Re: More DST fall-out

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "David L Neil, Mailing list a/c" <ip () etelligence info>
Date: March 11, 2007 6:37:44 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net, ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: Re: [IP] More DST fall-out

Dave and Bob,

As a Y2K PM, it has been somewhat amusing to me to see the energies
being expended in order to cope with the advanced commencement of DST -
brought in to save time? Sorry, energy.

Americans have had so much trouble coping with date-time variations for
so long. Is it because the world-clock concept starts at Greenwich,
England and not within the US? Fair enough, neither did the French et
al, which is why the modern name for GMT is UTC (a meaningless acronym
whose sole virtue is to commence the three pertinent words in the
primary European languages but NOT in any language's particular
combination - Universal Time Coordinated in 'English'). GMT/UTC is still
referred to by my military buddies (in civilian life) as 'Zulu time' or
'military time' - another US irony that whereas to everyone else time
'begins' at the Greenwich meridian to the US .mil fraternity that's
where it 'ended'...

The US has had so much more difficulty getting used to the twenty-four
hour clock than elsewhere, eg Europe, and my wife still counts backwards
on her fingers when attempting to read the time from my computer's clock
display... The arrogance with which various peoples write dates - a
combination of day, month, and year; is breathtaking in its promulgation
of international confusion. A few years ago I enjoyed the amusement of
the date 01-02-03, and was able to re-use it around one month later on a
completely different continent!

Per the example given, I have been long bemused by my parents-in-law,
who live in New Zealand, having the habit of phoning to wish us happy
birthday (et sim) at what they see is the 'cheap' time of day to call -
or perhaps this is some bizarre 'payback' for having taken their
daughter away to far-off and foreign climes? The fact that it may not
yet be that day where we are, indeed may not even be daylight yet, is
beyond their saintly souls to reliably remember - but it is the thought
which counts! Less amusing were my controllers in UN HQ-NY who failed to
grasp that us field workers didn't work NY office hours, or that someone
carelessly disturbed from well-deserved sleep might not be at their  
best...

Am I missing something in Bob's question? Perhaps less personal (as in,
'me-only') computer biased, I'm used to working with databases and
systems that have to be international, or cope with international
access. OpSys offering such facilities conform to the following:

ISO 8601, Data elements and interchange formats – Information
interchange – Representation of dates and times
http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/datesandtime.html

Date and Time on the Internet: Timestamps
 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3339.txt

- but more readable is:
W3C note on date and time formats
http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime

Yours at c.2230 UTC,
=dn



David Farber wrote:
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Bob Frankston <Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com>
> Date: March 11, 2007 1:11:09 PM EDT
> To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
> Subject: More DST fall-out
>
> From http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/daylightsaving/ 
> default.mspx
>
>
>
> This is a reminder of the problem of representation. While it’s useful
> to represent all dates as a time in seconds from a base time that’s
> often very wrong. Too bad we don’t have a common representation  
> that can
> indicate that 11AM means 11AM by the local clock in a given time zone.
> Thus if the conference call is 11AM New York time and I’m living  
> Paris I
> will be notified appropriately even if I’m passing through Indiana  
> which
> seems to have it’s own notion of DST.
>
>
>
> Of course we have events on lunar calendars and other calendars  
> though I
> don’t know how far we should push the representation issue. If we  
> have a
> holiday whose rule is “use the lunar calendar except when another
> religion is using that day and then …”. Or we may have events on a  
> Star
> Trek calendar.
>
>
>
> But the common case of coordinating events tied to the time in a
> particular place on Earth are common enough to warrant common  
> handing –
> being told someone’s birthday started at 23:00 the day before is not
> only silly but risks truncation errors.
>
>
>
> After reading the suggestions below I can’t help but ask – if you know
> this why don’t you fix the programs rather than the users?
>
>
>
> In fact, when I was at Microsoft I urged putting the time zone
> information into the CMOS along with the clock information so you run
> into another fun foible – having multiple operating systems or apps  
> each
> trying to fix DST without knowing about the other. Or simply getting
> totally confused when flying to or from Japan.



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