

On Complexity: when you can't even get time right - silentbicycle
http://www.rebol.com/article/0400.html

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brent
Man, I expected a much more interesting article based on the title.

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jderick
I totally agree people should stop making excuses for Microsoft. At the same
time, rants against complexity in general always make me think of this quote:

"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and
wrong." -- Mencken

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jhawk28
Changing timezones have caused some of the most complicated things in the
coding I've done. It seems so simple, but its never right. Look at how many
different libraries are in the standard Java library to handle time.

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russell
Sun got it wrong the first time and again the second time. I haven't looked at
the Java 7 api, but they'll probably get it wrong the third time.

OK, I took a quick look. It's better, but still not what I would consider an
easily usable system. I will still have to write a parser that will take
unconstrained user input. There are 8 or 10 formats that are unambiguous and
easy to recognize. Do it. Joda-Time has too many classes. Will it work
seamlessly with SQL Date?

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jmatt
Ironically I think it's just as likely that it was simplicity that caused the
error rather than complexity:

 _Older Microsoft Windows systems usually store only a single start and end
rule for each zone_ ^

If only they were forward thinking enough to know that laws change... and thus
DST will eventually change too. A similar form of naive simplicity caused the
Y2K mess. I think this falls in line with that incident.

I agree that Microsoft should have properly solved this problem on all OSes
and pushed the solution back in 2006. It's ridiculous that this is still a
problem on a recently installed recently patched box. Especially on XP which
is currently their core market.

^ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time>

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sanj
That's not simplicity.

That's simply being lazy and wrong.

Timezones have been changing for over a hundred years.

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thwarted
Yeah. And the changelog for the tzdata package is quite interesting in that
regard. Usually changes in timezone information occur months or years before
they actually need to occur (including recognizing leap seconds).

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jhancock
OT: every time I bump into Rebol, I make a mental note: "would like to find an
excuse to use this language someday."

    
    
      Some many cool languages...so little time ;)

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blasdel
The worst part about time on Windows is that the system clock is _always_ set
to localtime.

With that as the default, nearly all Windows software is completely timezone-
ignorant, which is especially shitty for web software. The most support I ever
see is a user preference for "Server time +/-N:00", which forces foreigners to
manually fiddle with it twice a year.

Just one of the many bullshit misfeatures that Microsoft should have fixed
with NT but chickened out on.

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qeorge
I found this title a bit ironic. Although MS should have gotten it right,
keeping time is an inherently complex problem.

