

Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST) - makuro
http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/russia-winter-time.html

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furyg3
Can we all just have a 24 hour clock based on GMT, no other timezones, and no
daylight savings time?

It seems a whole lot easier to change our time format just once and get used
to it... instead of half of us changing the clocks twice a year, the other
not, drawing all these weird lines all over (grumble India grumble), and
keeping track of it all.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
No! Even better! "Metric time" - a minute has 100 seconds, an hour 100
minutes, a day is 10 hours (100,000 seconds). Makes perfect sense on a space
station so we'll have to face it sooner or later.

~~~
zeteo
Well while we're at it, what's the fetish with 10? We should use powers of 2
for everything :)

~~~
BrandonM
I would prefer base-12; it has a lot of benefits. See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal>, especially
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal#Comparison_to_other_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal#Comparison_to_other_numeral_systems)

Instead of changing our clocks, we could just change our numbering system.
Having 50 (that's 5 x 12) seconds per minute, 50 minutes per hour, and 20
hours per day seems perfectly reasonable.

~~~
baddox
Choosing a radix is a balance between the number of prime factors (and
brevity) and the number of symbols to keep track of. I think twelve strikes a
good balance as well.

~~~
ars
In that case 3 is your number. (Because it's the closest number to e, 2.71)

There is a currency based on it (with the provably least number of coins
necessary to make any kind of change), ternary logic, balanced ternary is
especially cool, etc.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Why is being close to e a good thing?

~~~
eru
Actually, the best number depends. Basically, you want to have as few
operations as possible, but you also want them easy.

Having base b for number n, you need log_b n digits where each digit is an
element of (0..b-1). So working on those representations takes something like
f(log_b n, b) operations. Where the function f depends on the operation you
are looking at.

A good base should keep f small in relation to all n.

One very natural choice for f, I can't remember which at the moment, leads to
e being the best base in theory---so 3 being good in practice.

If you are working with something like trees on disk (yes, data structures are
very intimately related to numbering systems---read Okasaki's Purely
Functional Data Structures for more information) a very big b, i.e. branching
factor in this case, like 1024 is useful: Loading a new digit/node from disk
into memory takes a long time, but once it's in memory, your operations will
be fast.

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orangecat
Good for them. It makes much more sense to shift government/business hours if
needed than constantly mucking with the time and screwing up millions of
software installations.

~~~
andresmh
can't the OS's handle the change automatically?

~~~
ig1
No. Every piece of software that deals with time in any kind of sophistication
needs to have logic to handle it.

I used to work on a share price alerting system where you could say "if the
price of stock X goes up by 10% during these hours than alert me", that
creates a nightmare when it comes to DST changes. Do you use the timezone of
the person who setup that alert (what if they're now in a different timezone
do you change ?) or do you use the DST rules of the country the share trades
in.

Imagine you have a calendaring app and someone from another country sends you
a meeting request for the future that's past a DST change in one of your
countries, but not past it in the other. It's possible for the time to be
ambiguous unless you specify DST handling rules. What happens if a country
changes DST rules (this happens far more often than you think) how do you
adjust previously set appointments ?

Imagine your Google Analytics, what timezone do you save analytics data in and
do you adjust for DST (the answer is PST by default, and if you change it,
historical data won't be adjusted so you end up with a mishmash of time data).

In any scenario where you have to handle timezones it's complicated enough as
it is, DST handling makes it a nightmare.

~~~
weinzierl
Unix-like systems like Linux and OSX handle that very well. The hardware real
time clock ticks in UTC, file timestamps and the like are stored in UTC. The
OS knows everything about time zones and DST and therefore can display the
time the way you expect it.

~~~
jrockway
The problem goes the other way. If a user says, "run this job at 1:10AM", does
the job run twice when 2am becomes 1am at the DST switch? If everyone input
times in UTC, it would be fine, but users want to input _and_ output.

I am lucky to be able to avoid this problem, because while I do have users
that want to read and write times in their local time zone, they are asleep at
1am and automated stuff tends to run at midnight. Sometimes the dice roll in
your favor :)

------
gbhn
That's a great precedent! I hope the US abandons winter time, too.

~~~
pkulak
Lousy farmers...

~~~
ecaron
Actually the farmers in my family have to reprogram their clocks twice a year
to avoid DST, since cows are incredibly sensitive to their milking schedule
and the twice-a-year hourly shift really screws with the herd.

I would go so far as to say that farmers hate DST more than
programmers/sysadmins do.

~~~
eru
Why do farmers bother they cows with DST, then? Can't they just get up at the
same (real) time?

~~~
simias
I think one of the problems is that the milk trucks and the rest of the
industry do respect DST so if you lose one hour the milk might spoil. At least
it's what I heard a farmer say on the TV a couple years ago.

~~~
eru
Thanks. That's the first time I heard that argument considered.

------
Vivtek
Indiana just _went_ to daylight savings a couple of years back. Pissed me off
- the new Republican governor said it would attract jobs (which is the reason
anybody ever does anything in Indianapolis), and the success of that was
predictable.

~~~
technomancy
I live in the Pacific time zone, and for a long time I've been tempted to
reset my clock to Pitcairn Island time, which is just like Pacific time, but
without observing daylight savings.

Haven't made the jump yet, but it's only a matter of time before some stupid
DST error fills me with enough rage.

~~~
joeyh
I am not observing DST this winter. When living off the grid on solar power,
messing with the time the sun is up is annoying. It's been working out well
enough for me. Did a custom DST-less EST timezone.
[http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/howto_create_your_own_ti...](http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/howto_create_your_own_time_zone/)

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speleding
I wish they would do that here. As a parent of two small kids I dread the
clock changes, it takes forever for them to adjust.

~~~
anigbrowl
It costs the US economy billions every year. Exactly how many billions depends
on how you measure, but the direct costs of adjusting for the extension in
2007 were $1.1bn, according to the well-sourced Wikipedia article on the
subject. DST all year round, say I. Dark winter mornings are OK by me.

------
nathanb
I think the title of this post is incorrect; they're not abolishing DST,
they're permanently moving to DST.

~~~
weinzierl
I'd rather say that they are changing their time zone from UTC+3 to UTC+4.
It's not that they will have permanent DST, but rather standard time is now
UTC+3 and will be UTC+4.

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zdw
Move to Arizona. We don't have DST here. It's awesome... until you get a
machine shipped to you from somewhere misconfigured with DST turned on running
a time-criticial task...

Seriously, I wish we all went to GMT, everywhere, and just were done with it.

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yason
Isn't winter time the standard clock and it's summer time that is the
deviation from that? So Russia would be abolishing summer time that is also
known as daylight savings time?

~~~
msbarnett
No. Per the article, they're staying on UTC+4 (aka DST) permanently, rather
than falling back to UTC+3 in the winter.

~~~
weinzierl
Absolutely, but that is no counter argument to yason's statement. There is no
such thing as winter time. As far as I understand it it's just that Moscow's
time zone is UTC+3 and they are changing that to UTC+4. It's not that unusual
that a country is in an another time zone than it should be geographically,
look at Spain for example.

~~~
dedward
From the article,they only said they won't be switching their clocks back this
winter as they usually would.

They have "winter time" in the same sense that "it's the time we use in the
winter" Remember, some places refer to daylight saving time as "blah summer
time"

So yeah, all they're saying is they are staying on their equivalent of DST
starting this year.

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gojomo
Ho-hum. Want to be really forward-thinking? Follow the example of China, which
discarded 5 time zones for a single national time in 1949. (We'd then adjust
the office/retail hours to mimic local daylight, rather adjusting the numbers
on the clock.)

~~~
evgen
One timezone covering enough longitudinal variation to want five timezones is
a dumb idea. Doing the same thing in a country with enough east-west span to
cover ten timezones would be an incredibly dumb idea.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
What, why? Does waking up at 6 have any different intrinsic value than waking
up a 3.5 or 11 ? Ever since time zones, there hasn't been an intrinsic meaning
to time (who uses sun dials?) We should all just be on the same time, the
whole world around.

~~~
rue
Indeed. It can also be explained as a matter of simple efficiency: Currently
when synchronising something, two pieces of information must be known (the
time, and the timezone). If using a single timezone, only one is required
(whether it's night or day at either end is inconsequential, only the party at
that end really needs to worry about it and can provide a range of hours
suitable to them).

~~~
rottencupcakes
This is absolutely incorrect. Except in the singular example of arranging
telecommunication across timezones, you have to maintain MORE information
under this system. When I currently travel, I can make the assumption that any
restaurant will be open by 11 AM, that I have to check out of my hotel by 11
AM and that I can't check in until 3 PM.

In your system, standard store hours have become a random regional fluctuation
instead of a strictly maintained standard. I still need to maintain timezone
information, but I ALSO need to do math in my head to figure out if it is an
appropriate time to go to a certain kind of store.

~~~
salvadors
You obviously don't travel much.

There is _huge_ variation in these sorts of things worldwide. See, for
example, <http://www.spanish-town-guides.com/Opening_Hours.htm>

~~~
ghshephard
Which of the three isn't (generally) true all over the world:

    
    
      o Restaurants open at 11:00 AM.
      o You check out of your hotel no earlier than 11:00 AM 
      o You can check in at 3:00 PM.
    

Certainly different hotels allow things like Early Checkin (I've checked in as
early as 8:00 AM in hotels with a lot of vacancy), and late checkout (most
hotels will let you check out at 12:00, and for a small fee, 1:00 is usually
no problem). And yes, there are lots of restaurants that only do dinners, or
breakfasts/lunches - but for a restaurant that does two shifts - 11:00 AM is
usually a guaranteed time for it being open.

But, I don't think I've ever been to a country where the
checkin/checkout/restaurant opening wasn't generally true.

Admittedly, I haven't been to the "One Time Zone China" - that might throw my
theory out the door...

~~~
salvadors
Pretty much none of those are generally true across Europe.

Restaurant opening hours vary dramatically by country, largely due people
tending to eat at very different times in different countries. To pick a
restaurant I walked past yesterday: <http://www.restaurant-
thierry.fr/index.php?p=contact> — open 12pm–3pm and 7pm–11pm. From my
experience here those lunchtime hours are fairly common, although more
restaurants would open earlier than than in the evening (unlike Spain, where
lots of restaurants don't open until at least 9pm or 10pm at night).

On the assumption that #2 is "no later than", then where there's consistency
at all it would be noon, rather than 11am.

Check-in has almost no consistency at all. I'm currently in France, and lots
of the hotels I've been looking at have a 6pm earliest check-in. Many others
are noon or 1pm. I haven't seen one yet that's 3pm.

------
madcaptenor
You can generate a table of sunrises and sunsets from the US Naval
Observatory, <http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneYear.php> .
Unfortunately I don't see a way to link directly to the table; Moscow is 55 45
N, 37 36 E, and now four hours east of Greenwich. From their location, they're
"naturally" around UTC+2:30 (37.6 degrees, divided by 15 degrees per hour).

The table says that in late December the sun will rise at around 10 AM and set
at around 5 PM. This doesn't seem preferable to the 9-4 they'd have under
standard time. I'm not sure about Russian time zone boundaries, though; is
Moscow time used in areas to the east of Moscow?

~~~
listic
Moscow time is used in the North-West region, there are 9 time zones in total:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Russia_-
_Time_Zones...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Russia_-
_Time_Zones_\(April_2010\).svg)

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GiraffeNecktie
China also maintains the same time year round.

~~~
dhughes
Yes but for the entire country!

That's a lot of real estate under one time zone, it may be silly to have
summer and winter times but having one time zone for a country approximately
the same size as Canada (5,000km wide) seems silly, Canada has six time zones.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> having one time zone for a country approximately the same size as Canada
> (5,000km wide) seems silly

Why?

In America, people already get up at 7am (insert your own time here,
obviously) regardless of what the local sunrise actually is - which varies
based on how far north or south you live.

It's pretty arbitrary. But one time zone at least makes the arbitraryness
easier on coders.

~~~
dedward
It's arbitrary to a degree, but having a single timezone for Russia, or even
the US, would amplify the effect. It's no big deal now because you are used to
season changing, sunrise changing, etc - but if suddenly you had to get up for
work and endure, say, 5 hours of darkness, or perhaps only 1 hour of daylight
left..... it would be ugly. That's why we have timezones.

~~~
anigbrowl
Couldn't you just get up at, say, noon, work from 2pm until 10pm, and go to
bed at 4am? This would be a bit confusing at first but it's basically what
people do now. Solar noon would be at a different chronological time for
everyone outside of GMT but you'd only have to make the adjustment once, plus
it would provide an economic stimulus to compass manufacturers :-)

~~~
pavel_lishin
Yes, this is exactly what I meant. I didn't mean that the whole country would
get up at 8am, no matter what the local solar time was. That would be kind of
ridiculous.

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antirez
Hope that Berlusconi in one of his delirious of madness will do the same for
Italy. But I want to stay always in DST, that in Italy means more daylight.

~~~
eru
If you want to get up an hour earlier to have more light, then just get up an
hour earlier.

~~~
antirez
The problem is that the rest of the world will instead follow the clock. So
for instance my son will still exit school at 2:10 pm, I'll need to prepare
something to eat, and then we could spend some time to the park, but it's
already too late to get some decent sunlight.

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rjrodger
Woohoo! Good riddance.

