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Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)
- orangecat 16y agoGood for them. It makes much more sense to shift government/business hours if needed than constantly mucking with the time and screwing up millions of software installations.
- andresmh 16y agocan't the OS's handle the change automatically?
- doyoulikeworms 16y agoSure, but it's just another point of failure for dubious benefit.
- ig1 16y agoNo. Every piece of software that deals with time in any kind of sophistication needs to have logic to handle it. 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.
- weinzierl 16y agoUnix-like systems like Linux and OSX handle that very well. The hardware real time clock ticks in UTC, file timestamps and the like are stored in UTC. The OS knows everything about time zones and DST and therefore can display the time the way you expect it.
- ig1 16y agoCurrent time is only a small part of time handling, practically every crontab implementation handles DST differently due to the ambiguity in the posix standard which just states that time stamps have to be in local time taking no account that this can mean a scheduled task can incorrectly get run twice or never.
- jrockway 16y agoThe problem goes the other way. If a user says, "run this job at 1:10AM", does the job run twice when 2am becomes 1am at the DST switch? If everyone input times in UTC, it would be fine, but users want to input and output. I am lucky to be able to avoid this problem, because while I do have users that want to read and write times in their local time zone, they are asleep at 1am and automated stuff tends to run at midnight. Sometimes the dice roll in your favor :)
- technomancy 16y agoSoftware is often written with the assumption that time always goes forward, because, well, that's how time works. However, according to the rules of daylight savings, time actually goes backwards once a year.
- dedward 16y agoThis was resolved a long, long time ago - it's why we have a timezone file, so we can keep the system in GMT and have it convert user-interface stuff for the user. Software is often written in ignorance of this fact - and causes headaches whenever things change.
- pavel_lishin 16y agoIf by "automatically", you mean "after thousands of man-hours have been taken to implement and debug the process" - and then only for so long as the system remains precisely the same. Like it just didn't, in Russia.
- arohner 16y agoNot really. On *nixes, there's a library called zoneinfo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database) that has the list of rules about "if you're in living in California, then DST starts on March 23" or whatever. When a country changes the law about when DST is, that data needs to be updated. 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.html 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.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- gbhn 16y agoThat's a great precedent! I hope the US abandons winter time, too.
- wtn 16y agoMore likely this will deter Congress from taking action, out of spite.
- pavel_lishin 16y agoYou simply have to present it to the Right in the way they can hear it. "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!"
- pkulak 16y agoLousy farmers...
- pig 16y agoFarmers work whenever they want.
- Semiapies 16y agoAnd people haven't been using farm schedules to justify DST for several decades. It's now supposedly about electricity use.
- presidentender 16y agoIt's about continuing to justify what has always been a bad idea of which the powers that be refuse to let go.
- VMG 16y agoIt's probably not about farmers: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4172 http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4172
- speleding 16y agoI wish they would do that here. As a parent of two small kids I dread the clock changes, it takes forever for them to adjust.
- k_shehadeh 16y agoAs a father, I completely agree. As a c++ developer I'm counting down to the russian support calls.
- anigbrowl 16y agoIt costs the US economy billions every year. Exactly how many billions depends on how you measure, but the direct costs of adjusting for the extension in 2007 were $1.1bn, according to the well-sourced Wikipedia article on the subject. DST all year round, say I. Dark winter mornings are OK by me.
- Vivtek 16y agoIndiana just went to daylight savings a couple of years back. Pissed me off - the new Republican governor said it would attract jobs (which is the reason anybody ever does anything in Indianapolis), and the success of that was predictable.
- technomancy 16y agoI live in the Pacific time zone, and for a long time I've been tempted to reset my clock to Pitcairn Island time, which is just like Pacific time, but without observing daylight savings. Haven't made the jump yet, but it's only a matter of time before some stupid DST error fills me with enough rage.
- joeyh 16y agoI am not observing DST this winter. When living off the grid on solar power, messing with the time the sun is up is annoying. It's been working out well enough for me. Did a custom DST-less EST timezone. http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/howto_create_your_own_time_zone/ http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/howto_create_your_own_ti...
- yason 16y agoIsn't winter time the standard clock and it's summer time that is the deviation from that? So Russia would be abolishing summer time that is also known as daylight savings time?
- msbarnett 16y agoNo. Per the article, they're staying on UTC+4 (aka DST) permanently, rather than falling back to UTC+3 in the winter.
- weinzierl 16y agoAbsolutely, but that is no counter argument to yason's statement. There is no such thing as winter time. As far as I understand it it's just that Moscow's time zone is UTC+3 and they are changing that to UTC+4. It's not that unusual that a country is in an another time zone than it should be geographically, look at Spain for example.
- dedward 16y agoFrom the article,they only said they won't be switching their clocks back this winter as they usually would. They have "winter time" in the same sense that "it's the time we use in the winter" Remember, some places refer to daylight saving time as "blah summer time" So yeah, all they're saying is they are staying on their equivalent of DST starting this year.
- GiraffeNecktie 16y agoChina also maintains the same time year round.
- dhughes 16y agoYes but for the entire country! 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.
- pavel_lishin 16y ago> having one time zone for a country approximately the same size as Canada (5,000km wide) seems silly 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.
- dedward 16y agoIt's arbitrary to a degree, but having a single timezone for Russia, or even the US, would amplify the effect. It's no big deal now because you are used to season changing, sunrise changing, etc - but if suddenly you had to get up for work and endure, say, 5 hours of darkness, or perhaps only 1 hour of daylight left..... it would be ugly. That's why we have timezones.
- anigbrowl 16y agoCouldn't you just get up at, say, noon, work from 2pm until 10pm, and go to bed at 4am? This would be a bit confusing at first but it's basically what people do now. Solar noon would be at a different chronological time for everyone outside of GMT but you'd only have to make the adjustment once, plus it would provide an economic stimulus to compass manufacturers :-)
- nathanb 16y agoI think the title of this post is incorrect; they're not abolishing DST, they're permanently moving to DST.
- weinzierl 16y agoI'd rather say that they are changing their time zone from UTC+3 to UTC+4. It's not that they will have permanent DST, but rather standard time is now UTC+3 and will be UTC+4.
- gojomo 16y agoHo-hum. Want to be really forward-thinking? Follow the example of China, which discarded 5 time zones for a single national time in 1949. (We'd then adjust the office/retail hours to mimic local daylight, rather adjusting the numbers on the clock.)
- evgen 16y agoOne timezone covering enough longitudinal variation to want five timezones is a dumb idea. Doing the same thing in a country with enough east-west span to cover ten timezones would be an incredibly dumb idea.
- aaronblohowiak 16y agoWhat, why? Does waking up at 6 have any different intrinsic value than waking up a 3.5 or 11 ? Ever since time zones, there hasn't been an intrinsic meaning to time (who uses sun dials?) We should all just be on the same time, the whole world around.
- rue 16y agoIndeed. It can also be explained as a matter of simple efficiency: Currently when synchronising something, two pieces of information must be known (the time, and the timezone). If using a single timezone, only one is required (whether it's night or day at either end is inconsequential, only the party at that end really needs to worry about it and can provide a range of hours suitable to them).
- rottencupcakes 16y agoThis is absolutely incorrect. Except in the singular example of arranging telecommunication across timezones, you have to maintain MORE information under this system. When I currently travel, I can make the assumption that any restaurant will be open by 11 AM, that I have to check out of my hotel by 11 AM and that I can't check in until 3 PM. In your system, standard store hours have become a random regional fluctuation instead of a strictly maintained standard. I still need to maintain timezone information, but I ALSO need to do math in my head to figure out if it is an appropriate time to go to a certain kind of store.
- furyg3 16y agoCan we all just have a 24 hour clock based on GMT, no other timezones, and no daylight savings time? 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.
- pavel_lishin 16y agoWhat do you mean by "we"? First, you'd have to get all of the states to sign off on this, including the weird ones that half-follow and half-don't-follow the conventions. I'm not even sure if this is something the Federal government could just demand. Oh, and then you also have to convince every other government to implement, too.
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoNo! Even better! "Metric time" - a minute has 100 seconds, an hour 100 minutes, a day is 10 hours (100,000 seconds). Makes perfect sense on a space station so we'll have to face it sooner or later.
- antirez 16y agoHope that Berlusconi in one of his delirious of madness will do the same for Italy. But I want to stay always in DST, that in Italy means more daylight.
- eru 16y agoIf you want to get up an hour earlier to have more light, then just get up an hour earlier.
- antirez 16y agoThe problem is that the rest of the world will instead follow the clock. So for instance my son will still exit school at 2:10 pm, I'll need to prepare something to eat, and then we could spend some time to the park, but it's already too late to get some decent sunlight.
- rjrodger 16y agoWoohoo! Good riddance.
- zdw 16y agoMove to Arizona. We don't have DST here. It's awesome... until you get a machine shipped to you from somewhere misconfigured with DST turned on running a time-criticial task... Seriously, I wish we all went to GMT, everywhere, and just were done with it.
- madcaptenor 16y agoYou can generate a table of sunrises and sunsets from the US Naval Observatory, http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneYear.php http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneYear.php . Unfortunately I don't see a way to link directly to the table; Moscow is 55 45 N, 37 36 E, and now four hours east of Greenwich. From their location, they're "naturally" around UTC+2:30 (37.6 degrees, divided by 15 degrees per hour). 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?
- listic 16y agoMoscow time is used in the North-West region, there are 9 time zones in total: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Russia_-_Time_Zones_(April_2010).svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Russia_-_Time_Zones...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- anonymous1234 16y agoThe US DST change in 2007 cost an estimated $500 million to $1 billion: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0307/p02s01-stct.html http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0307/p02s01-stct.html DST has cost me many hours spent debugging. I will be very happy if/when it is abolished in the US.
- daxelrod 16y agoI have a clock from one of my former employers that's imprinted with "We survived the 2007 DST change!" The clock is broken.
- masklinn 16y ago> DST has cost me many hours spent debugging. I will be very happy if/when it is abolished in the US Because then the bugs will be rarer and even harder to find, as they'll be caused by interfacing with DST systems when yours isn't.