"All times are in Eastern Time"
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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!
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Yeah, I see that -- "All Times ET" -- on FOX's MLB schedules as well. Not much help when trying to watch the local game.
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
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.
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Well, what do you think they should use, UTC? Do you honestly believe that anyone except programmers and those living outside of the US even know what UTC is? People in the US probably think UTC is a form of contraceptive. Marc
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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.)
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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.)
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)
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Well, what do you think they should use, UTC? Do you honestly believe that anyone except programmers and those living outside of the US even know what UTC is? People in the US probably think UTC is a form of contraceptive. Marc
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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]
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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.
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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]
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.
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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.
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"It's British for GMT"
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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.
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Richard MacCutchan wrote:
I could never get our American programmers and analysts to fully understand time zones
And we wonder why our educational systems are failing. :( I bet they all knew where the Twilight Zone was though! Marc
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No you mention Twilight Zone to these youngsters today and they just stare uncomprehendingly at you.
joeller wrote:
No you mention Twilight Zone to these youngsters today and they just stare uncomprehendingly at you.
True. I date myself. :) Marc
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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]
G-Tek wrote:
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!
What's amusing is, in the MSDN documentation for SetTimeZoneInformation, is this: Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) Where, of course, the acronym would be CUT, not UTC. Marc
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No you mention Twilight Zone to these youngsters today and they just stare uncomprehendingly at you.
Need to make them watch more SyFy channel XD
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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]
Out apps have to function all over the world from the US East Coast, (where the preponderance of users are), to the west Coast, to Hawaii, to Japan, to the Med and to Afghanistan. Where datetimes are of importance we use zulu time (GMT) . Otherwise we reference the time zone of the system's location and the supporter's location, which Eastern Time, (+5). Time zones were established in the US to accomodate railroads scheduling from the days when each location kept its own time based on Local Apparent Noon. However, they did not really impact most Americans until airline travel and broadcasting. Since most Americans never leave the country all they care about are their own Time zone and Eastern Time (by which the TV shows are scheduled). As far as one time zone for the entire country, I really would not want to work an 8 AM to 4 PM shift and never see the sun. I don't think the pharse "Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the Noon day sun" would make much sense, if Noon came before sunrise for most of the year. ;)
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Out apps have to function all over the world from the US East Coast, (where the preponderance of users are), to the west Coast, to Hawaii, to Japan, to the Med and to Afghanistan. Where datetimes are of importance we use zulu time (GMT) . Otherwise we reference the time zone of the system's location and the supporter's location, which Eastern Time, (+5). Time zones were established in the US to accomodate railroads scheduling from the days when each location kept its own time based on Local Apparent Noon. However, they did not really impact most Americans until airline travel and broadcasting. Since most Americans never leave the country all they care about are their own Time zone and Eastern Time (by which the TV shows are scheduled). As far as one time zone for the entire country, I really would not want to work an 8 AM to 4 PM shift and never see the sun. I don't think the pharse "Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the Noon day sun" would make much sense, if Noon came before sunrise for most of the year. ;)
We store UTC instead of GMT because we also want to be careful to account for DST. We denormalize larger tables by storing both the UTC and Local time. My preference is also to base time on 24hr clock, but there are lots of people that aren't comfortable with that. Time zones are a PITA.
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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.
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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.
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Thanks, Google. WTF is "Eastern Time"? Time since the birth of Mao? Something to do with Scheherazade? Mongolian sheep-dung-decay time?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
You know - 12 o-crock, 1 o-crock - talk like an oriental - you'll get it. :)
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013 -
Thanks, Google. WTF is "Eastern Time"? Time since the birth of Mao? Something to do with Scheherazade? Mongolian sheep-dung-decay time?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
What use of time zones anyway? I live nearly 42° N. According to the encyclopedias the earth is ~40000km around equator. That means ~29322km at this latitude, so on every ~1222km east/west the sunset/sunrise differs by one hour and on every ~20km by one minute. And the sunset/sunrise is the only thing that matters in measuring the time.
