[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_! " ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-11 23:00 UTC)