Meanwhile in CanadaBusy day at Stonehenge as the stones are moved forward one hour.
#springforward
#springforward
Jim Fenton 🇺🇸🇨🇦@MeanwhileinCanada But the UK changes their clocks a different weekend!
enmodo ⚛️ 🧬 🇺🇦 🍉@jimfenton @MeanwhileinCanada and all because lobbyists for the US candy industry persuaded Bush junior to alter our DST start and end dates. They claimed it was to keep the children safe during Halloween but everyone knows it was in the hope of increased profits because extra daylight at the end of October means more trick or treat hours and more candy sales.
JohnMashey@enmodo @jimfenton @MeanwhileinCanada
Consider Unix time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
For a while during 1974, the USA went to "permanent" DST, which introduced a "nixonflag" to adjust the local times produced by the Unix time conversion function.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2022/03/15/the-us-tried-permanent-daylight-saving-time-in-the-70s-people-hated-it/
People hated permanent DST.
Computers hate TZs and DST changes.
We should all just go to UTC!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time
Consider Unix time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
For a while during 1974, the USA went to "permanent" DST, which introduced a "nixonflag" to adjust the local times produced by the Unix time conversion function.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2022/03/15/the-us-tried-permanent-daylight-saving-time-in-the-70s-people-hated-it/
People hated permanent DST.
Computers hate TZs and DST changes.
We should all just go to UTC!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time
@JohnMashey @jimfenton @MeanwhileinCanada if I had a dollar for every second I've spent on date and time issues in apps I could have bailed out Silicon Valley Bank. Well, at least it feels that way...
As for just using UTC - I spend so much of my day dealing with data from a global app I pretty much think in UTC / Zulu time anyway.
I'd be up for decimalizing time too, something like Swatch time... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time and moving to more recent epoch for 0. Unix time WFM!
@enmodo @jimfenton @MeanwhileinCanada
Swatch is step too far I think, UTC already used in key domains. Given 64-bit CPUs and even “long long” on 32-bit CPUs, UNIX epoch Jan 1 1970 can last long beyond 2038… even 5,000 years from now😊 according to Vernor Vinge:
https://mstdn.social/@JohnMashey/109991399173605796
Swatch is step too far I think, UTC already used in key domains. Given 64-bit CPUs and even “long long” on 32-bit CPUs, UNIX epoch Jan 1 1970 can last long beyond 2038… even 5,000 years from now😊 according to Vernor Vinge:
https://mstdn.social/@JohnMashey/109991399173605796
JohnMashey (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] 7/ And as for the difficulty of understanding legacy software and its persistence, I couldn't resist quoting Vernor when I wrote "Languages, Levels, Libraries, and Longevity" https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039532 The idea that 5000 years from now, a relativistic starship would be running a Unix timer routine was quite amusing.... but then, there was code written at BTL in 1960s that I think is still being used today,
@JohnMashey @jimfenton @MeanwhileinCanada with a signed 64-bit number and one second resolution you can go for 292 billion years into the future (or into the past). The question is then do you want milli, micro, or nano second resolution as well - or add an additional fractional seconds field for that?