3 ms·
The nice thing about time standards is that there are so many to choose from! One drawback of your approach is that I can't just see if a time = 0 mod 60 to ch
by danielweber 11y ago
The nice thing about time standards is that there are so many to choose from!
One drawback of your approach is that I can't just see if a time = 0 mod 60 to check if we are on a minute boundary.
Your way is what is used by the GPS network, IIRC, and it works for them, so there you go.
- mikeash 11y agoIf your dates and times and locations vary enough, you already can't do a mod 60 check on UTC to detect a minute boundary, as various historical time zones include seconds-level offsets from UTC. For example, US cities were on local solar time until the latter part of the 19th century, and the changeover to uniform time zones involved lots of seconds-level offsets. Interesting stories here: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5748 http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5748
- Dylan16807 11y agoI don't think anything to that resolution is in any time zone database, so you would be using a custom system anyway.
- mikeash 11y agoI just downloaded the standard ones from: https://www.iana.org/time-zones https://www.iana.org/time-zones It appears to have this stuff down to the second. For example: # Zone NAME GMTOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL] Zone America/New_York -4:56:02 - LMT 1883 Nov 18 12:03:58 # Zone NAME GMTOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL] Zone America/Chicago -5:50:36 - LMT 1883 Nov 18 12:09:24 Although this won't really be accurate, because it doesn't have every single city. The New_York zone covers the whole eastern time zone even though all the cities in that zone would have been different before 1883. But it is in the database, even if it's not quite right for anything outside of the named cities.
- Dylan16807 11y agoWell that's a mess. Wrong data is worse than missing data for something like this...