It seems a whole lot easier to change our time format just once and get used to it... instead of half of us changing the clocks twice a year, the other not, drawing all these weird lines all over (grumble India grumble), and keeping track of it all.
There's a few ways to do it: as you can see, I like to use the 1/100 as the base unit (it's a little under 15 minutes in current reckoning) and go decimal beyond that since you have a neat percentage as a result, and you can drop off precision as needed.
And loads of date parsing / string emitting libraries already handle it :)
Time is a pain in the ass.
Second, timezones are used for globally-recognizable time of a day. No matter where you are on Earth, 08:00 (by 24-hour scale) is certainly in the morning, and 20:00 is evening.
i think it might be slightly worse in that "solar noon"-zones would stick to straight bands.
Oh, and then you also have to convince every other government to implement, too.
It's summer time that is moved.
Maybe that's only in the US and Russia has the reverse?
As Moscows longitude is 37 degree East, they should really use UTC+3 as their standard time, but that's a different story.
"Are you gonna let a bunch of commies beat you in the modernization of time? We didn't land the first man on the moon just so we can be beaten out by savages with beet-powered potatoes!"
I would go so far as to say that farmers hate DST more than programmers/sysadmins do.
She said we shouldn't adopt DST because the extra hour of sunlight - and I quote directly here - would "fade the curtains".
I used to work on a share price alerting system where you could say "if the price of stock X goes up by 10% during these hours than alert me", that creates a nightmare when it comes to DST changes. Do you use the timezone of the person who setup that alert (what if they're now in a different timezone do you change ?) or do you use the DST rules of the country the share trades in.
Imagine you have a calendaring app and someone from another country sends you a meeting request for the future that's past a DST change in one of your countries, but not past it in the other. It's possible for the time to be ambiguous unless you specify DST handling rules. What happens if a country changes DST rules (this happens far more often than you think) how do you adjust previously set appointments ?
Imagine your Google Analytics, what timezone do you save analytics data in and do you adjust for DST (the answer is PST by default, and if you change it, historical data won't be adjusted so you end up with a mishmash of time data).
In any scenario where you have to handle timezones it's complicated enough as it is, DST handling makes it a nightmare.
For example, last year Chile gave a month's notice that daylight savings time was changing. (http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/chile-extends-dst-2010....)
That can cause headaches, if you have a mission critical system that needs to be updated, otherwise it may do something important an hour early, or an hour late. For example, Postgres has to be rebooted when the timezone information is changed.
Like it just didn't, in Russia.
Why is adjusting the clock numbers better than adjusting local practices?
Why does a single time work well for China... and the US armed forces globally?
Shouldn't we be optimizing for long-distance collaboration, now that we have the telecom technology to do so?
Haven't made the jump yet, but it's only a matter of time before some stupid DST error fills me with enough rage.
That's a lot of real estate under one time zone, it may be silly to have summer and winter times but having one time zone for a country approximately the same size as Canada (5,000km wide) seems silly, Canada has six time zones.
Why?
In America, people already get up at 7am (insert your own time here, obviously) regardless of what the local sunrise actually is - which varies based on how far north or south you live.
It's pretty arbitrary. But one time zone at least makes the arbitraryness easier on coders.
The table says that in late December the sun will rise at around 10 AM and set at around 5 PM. This doesn't seem preferable to the 9-4 they'd have under standard time. I'm not sure about Russian time zone boundaries, though; is Moscow time used in areas to the east of Moscow?
Seriously, I wish we all went to GMT, everywhere, and just were done with it.
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