
Time zone news - fs111
http://time.is/time_zone_news
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dijit
Is there still a valid reason to have timezones altering between states? is it
just for agriculture?

While we're, talking about changing time monitoring systems, can't we have 13
months with 28 days each? (and an extra day every 4 years added on to
december?) :(

Simple things, but that would allow us to follow the lunar cycle.

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bostonpete
In Northern areas, there's a lot of practical value that gets overlooked. In
Boston, the sun is rising close to 5:00 AM as it is at the height of summer.
Without daylight savings time, it would be rising at 4:00 AM. I think most
people would rather have extended daylight late in the day than have all that
extra sunlight wasted when we're sleeping.

The counter to that is -- well, let's always stick with daylight savings time
then. That has problems of its own. For example, sunset is a little after 4:00
PM in Boston in late December. If we stuck with daylight savings time, it'd be
a little after 3:00. That would pose risks for school children walking home,
etc.

Yes, I realize that people in Fairbanks Alaska have it much worse and daylight
savings doesn't fix the problem for them, but there are a lot of people who
live in the northern parts of the lower 48 that benefit from the time shift.

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ghaff
You're backwards. The problem with year-round daylight savings in Boston
(which, personally, I'd prefer) is kids going to school in the dark in the
winter. Boston's both relatively northernly and very far east in a timezone
because eastern time wraps up the northeast-jutting coast of the US to avoid
New England being in its own timezone. [Edit: It wouldn't be in its own
timezone; it would be in Atlantic time, which is used in parts of Canada. But
it would put Boston in a different timezone from NYC and other major east
coast cities.]

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kuschku
> kids going to school in the dark in the winter

Daylight Savings Time can’t fix that in most places either.

Where I live, right now (today), sun rises around 8am, and sets around 4pm.

Kids will go to school around 7:20, and come back home around 15h.

In mid december, it’s even worse – most people never see the sun during that
time.

~~~
ghaff
DST's not really all that useful at either latitudes where the day length is
relatively uniform throughout the year nor at latitudes that vary between more
light than you know what to do with and dark in morning and evening no matter
what.

It's really primarily useful when you have enough light for long summer
evenings and winter days that are short but are still long enough that it
makes sense to fine-tune sunrise and sunset relative to normal work and school
times.

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gerjomarty
For anyone interested in time zones, I had a terribly unproductive afternoon
the day I started looking through both the time zone mailing list[1], and the
raw zoneinfo files. I love the history that lies beneath all of the changes.

[1]: [http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/](http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/)

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samhoggnz
The Turkish change affected me over the weekend. The local mobile carriers
didn't update their settings and thus my phone automatically updated to EEST.
Fortunately my flight was much later in the day and it was rectified by that
point.

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Sevzinn
Willing to move to Arizona to not deal with timezone changes.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
Or Hawaii!

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donatj
I wish this site had an RSS feed. I'd subscribe right now.

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time_is
We now have an RSS feed. Thanks for your requests!
[http://time.is/rss/time_zone_news.rss](http://time.is/rss/time_zone_news.rss)

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kseistrup
Thanks for you swift attention! :)

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jarcoal
Situations like Turkey's DST extension reminds me why storing dates in UTC
with no further information is not good enough.

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mildweed
Can you explain the complication you're thinking about? And what additional
information you'd store?

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0x0
Lots of events needs to be scheduled in local time. If your calendar app
stores a given UTC timestamp for your meeting with a customer on friday at 5PM
and the time zone rules database change inbetween, you're going to have an
angry customer.

~~~
scrollaway
And what would meta-metadata about the datetime solve? What you're looking for
is faster updates to timezone libraries. And for governments to stop being
idiots — "I'm delaying DST because it inconveniences me", pah, what a load of
garbage. It's a symptom of how much DST sucks. If anything, this couldve been
a good occasion to repel DST in turkey.

~~~
0x0
If you stored it in the DB as "2015-10-30 17:00:00 SOMETIMEZONE" then it would
be unambiguous when the event is going to happen. If you stored an UTC
timestamp, well, then you'd get two different values depending on whether you
had the updated tzdata or not when the value was entered and converted to a
timestamp.

If you think this problem can be solved by declaring today's version of tzdata
immutable and final, then I'm afraid you're not being realistic. Timezones,
DST rules, country borders will change and always have.

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fanf2
Storing the timezone name does not work when the boundaries between timezones
change. Best to store local time and location.
[http://fanf.livejournal.com/104586.html](http://fanf.livejournal.com/104586.html)

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bkjelden
I always joke that time zones and character encodings more or less guarantee
programmers will always be able to find jobs.

~~~
nulltype
Unicode hurts workers, families, & community! Shame on the Unicode Consortium!

If we got rid of DST and didn't change the rules too often, time zones
wouldn't really be that big of a deal.

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MichaelGG
It'd still be an issue, because people lose their minds when thinking about
time zones. Example: .net XML serialization. The PM wanted to "do the right
thing" and thus would encode all dates in XML with an offset determined by
looking at some local setting. Hence the exact same code would produce a
different XML document depending on the selected time zone.

They 'fixed' it by using a couple bits of the date to note if it was UTC or
'local'. But for a version or two, there was no way around corrupting data.
The PM lamented the fact, saying "if only machines all had GPS, then we'd know
the right offset to use", further demonstrating the lack of understanding.

Some folks just can't resist thinking in local time, instead of letting the
dev handle time zones additionally.

Even the great tzinfo database is weird. Instead of using the names of time
zones, it uses a random city. Which means if a time zone does split up in the
future, you might end up with an incorrect timezone. (Like if I select Denver,
but Denver switches to New Mountain Time, but my city doesn't.)

~~~
nulltype
I'm sure there's no problem that can't be created by a sufficiently bad PM.

I think you can treat the name of the city as the name of the timezone. Seems
like you'd have the same problem either way. If you used "Mountain Time" and
then your city switches to "New Mountain Time" you still have the incorrect
timezone.

Instead of cities it could use polygons on the surface of the earth, but
that's starting to get complicated at that point.

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icehawk219
I've always joked that the more I work with i18n and l10n the more I become a
fan of one world language, currency, and time zone. I know that would be rife
with its own problems but hey, an exhausted developer can dream.

~~~
a3n
An exhausted developer can also pay the rent.

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BorisMelnik
Is it me or does it look like some countries / states are moving towards
abolishing daylight savings? I hate to revisit this topic but I would love to
see this horribly archaic system abolished ad infinitum.

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davidw
I'm reminded of this quote:

"I was in favour of space exploration until I realised what it'd mean for date
time libraries"

[https://twitter.com/joe_jag/status/510048646482894848](https://twitter.com/joe_jag/status/510048646482894848)

~~~
diminish
All space time clocks may run at GMT+00 with no regional differences.

Actually we may remove time zones all together too. So the day time of 3pm
will be different everywhere. For calendar months and seasons we already have
it like that, in both hemispheres. The only issue is backward incompatibility
with legacy movies, books who talk about breakfast at 8am. Similarly, a love
song which talks about April/May being a sunny warm time sounds weird in
southern hemipshere. Let's get rid of Roman legacy code in our civilization :)

~~~
hedgehog
Oh no, it's much worse than that. On Earth you can generally treat time as
being the same speed everywhere. If you start a timer at T1 UTC and run it for
a locally observed 60 seconds you can expect the current UTC time to be T1+60
seconds. In space relativistic effects stop being negligible and you might
find that UTC time is T1+61 seconds.

~~~
nulltype
We have clocks that are wrong all the time already, I'm not sure how that
makes date time libraries worse. GPS satellites are in space, they have to
deal with relativity effects, and mostly everything seems fine.

~~~
Zikes
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11279076/why-does-the-
lea...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11279076/why-does-the-leap-second-
cause-problems)

One second can be a big deal.

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tempodox
fork(2) me, Optima for display & body text. Say what you will, it looks
beautiful.

~~~
tempodox
Apparently, some time zone fans are opposed to the praise of beautiful fonts.
Have it your way.

