"All times are in Eastern Time"
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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.
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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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"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 – ∞)
Except that [generally] GMT gets adjusted for Daylight Savings, UTC does not (at least in my experience - not to say I'm any kind of expert here).
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Except that [generally] GMT gets adjusted for Daylight Savings, UTC does not (at least in my experience - not to say I'm any kind of expert here).
Nope, GMT stands for Greenwich Mean Time, and is not adjusted - the UK switches between GMT and BST (GMT + 1) for winter and summer respectively.
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 – ∞)
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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 – ∞)
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Nope, GMT stands for Greenwich Mean Time, and is not adjusted - the UK switches between GMT and BST (GMT + 1) for winter and summer respectively.
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 – ∞)
Interesting. I'll look into that on our servers. I've seen the GMT reference (yes I know what GMT is short for), but not a BST. but you are right - there is a separate check box for whether to adjust for DST. We have our severs set to UTC for consistency... Thanks for the info... Mark (just a cog in the wheel in Denver, CO)
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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.
Jim Dolson wrote:
Actually, it's not British. Its French.
Universal Time Coordinated (dumb Frogs can't even get sentence structure correct).Jim, because it was the result of a compromise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time#Etymology[^]
