4 ms·

Yes, tangent, but please support the movements in several states to abolish daylight savings time. Having time move out from under us has long been a pain for

Yes, tangent, but please support the movements in several states to abolish daylight savings time. Having time move out from under us has long been a pain for programming robust systems. Perhaps the 5th or 6th generation of Apple watch will not need to do such an archaic adjustment.

spacehome 12y ago
Daylight Savings Time has some ill effects, true, but if you think that making life easier for programmers is a point that should convince the general public, you're sorely out of touch. For one, it's not all that difficult in the scheme of things. For another, programmers dealing with dates in the past will always have to consider it. Lastly, the general perception is that programmers get paid quite well enough and can suck it up and deal with this minor annoyance.
- uptown 12y ago
  Just wait till we travel to other planets' timezones. That's when programmers will really earn their paychecks.
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    Or when timezones depend on how fast you are traveling.
ecobiker 12y ago
I have worked on a fairly large scale distributed system where we had to deal with DST. The week before the switch was always the craziest. Until... we switched the boxes and the database to UTC. Even if DST is abolished, leap second will be something to deal with. I have so many things I hate about DST - like switching all our cross timezone meetings but programming is not one of them - always set your machines and DB to UTC and do the conversion in your app.
- jewel 12y ago
  You could even set your servers to TAI and adjust for leap seconds in your app, so that you don't have to worry about timestamps going backwards during leap seconds.
  - PinnBrain 12y ago
    But then relativity messes even that up.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- padmanabhan01 12y ago
  //We have enough digits to print 1424978922 on a watch face - that is standard Unix time. Why humans can't just learn to read that simple number is beyond me You really think people should be using 1424978922 instead of 5:30 or 9:30? That kind of thinking is what's beyond me..
  - schoen 12y ago
    The parent commenter's post was definitely intended as satire.
morcheeba 12y ago
While we're at it, all roads should be straight. Hint: If your system depends on local time, it isn't going to be robust.

spacehome 12y ago

Daylight Savings Time has some ill effects, true, but if you think that making life easier for programmers is a point that should convince the general public, you're sorely out of touch. For one, it's not all that difficult in the scheme of things. For another, programmers dealing with dates in the past will always have to consider it. Lastly, the general perception is that programmers get paid quite well enough and can suck it up and deal with this minor annoyance.

uptown 12y ago
Just wait till we travel to other planets' timezones. That's when programmers will really earn their paychecks.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  Or when timezones depend on how fast you are traveling.

ecobiker 12y ago

I have worked on a fairly large scale distributed system where we had to deal with DST. The week before the switch was always the craziest. Until... we switched the boxes and the database to UTC. Even if DST is abolished, leap second will be something to deal with. I have so many things I hate about DST - like switching all our cross timezone meetings but programming is not one of them - always set your machines and DB to UTC and do the conversion in your app.

jewel 12y ago
You could even set your servers to TAI and adjust for leap seconds in your app, so that you don't have to worry about timestamps going backwards during leap seconds.
- PinnBrain 12y ago
  But then relativity messes even that up.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

padmanabhan01 12y ago
//We have enough digits to print 1424978922 on a watch face - that is standard Unix time. Why humans can't just learn to read that simple number is beyond me You really think people should be using 1424978922 instead of 5:30 or 9:30? That kind of thinking is what's beyond me..
- schoen 12y ago
  The parent commenter's post was definitely intended as satire.

morcheeba 12y ago

While we're at it, all roads should be straight. Hint: If your system depends on local time, it isn't going to be robust.