value… especially when that rounding is non-obvious. It took me months to even identify the pattern clearly enough to find an explanation. Up to that point we just had an arbitrary allowance that the value might vary by some unknown amount, and looked for the closest one.

This is an established standard. It's really not any stranger than starting dates at 1 CE, or array indexes starting at 0.

justsomehnguy 5y ago
> This is an established standard. Established doesn't mean it is understandable without documentation. Anyone who is not familiar with it doesn't know why it starts in 1970 and counts seconds. You need to actually open the documentation to know about that, and it's name (be it unix time, epoch, epoch time or whatever) doesn't help in understanding what it is and what unit it is using.
- hannasanarion 5y ago
  The metric system is also not understandable without documentation, byt you don't need to explain it every time because every living person should have gotten that documentation drilled into them at age ten. UNIX time is an easy international standard, everybody with computer experience knows what it is and how to work with it.
  - justsomehnguy 5y ago
    > everybody with computer experience knows what it is and how to work with it. Thanks for the laugh. The only ones who needs to know about unixtime is: developers when they do something which takes it/produces it *nix sysadmins Everyone else with "computer experience" could live all their life without the need to know what unixtime is.
    - hannasanarion 5y ago
      Yeah, that's what I meant. People who program or do sysadmin, ie anybody who will ever need to call a sleep function, should know what a unixtime is.
      - justsomehnguy 5y ago
        > anybody who will ever need to call a sleep function Bullshit. I never needed to know what unixtime is when I wrote anything with sleep(). All I needed to know is how long in seconds I want the execution to pause for, never ever I needed to manually calculate something from/to unixtime, even when working with datetimes types.
        hannasanarion 5y ago
        No, but as a person who has had a need for sleep() before, you are also the type of person who could be expected to know what unix time is. Nobody is saying that the two things need to be connected, the point is that it can be name dropped in a type definition, and you would know what it means.
jodrellblank 5y ago
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090306-00/?p=18913 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090306-00/?p=18... Windows uses the Gregorian Calendar as its epoch.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

If they’re using ISO format I don’t really care what they’re counting from. But I care if some ISO dates are preserved exactly and some are rounded to another value… especially when that rounding is non-obvious. It took me months to even identify the pattern clearly enough to find an explanation. Up to that point we just had an arbitrary allowance that the value might vary by some unknown amount, and looked for the closest one.