3 ms·
This is the part that isn’t even technically hard per se. It’s just hard because there’s literally no way to know what the computer should do because there’s no
by tshaddox 3y ago
This is the part that isn’t even technically hard per se. It’s just hard because there’s literally no way to know what the computer should do because there’s no way to know what a human would even expect.
In many cases reasonable assumptions can be made, e.g. a calendar event for two people in different time zones to meet on a video call almost certainly needs to be scheduled for a proper time (or likely UTC, which is close enough since if you can ignore leap seconds). Although even then I wonder what the two attendees would expect if, between the scheduling of the event and the event itself, both of their local time zones changed their DST rules such that their UTC offset changed by +1 hours. If only one time zone changed its UTC offset we might assume that the previously agreed upon UTC time would hold, but it’s hard to say what the humans would expect if both of their time zones shifted the same way.
- stavros 3y agoI've been in this situation, and what people expect are that the "main office" time holds, even for remote teams that should know better. Then again, you don't want all your meetings changing by an hour half the year to avoid a one-week discrepancy.
- tshaddox 3y agoIf there’s a clear “main office” that’s probably a reasonable assumption, and it’s probably a reasonable feature for calendars to explicitly allow scheduling an event for a specific time zone (instead of converting every datetime to UTC or similar before storing it, which is the usual recommendation among programmers).
- disgruntledphd2 3y agoI'm pretty sure that both MS and Google default to the time of whoever set up the meeting.