"All times are in Eastern Time"

Lost User

None of them were what you would call stupid, it's just that the whole concept of how to use time zones seemed to elude them. Always baffled me.

PIEBALDconsult

Marc Clifton wrote:

UTC

University Town Center -- it's a mall in La Jolla.

You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.

Marc Clifton

PIEBALDconsult wrote:

University Town Center -- it's a mall in La Jolla.

Yes, I used to shop there, was a frequent customer of the Ritz Camera that was there (is it still?) And is it actually part of La Jolla or University City? Funny you mention that, I was almost going to post that acronym in my original post, but decided nobody would get it (though I suppose there's a website for the mall.) Marc

Latest Article - APOD Scraper

PIEBALDconsult

Let's just assume we met! :-D And if you worked at SAIC we can say we worked together.

You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.

Mark_Wallace

Richard MacCutchan wrote:

I could never get our American programmers and analysts to fully understand time zones_, irony, that other countries exist, that "America" is a pair of continents comprising lots of countries, that English accents aren't cute (they just don't sound bluddy awful like yankee ones), or that everything that they believe was invented in the US wasn't._

It must be a developer thing, but I hate seeing incomplete statements.

I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

Mark_Wallace

The US won't be in the world cup long enough for them to need to use blasted-colonial time zones. With any luck, the UK and NL won't last much longer, so the noise will decrease to bearable levels.

I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

Lost User

Mea culpa. :laugh:

Herbie Mountjoy

I used to work for a company that broadcast television to the whole of Europe, Africa and the middle East. Don't talk to me about time zones!!! They were the bane of my life. Because of stupid daylight saving time we were obliged to modify the start of day times for almost every single channel (nearly 100 at that time). Thank goodness for SQL. Made my life so much easier.

I may not last forever but the mess I leave behind certainly will.

kalberts

Marc Clifton wrote:

Well, what do you think they should use, UTC?

Well, didn't China ("which we call Red China") fairly recently switch to use a single time zone for the entire country? It makes sense. It really doesn't matter what you call the time when you get out of bed. People in the west DO get out of bed five hours later than the people in the west, so why should they both insist of calling it six o'clock, create a lot of problems. As long as you live isolated, you might want to insist on your day starting at 06:00, but once you start cooperating with someone far away, I cannot see one single advantage of labeling the same point in time with different values. I wouldn't mind UTC beeing established as the "time zone" for the entire world. (My country, Norway, is a tiny north-south string of land. Nevertheless, we span two complete time zones: The people up north (-east) see the morning sun two hours before the people on the west coast. We live well with that, and have always done.)

Stefan_Lang

Makes me wonder, if the sun didn't even set the previous day, can you really call it the 'morning sun'? How do you measure the difference in time to other locations' morning sun when you don't technically have one? :^) Then again, US citizens may be reading this - let's not confuse them even more ;P

GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)

G Tek

Our app functions across multiples time zones so we've dealt with time zone despair for years as well. We store everything in UTC and convert back to local when displaying to user, but it's a real pain, especially when MS changes standards over time (for those that don't know, they try to automatically adjust times for you by comparing time zones of client and server - not helpful when we're already doing the conversion ourselves). If anyone ever needs help with the horrors of time zones drop a line - lots of experience to share. As part of your useless trivia for the day, Coordinated Universal Time was originally going to be abbreviated as CUT, but since people couldn't agree on the abbreviation it was arranged so that no one got what they want. That's compromise! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time[^] The official abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time is UTC. This abbreviation arose from a desire by the International Telecommunication Union and the International Astronomical Union to use the same abbreviation in all languages. English speakers originally proposed CUT (for "coordinated universal time"), while French speakers proposed TUC (for "temps universel coordonné"). The compromise that emerged was UTC,[8] which conforms to the pattern for the abbreviations of the variants of Universal Time (UT0, UT1, UT2, UT1R, etc.).[9]

ZurdoDev

Perhaps it was actually your accent they could not understand. :-D

There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.

Rowdy Raider

Ah, blame the French - it is agreed then - this mess is their fault. Seriously though in newer .Net and SQL DateTimeOffset is a support primitive type, and 99% of the time that is what you ought to be storing not DateTime. So many issues go away completely whith that simple change.

Lost User

Yeah most likely; I always wrote my emails in English. ;)

ZurdoDev

Richard MacCutchan wrote:

; I always wrote my emails in English.

Yep that's it. Try writing in American next time. :)

There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.

Jim Dolson

Actually, it's not British. Its French. Universal Time Coordinated (dumb Frogs can't even get sentence structure correct). Jim aka dumb American ham radio operator who, along with 700,000 other dumb American ham radio operators, only uses UTC when logging radio contacts.

joeller

No you mention Twilight Zone to these youngsters today and they just stare uncomprehendingly at you.

Marc Clifton

joeller wrote:

No you mention Twilight Zone to these youngsters today and they just stare uncomprehendingly at you.

True. I date myself. :) Marc