[HN Gopher] Tell HN: Sudden Chile daylight savings time rules ch...
___________________________________________________________________
Tell HN: Sudden Chile daylight savings time rules change causes
chaos
The government of Chile changed the local rules for daylight
savings with approximately 30 days notice. A lot of chaos has
resulted, at least according to Reddit [1], which is where I found
out about it. Media doesn't seem to be reporting much on this, the
most I've been able to find is one article from before the
changeover [2] and a changelog for the IANA tzdb [3]. [1]
https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/x9kr4...
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/07/microsoft_windows_chi...
[3] https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdb/NEWS
Author : csense
Score : 129 points
Date : 2022-09-11 15:32 UTC (7 hours ago)
| gerikson wrote:
| Here is Microsoft's interim guidance for the change
|
| <https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/daylight-saving-time-...>
|
| In my experience MSFT does a stellar job within the limits of
| what's possible to accommodate TZ/DST changes.
|
| As per the TZ Info mailing list, the change was committed on 9
| Aug:
|
| <https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2022-August/031777.html>
| amelius wrote:
| I like this chaos-monkey approach to politics, and we should do
| it more often.
|
| Now let me slide this handle that increases taxes on HFT and see
| what happens.
| thro388 wrote:
| Even better, let's lock everyone at their homes with 3 hour
| notice at 2 AM...
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Hell, increase tax on all trading. Most people don't need to be
| gambling day-to-day on equities
| jstanley wrote:
| Most people don't need to be running most businesses, but it
| still hurts them if those businesses become less efficient.
| rmujica wrote:
| Chilean here. Unfortunately our governments have had the bad
| habit of changing the date DST starts on every two-three years,
| and that wreaks havoc everywhere in the country. We are kind of
| used to having a couple of days where we assume everyone will run
| an hour late because of this.
|
| I just hosted some Peruvian friends this week and were amazed at
| the kind of power the government wields just by having the
| ability to change our timezone.
|
| We should be placed on GMT-5, but for a couple of reasons we are
| on GMT-4 and GMT-3 for DST. Our country is so long that some
| places on the north have normal length days but on Patagonia days
| are shorter and they prefer to be on DST all year long (and since
| some years ago we have a different timezone for that area).
| pedalpete wrote:
| Didn't they do the same thing in 2011? But as I recall, it was
| the Friday before the time change that the announcement came
| out. I had just recently moved to Chile, and I remember a week
| of looking at Google to find out what the current time was.
| mike_hock wrote:
| So that's why `tzdata` constantly gets updated.
| mtmail wrote:
| So far 3 releases in 2022, 5 in 2021, 6 in 2020, 3 in 2019
| mike-the-mikado wrote:
| For comparison, it looks as if Punta Arenas ("the most
| southerly city in Chile" according to Wikipedia) is about 53
| degrees south.
|
| 53 degrees north puts you around Nottingham, England (or a
| little north of Berlin).
| smsm42 wrote:
| Israel used to have the switch data determined by a parliamentary
| vote, and changed almost every year. Depending on the political
| power distribution, the date was moved back and forth. I don't
| remember the exact details already, but it was related to Jewish
| holidays, which involved morning prayers, so sometimes it was
| more convenient for certain people to move the time scale back or
| forward, and since Jewish holidays are celebrated following
| Jewish calendar, which moves around relatively to Western
| calendar, and since sometimes religious parties had enough power
| to get special consideration and sometimes they didn't...
|
| You can look at the result e.g. here:
| https://git.launchpad.net/pytz/tree/tz/asia (look for "Zion"
| there). They thankfully finally stopped doing it in 2013 and
| arrived at a stable rule, but until then you can image how much
| confusion it caused.
| Zekio wrote:
| This is why I personally want everything to just be utc without
| timezones
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Well... https://qntm.org/abolish
|
| Time zones are fine. Random time zone offset changes are not.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" Random time zone offset changes are not."_
|
| Are you saying that our computer systems are so inflexible
| that we cannot make them do our bidding? The issue here has
| nothing to do with whether daylight saving is appropriate or
| not, rather it's about the inability of computers to adapt
| quickly.
|
| When I was studying computing I had a textbook titled
| _Problems for Computer Solution,_ it was about how to get
| computers to do _our_ bidding - not vice versa!
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Most computers adapt just fine. International travel and
| cooperation are the real problem, especially in our
| increasingly globalized world.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| It would be indeed great if our computer systems could
| adapt to those changes quickly. But the reality is that
| they can't, and there are many excuses available; for
| example there are many devices which are not continuously
| connected to the global network but can still keep a clock
| ticking. Jurisdictions are expected to take account of this
| reality, no matter you like it or not.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| "Are you saying that our computer systems are so inflexible
| that we cannot make them do our bidding? "
|
| Yes, of course that is the case. Any non-internet connected
| clock (microwaves, cars, toys, $10 alarm clocks,
| wristwatches, etc) will not be able to respond to these
| types of changes.
|
| Calling these computers may be significantly overstating
| their abilities.
|
| "it was about how to get computers to do our bidding - not
| vice versa"
|
| It's much easier to declare that problems ought not exist,
| than to actually solve them in a practical, global manner.
|
| In many cases, the owner of the device also isn't aware of
| the change. This is not a problem specific to software.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" Any non-internet connected clock (microwaves, cars,
| toys, $10 alarm clocks, wristwatches, etc) will not be
| able to respond to these types of changes."_
|
| My post about 19th C. timezones and train timetables is
| about this very point. All these independent systems are
| independent 'timezones' and that's the problem - and it's
| a fundamental one!
|
| First, closed systems are intrinsically subject to drift
| and will never really be on time anyway. Second, there's
| nothing wrong with an independent closed system having a
| 'clock' - 'oscillator' would be a better word here - but
| it was all too convenient to couple this with external
| time systems. In essence, independent closed systems will
| never be in sync with external time.
|
| If closed systems have to have time clocks that are an
| analog of real-world time then they should always be
| considered an approximation as with _all_ analog systems.
| Relying on them for accuracy has to be a last ditch
| resort.
|
| The trouble is that we never adopted this newer mindset
| from the outset of digital systems, instead we simply
| repeated the earlier mistake of every town having its own
| timezone.
|
| There are ways around these problems just as there were
| in the 19th C. but no one has bothered to implement them.
|
| This is not the place to delve into them except to say
| that they involve both technological solutions and an
| automatic assumption by humans that closed systems cannot
| be relied upon to provide accurate time.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| I think you're mixing up a few different causes and
| concepts.
|
| Wristwatches are generally accurate and can generally be
| relied upon. It's not practical or reasonable to say they
| should be a "last ditch resort" simply because they do
| not handle legislative corner cases.
|
| All clocks are approximations to some degree, because
| time and space are relative. This is true of all systems
| of measurement in science, in general.
|
| It's not possible to have a computer perfectly account
| for all legislative corner cases for the same reason it's
| not possible to have a perfect map: Grey areas exist
| within law and geopolitics. Knowing the time requires
| knowing map boundaries and which authority controls a
| given area. For example: Does Ukraine observe DST? The
| Donbass region?
|
| Furthermore there are practical costs associated with
| automatic clocks: A GPS, an updating map system and an
| updating database of time legislation is expensive to
| implement in terms of hardware, energy, etc.
|
| These are not problems that no one's bothered to
| implement. They come at a cost which we aren't willing to
| shoulder, or in some cases are intractably complex social
| questions with simple pragmatic work-arounds (make the
| clock dumb and set it to whatever you wish)
|
| In reality, close enough is often good enough. Perfection
| isn't necessary.
| shireboy wrote:
| Speaking of, are we supposed to be doing anything about this yet,
| or should we just wait til 30 days before?
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/623
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| This seemingly almost happened a year or two ago in Georgia (the
| US state, not the country) when the legislature overwhelmingly
| supported ending the twice a year time change. But much like the
| public, the legislature couldn't agree on if they should go to
| year around standard time or year around daylight saving time,
| with one house passing standard time overwhelmingly and the other
| house passing DST overwhelmingly. There's no good reason for the
| two houses to each have such strong affinities to one system or
| the other, which makes me think the two houses may have had an
| agreement to look like they tried to address the issue that the
| public wants settled once and for all without actually passing
| something that would make half the state upset no matter which
| way they went. Or the party whips in both houses are simply very
| effective in gaining consensus in their own chamber.
|
| IIRC, one of the bills was to go into effect the year it was
| passed, which would have been extremely short notice for the IT
| world to deal with.
| wil421 wrote:
| Not exactly what happened in the end. The house and senate in
| Georgia agreed on DST. However we can't change to permanent DST
| yet. By Federal Law an act of Congress has to happen to change
| the law.
|
| https://www.fox5atlanta.com/weather/permanent-daylight-savin...
| xeromal wrote:
| It's the same for California as well
| chrismorgan wrote:
| This is not novel. Look through the tzdb news and you will find
| _many_ instances of similar and considerably shorter periods of
| notice.
|
| Just to pick a couple from last year that are unambiguous and
| well-documented (most you'll have at least a bit more trouble
| finding first-party announcement of):
|
| 2021d: Fiji gave a month's notice on suspending DST for the
| season.
|
| 2021b: Samoa gave less than a week's notice on cancelling DST.
|
| I have a feeling there was a less-than-two-days' notice a few
| years ago, but can't be bothered hunting for it. But there are
| _many_ more of things like "eh, we're shifting the start or end
| by a day or two or a week or two, with less than ten days'
| notice".
| darrenf wrote:
| I was tangentially affected by Pakistan deciding to extend DST
| in 2008 with very little notice. It was originally going to end
| on August 31, but I believe they decided on August 28 or so to
| extend it to October.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_Paki...
|
| https://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_pakistan02.h...
| avip wrote:
| Samoa also famously skipped the 2011-12-30.
|
| Maybe "famously among software developers" is more on-point.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Italy has not yet made a decision on a whether DST will ever end
| this year and I suppose the situation is similar in other
| European countries.
|
| I can't even imagine the chaos if each EU country makes their own
| choice last minute
| tgv wrote:
| I don't think they can do that on their own, can they? There's
| still an EU wide rule on DST. They never revoked it, AFAIK.
| jcelerier wrote:
| EU countries disregard EU rules all the time
| ithkuil wrote:
| In 2018, the European Parliament voted to get rid of twice a
| year clock changes. It came after a poll of 4.6 million EU
| citizens showed strong support for scrapping it.
|
| I'm not sure however what's the process of getting this
| actually implemented.
| dalys wrote:
| I believe it is up to the current (always rotating)
| President of the Council of the European Union to raise /
| implement / pass it on to some other instance.
|
| https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-
| budget/ins...
|
| Correct me if Im wrong. Its really hard to understand how
| EU works, even for us on the inside.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| It's also absolutely political repression.
|
| And there are instances of gross abuses. I can testify.
|
| .
|
| I unknowingly ate food prepared by slaves once in Santiago,
| thousands knew nothing just like I knew nothing of it, I remember
| it distinctly, the Jewel of India in Nunoa. This man was Indian,
| he brought his people from India. Like told them how incredible
| life was in Chile, the wages the wages, took their passports
| quickly on arrival. Must have made some connections, to keep so
| much shit up so long, known violer, longtime violer. All the
| tricks. Superior masters have literally no dignity, nothing is
| actually gross to them, if human trafficking is not gross either.
|
| I'm not sure if he sold people, however. That lawyer quizzed me
| on what happens in human trafficking, and I knew. You show up
| somewhere, without speaking the language, and _especially_
| customs is really shitty with you, then the guy takes your
| passport (any way he can), then to the local authorities you 're
| total biomass, like it's impossible for them to help you, like
| bad, way out of their league. And in a country that embraces all
| this, too, surely not the master's first slave, he learned the
| traditions somewhere he knows somebody, not the only master, he
| got some form of impunity set up, like pimps in fact. Yeah just
| like the pimp I talk about on New Year's, http://fgemm.com. Like
| he was there to demonstrate to the victim there was nobody
| outside to help them. Well I am outside, somewhere, surrounded by
| posers and losers deflecting credit that is due to me, can't get
| a trial in 13 years out of Scamford, but I'm out there. I could
| help but have to witness it.
|
| But that superior master had a rule: No passports! Like he
| pretends they gave them up stupidly in order to insult them, but
| really this superior master had all _all_ kinds of shit set up
| like a plan B plan C plan D plan Z, anything.
|
| No passports, no documents. Has to be biomass, with no language.
| Specifically get guys with terrible English, in fact, like really
| _really_ rural, because English the Chilean government could
| _yes_ help with, these guys like Pashtun not even something very
| obscure. And people denied an education, also. This is in order
| to profit off slavery after a _very long_ plane ticket which he
| said up front, in his infant-baby version of a deal with the
| devil, that they had to do once they arrived in fairness to him.
| So he could remind them they agreed to it, "voluntarily",
| without obligations, signed this signed that alter documents and
| move signatures, anything. Any anything.
|
| No decency, despite an infinite act to have infinite decency.
| Needs to maintain the image of superiority you understand.
| Secretly does incredibly defeating pathetic shit like picking
| through feces, but secretly, tries to delegate but if he can't he
| can't. Hide it though. Hide it to the bitter end! It can only be
| divined, never _known_! Rummage filthy underwear. Huge wastes of
| time like memorizing details picked off a website at a 1000:1
| effort differential, like 1984 putting dust back in place, huge
| waste of time. The superior master? He 'll do it. The more
| degrading the trick, the higher it elevates his superior status.
| Whereas we are inferior because we don't take shit, that's the
| definition after all, Christians are inferior. Last? First?
| Superior masters get a high from doing incredibly pathetic things
| _as long as it 's so pathetic people think it's too low for them
| to possibly ever do it, since they have so much stature, after
| all that's all they say every time the clock stops._ Like _aha,
| he 'll never suspect I combed every hair with so much effort to
| feign..._, anything. But keep up the image. Wants fear you
| understand. Like his pathetic defeating betrayals make him
| superior. They do.
|
| Like that pimp I fucked with you can read about on
| http://fgemm.com, he wanted that woman to be convinced nobody
| would ever help her, ever. When he was evidently being violent,
| injured me with the power of his screaming, calling her a bitch
| at the volume of a shotgun. Plus I drew him out so he threatened
| _te voy a acuchillar_ while searching a backpack for a knife. He
| got treated like a bitch, superior masters in general know once
| they get found out as being a bitch (in the retaliatory sense of
| the word, not the aggression sense of the word like this pimp
| used it), it 's over, fear dissolves, _has_ to come to the
| negotiating table like he instantly did, cops are on their way,
| his _savior_ had to defend the real bitch peel the hero off him
| (I loved that she did that, by defending him militarily she
| scored so many points forever, he 'll always be careful now, him
| not her being careful, tables have turned).
|
| I, technically declared a hero before this day, didn't even run
| that fucking far like 8 meters. Only then after saying it was
| necessary after the material legally-valid threat, like replied
| to his threat of gutting me by saying "well, then I'm obliged to
| run.". _And even then screaming back "aren't you going to come
| _perseguirme y acuchillarme _"? Like what happened? It sounded
| fun, finally some exercise, I expected to run for miles! Santiago
| Marathon! I was disappointed!_
|
| .
|
| Back to the human trafficker. Now, don't be fooled to think, if
| you are not yourself the slave, that the master of that slave
| will not exploit you any less. His only real favorites are...well
| there's nobody not even his sons _not even rapelings_ he is shit
| with everyone in the world. Only noble insofar as he scores
| points off it, like a tumor basically, not sure.
|
| So this owner pulled a move with his menu, making it confusing
| bad font surely so _we* would ask_ him* like an old-fashioned
| owner what we could eat, _conveniently without saying the
| prices_. And then they were roughly double, like 90% more (also
| intentional, because doubling the theft triggers people and they
| want to get in right underneath that), 90% more than they should
| have been. But the food was no different than what free people
| could cook, same two hands with five fingers apiece, you couldn
| 't taste the slavery. Literal slavery. Well maybe it did taste a
| little different, like there was horrifying tragedy forcing
| perfect work--to assuage the price. Holographic memory, do I
| recall the taste? Well when we paid we paid enough for him to pay
| wages, money in money out, you figure, right?
|
| Hey why would he enslave, he doesn't _need_ to enslave, that
| means he _won 't_!
|
| Yeah and in my holographic memory it makes perfect sense, yeah
| that guy was a slave trafficker at some point you meet one.
| Talked to a human rights lawyer about it, that was a known
| violer, the owner of the Jewel of India in Nunoa.
|
| They can't keep the name after being caught trafficking slaves,
| _come on._ Get with the times!
|
| .
|
| Between the change of daylight savings time is announced to a
| month after it's over, nobody knows what time it is. Happened
| during the 2010 8.8 Degree Earthquake, that's where the
| government got the idea.
| iwwr wrote:
| Some call it "chaos", others might call it "badly written
| software".
| onion2k wrote:
| A lot of the time it's not really a matter of how well or badly
| the code has been written. It's more that an app hasn't been
| deployed in a long time and the infrastructure has changed, so
| now you have to update the deploy process. Or that the people
| who worked on it have moved on and now there's no understanding
| of the functionality, or documentation, so running a QA check
| is hard. Or that the test suite has broken so you need to fix
| that first. Or even that you don't know which systems rely on
| dates so you have to audit everything.
|
| Code quality doesn't help if things are coded in inflexible
| ways, but there is _so much_ more to ops in a big company.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| If that's the case then let this be a wake-up call because
| there will be a time when you need to update your application
| in less than a week (see log4j for an example).
|
| On 2022-08-15, IANA released their third zoneinfo database of
| 2022. On 2022-03-15, the IANA timezone database changed for
| the state of Palestine as they decided to move from DST a day
| later after going to DST a day earlier in 2021-10-29, which
| was also announced just over a week before the change.
|
| If this is the third time this year your company has been in
| panic mode because of sudden timezone changes, you should
| really be changing your processes. Timezone databases change
| multiple times a year!
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Not all, or most, software that deals with time can be updated
| and deployed with less than 30 days notice. This is simply a
| grotesquely impractical policy change.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| This is why I dislike custom "we'll-do-it-ourselves" solutions.
| Updating your operating system's tz-database is easy; it's
| normally a single package with no dependencies that you can
| install without patching the rest of your outdated operating
| system full of security holes if you're in an "enterprise"
| environment where normal updates are seemingly impossible.
|
| If you need to rebuild your application or even your Docker
| container (just bind-mount it in place and update the host, all
| applications fixed in one go!) then IMO you're bringing this
| kind of crap on yourself.
|
| At most you should be reloading/restarting your application to
| apply the new timezone database, which shouldn't cause a
| problem if you've set up the right fallback and scaling systems
| to deliver whatever SLA you've promised to customers.
|
| My shitty PHP frontends I built when I finished high school can
| update and reload the timezone database in less than a second
| through `systemctl restart php8.1-fpm`. If you need a month to
| update the timezone database, maybe you should've written
| whatever you made in shitty PHP just like me, because
| apparently shitty PHP is more foolproof in handling common
| occurrences like timezone changes than Enterprise Grade (TM)
| Cloud (R) Applications (C).
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Some might call it "chaos", others might call it "stupid
| government policy compounded by (the expected) moronic
| government implantation guidelines"
| rbonvall wrote:
| This time there was a good reason for postponing the switch.
| Originally it would have been the same day of the
| constitutional referendum. It was a good call to remove one
| potential factor of chaos from that day.
|
| Having to deal with online calendars being off by one hour
| for a week is not that bad in comparison, we are already used
| to that :)
| tomrod wrote:
| The latter is too wordy. "chaos" suffices!
| edbaskerville wrote:
| Not the worst example I've heard. In 2016 the Haitian president
| canceled daylight savings by decree two days before the
| changeover. I was flying out of the country the morning after the
| change, and had a really hard time explaining to airline customer
| service (who hadn't gotten the memo) what exactly the problem
| was.
|
| "When does my flight leave?"
|
| "At the scheduled time."
|
| "According to what clock?"
|
| "Huh?"
|
| I just showed up an hour early.
| inciampati wrote:
| And when did it depart?
| edbaskerville wrote:
| I honestly don't remember!
| niko001 wrote:
| At the scheduled time
| wging wrote:
| Morocco did the same thing in 2018 - less than two days'
| notice. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-45995634
| petre wrote:
| I think they had like 4 DST changes per year before that,
| because of Ramadan. These people do not realize that they are
| making datetime calculations impossibly complicated because
| of all the changes. Any time they get these ideas, they
| should be required by law to compute dates in the past by
| hand and get corporal punishments if they fail to do so. It's
| common practice in the Arab world anyway.
| elashri wrote:
| Why would they change for Ramadan? the fasting times are
| determined by sun rise and set. It is not going to change
| and prayer times wouldn't be affected ( except the
| numerical shift of time only).
|
| The second part about arab world are not correct through. I
| grew up in Egypt which used to have daylight saving change
| but this ceased to happen from 2011 I think.
| spiffytech wrote:
| This kind of thing is why it's important to store user-specified
| future dates as local time + IANA zone name.
|
| If a user wants a calendar event at 9am, they probably still mean
| 9am after accounting for time zone or DST changes.
|
| Storing dates as UTC is appropriate for dates in the past, or
| future dates that a user will never expect to happen at a certain
| wall-clock time.
|
| (An IANA zone name is something like America/New_York, and not
| EST or UTC-05:00)
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| It's one heuristic, but you can't know what they want, the
| problem is underspecified. It's reasonably likely they could
| want a reminder to watch a game that is being broadcast from a
| different time zone, or call a friend in a different country.
| toast0 wrote:
| The user interface can be akward, but you can ask them for
| the timezone of the event. If it's for a live event in
| another place, they would ideally put in the local time in
| the other place and the timezone there.
|
| Or if it's a fixed time, not to be moved by DST changes
| anywhere, they could specify it in UTC.
|
| It's also a good idea to calculate and save the offset when
| editing. Then, if the offset changes later, you can notify
| the user. Hey, this appointment is affected by DST change,
| when do you want it to be?
| macintux wrote:
| I can't even get employees at the company where I work to
| understand and communicate EDT instead of EST. I don't
| think calendaring tools are going to have much success
| asking people what timezone they want.
| yorwba wrote:
| The stock calendar app on my Android phone (running
| LineageOS, so not sure how "stock" it really is) has a
| quite prominent time zone field when setting the time for
| an event, and I do use it quite a lot.
| delecti wrote:
| I've mostly given up being pedantic about the difference
| between PT, PDT, and PST. Most people _mean_ "PT" when
| talking about the time that work meetings are scheduled,
| but they say "PST" basically year-round, despite it being
| PDT more often than PST.
| macintux wrote:
| Yet if we're encouraging people to select a timezone
| manually (context for this particular thread) it matters,
| because software is (usually) happy to do exactly what
| you tell it to do.
|
| Mainly, though, it just annoys me: precision _sans_
| accuracy is bloody annoying.
| kragen wrote:
| It's not a pedantic difference; if you calculate the time
| as PST when it's PDT or vice versa you'll be an hour off.
| Holding a meeting an hour early or attending it an hour
| late can have serious consequences.
| delecti wrote:
| I agree that it's an important difference, but being
| insistent about it is excessive because functionally
| those kind of mistakes just don't happen when scheduling
| meetings in Outlook, which is the context where it
| matters.
|
| Most of my work meetings only involve people in the same
| city, so there's no confusion there, and thus no
| scheduling problems. And 99% of the rest of my meetings
| are with people in Europe, and the relative difference
| between PST and CET is the same as the relative
| difference between PDT and CEST (though I do have to
| remind people twice a year that the two time zones change
| to/from DST a week or two apart).
| Volundr wrote:
| It is a pedantic difference. While it's technically
| incorrect to say PST when it's currently PDT, it doesn't
| inhibit communication. Both parties will understand it to
| be that "we meeting at 9am, whenever that happens to be
| for our California staff" as opposed to "we are meeting
| at 9am PST, even though no one is currently on PST"
|
| Even my colleague in Arizona is able to follow this
| despite them not joining the daylight savings time.
|
| Technically incorrect but in a way that doesn't inhibit
| understanding is the definition of pedantic.
| vxNsr wrote:
| OP is calling it pedantic because most people mean PT.
| When someone says 9am they mean 9am regardless of the
| timezone, they'll add the timezone if they're talking
| with someone from a different timezone but still 99% of
| the time they mean 9am in their own timezone so if
| they're in a region that observes dst even if they said
| pst they really meant pdt and you're being pedantic by
| correcting them.
| AndreasHae wrote:
| A lot of this could be solved by inferring the time zone by
| location of the appointment. If you know the event occurs
| in a specific place at a specific time, you almost
| certainly want it to be the standard time zone of that
| place. If that place uses DST, I couldn't think of any
| reason to ignore it and opt for standard time regardless.
|
| Bonus: geopolitics change country lines, and that affects
| time zones as well. When the time zone at the appointment
| location changes due to border conflicts, you can get the
| new time zone without having to change anything.
| toast0 wrote:
| That works if you know the location of the appointment.
| But if you're going to a bar to watch a televised game
| with friends, the location in the appointment is probably
| the bar, but the timezone is wherever the game is held.
| If you're going to have a conference call and you have a
| shared calendar system, great everybody should agree; if
| all the participants have separate calendar systems,
| maybe you discuss the time to have the call and each
| enter it in your local time, which works fine until
| someone's government adjusts local time on short notice.
| Having separate appointments sounds fragile, but have you
| had a good experience with cross domain calendaring? I
| certainly haven't.
|
| Never mind, if you had a fully booked schedule
| collaborating across timezones and someone's government
| adjusts local time, now you've got a mess.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| There should also be a way to say "my current local time,
| whatever that may be", such as for events reflecting a
| personal daily routine for exercise, medicines, etc. This
| should adjust accordingly as the person changes time zone
| instead of staying at a fixed UTC offset.
| toast0 wrote:
| that's "floating time" and is definitely a valid option
| too, although for uses with multiple devices, now they've
| all got to agree on which timezone the user is currently
| subject to if you want a consistent experience.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Yes, many tz-related difficulties indeed arise from the
| future uncertainty and UX complexity to deal with that
| uncertainty. A conscious decision would be required and
| can't be easily delegated to someone else.
| foepys wrote:
| But this is one more reason to save the timezone and stop
| calculating on current data?
|
| Save the time and timezone of the event in the other country,
| so literally the time it starts not the calculated local
| time.
|
| Unless the other country decides to switch timezones, well
| then you are screwed.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That assumes you know what timezone the user intended. If I
| read somewhere that some football match in Chile is
| happening on November 1st at 1 o'clock, I may well put in a
| reminder for November 1st at 1 o'clock, without specifying
| a timezone or location. The calendar/reminder app would of
| course be unable to notify me that Chile's time for
| November 1st has changed, since I never told it anything
| about Chile.
| mason55 wrote:
| What exactly do you expect it to do? Asking the user for
| the location of the event for time zone purposes might be
| confusing but there's no better option.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Agree that this is a good default, but this doesn't solve
| everything. For example a meeting between people in two time
| zones. Typically that's handled by picking one time zone as the
| primary one, but that's always not ideal.
|
| Also some events aren't related to human activity and you would
| rather not make that adjustment. It can be tricky to know which
| is which.
| TJSomething wrote:
| I like keeping the offset and the zone name. Then, if there's a
| discrepancy, I can ask the user what to do about affected
| events.
| grog454 wrote:
| It's more a demonstration around why changing your wall clocks
| in unpredictable ways (and to a lesser extent, changing them at
| all) is a bad idea.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Well console yourself with the fact that the current timezone
| arrangement is much better than the 19th C. system where
| every town had its own separate timezone.
|
| When railways were introduced a multitude of local timezones
| made railway timetables impossible, this then led to the
| present system.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Can you give a few examples of what you mean by this?
| hilbert42 wrote:
| No doubt changing daylight saving rules at short notice is
| difficult but we should be asking ourselves why is it so.
|
| The major problem adjusting to daylight saving should be as it's
| always been - that of human adaptation to the sudden change of
| time. That our computers cannot adapt at a moment's notice simply
| says there's fundamental problem with their design.
|
| Moreover, the problem should have been long solved by now.
| Remember the huge kerfuffle over the Y2k problem 22 years ago?
| You'd think we'd have learned from that and fixed the problem
| back then.
|
| Either we're lazy or slow learners or both.
| DougN7 wrote:
| In my opinion it's because it's so easy to assume a day has 24
| hours. Coding for an occasional day that has 23 and another
| with 25 just doesn't occur to most people.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Yeah, like so. But these changes aren't just 'one-offs',
| they're in fact common enough for a streamlined procedure to
| be in place - yet it's not.
| gramie wrote:
| I think that the problem is that DST is a really, really bad
| idea.
|
| So you have a process that starts at 1:30am on November 6,
| 2022.
|
| If that's in Ontario, is that the first 1:30am or the second
| one? (At 2:00am, clocks go back to 1:00am, so we do that hour
| again.
|
| If the process is supposed to start at 2:30am on March 12,
| 2023, that's too bad, because at 2:00am the time jumps to
| 3:00am, so no times from 2:00am to 2:59:59am are valid.
|
| And now some regions are abandoning DST and others aren't. I'm
| not sure if it's still the case, but in Indiana one part of the
| state was on Central Time and another part on Eastern Time, and
| both observed DST. There was a third part that was on Central
| Time but did not observe DST, so part of the year it would
| match Central Time and the rest of the year it matched Eastern
| Time (IIRC).
| DerekL wrote:
| Starting in 2006, the entire state of Indiana uses DST.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| It's an issue everywhere you rely on data that's not purely
| static, but evolving too slowly to treat it as dynamic.
|
| The Y2K problem was entirely preventable in comparison.
| Timezones will keep changing erratically.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| Far more coordination with this than something like Y2K. This
| is a government deciding the rules of time have changed in some
| way. Y2K, the rules of time didn't change, but a pattern of
| implementation decisions frequently used over the previous few
| decades broke down.
|
| A system that needs to know about the rule change has to
| actually receive it in some way. It has to be connected or the
| update has to be brought to it. That alone creates a lot of
| systems that cannot react to a change like this at a moment's
| notice.
|
| You know when Y2K and Y2038 hit relative to yourself because
| they're numerical rollovers that can be computed from your
| current time. You can't know when the congress of Whereveralia
| has decided to change DST rules without someone or something
| telling you.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| The fundamental problem is that we humans are slaves to our
| computer systems instead of them being our slaves. By
| definition, a computer is a streamlined process or procedure
| designed to help humans but that's so often not the case.
| (Something that's so often overlooked.)
|
| The fact is that the biggest problem in computing is that
| their ergonomics suck big-time. This daylight saving issue is
| yet another instance of it.
|
| Seems to me that both hardware designers and programmers
| should have a course in ergonomics as a prerequisite before
| they embark on their profession.
|
| I say that as someone who has literally lost years off my
| life trying to get poorly designed computers to adapt to
| doing the simplest of tasks.
| mike_hock wrote:
| No, the fundamental problem is that DST is an ill-conceived
| concept, and being forced to inscribe it in software
| exposes all the contradictions and inconsistencies.
|
| As another poster said, when is 1:30am on November 6th in
| Ontario?
|
| The only thing this has to with computers is that we do all
| organizational stuff with computers nowadays. Changing DST
| on short notice would have caused chaos in the 19th century
| as well.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" an ill-conceived concept,"_
|
| That's just an opinion, not an absolute fact. There's
| nothing fundamental about it. After all, over the last
| hundred years or more most countries have had DST so
| that's the opposite opinion - and for DST to be so widely
| adopted many millions thought it was a good idea.
|
| I'm only stating facts. Frankly, I couldn't give damn
| whether we had DST or not and I can never understand why
| people get so hot and bothered over the issue.
|
| If I were ever forced to choose a system then I'd choose
| neither standard time or DST. Instead I'd move all clocks
| forward an hour and leave them there permanently but I'd
| never lose any sleep over the matter.
| mike_hock wrote:
| I literally lose sleep twice a year over DST :D
|
| Yes, twice. When the clock suddenly moves back, that also
| causes jetlag.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| That's a nice rant, and I don't entirely disagree with you,
| but it has little to do with my comment.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Politics can change faster than the time it takes to lick
| a postage stamp and can do so in the most unpredictable
| ways. That's been a fact of life for the whole of human
| existence.
|
| That said, a processor can do billions of operations in
| the time it takes to lick a stamp. Thus, there's plenty
| of leeway there to ensure that computers don't even enter
| the political equation.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| My point is that ergonomics and design is secondary to
| connectivity (continuous, intermittent, sneakernet,
| whatever) for a great deal of systems that need to care
| about time, including the latest political whims
| regarding time.
|
| The fastest processor ever created can't do anything with
| information it doesn't have.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _"...with information it doesn 't have."_
|
| That's my point. But when it eventually gets that info it
| shouldn't be impeded in updating as is the present
| system.
| Krisjohn wrote:
| Western Australia had a three year daylight saving trial imposed
| on us with short notice back around 1999. A decade later it was
| still dangerous to try to sync a calendar through iCloud from a
| Mac to a PC running Outlook. And I discovered a couple of years
| ago that Yealink VOIP phone _still_ get the time wrong here
| during summer.
| gerikson wrote:
| In my previous job we had to deal with sudden DST changes in
| Jordan, Russia, Turkey... it's amazing politicians don't realize
| what a big deal sudden changes can be.
|
| _Edit_ it appears the switch was delayed due to the
| constitutional referendum. Turkey had national exams as a reason,
| I believe.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I would love to read a blog post from you on this topic!
| gerikson wrote:
| Thanks, maybe I'll try to put one together!
| kepler1 wrote:
| I guess the government were upset that the new constitution
| didn't pass, so they thought, "well we have to cause chaos
| _somehow_! "
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