Samoa and Tokelau Are Skipping December 30th

ocean_soul writes "Starting January 1, 2012 Samoa and Tokelau will be in time zone +13 instead of -11. This means there will be no December 30, 2011 in these countries. The decision to switch time zone was based on the changing international business relations of Samoa. Samoa had adopted the -11 time zone to make business with the U.S. easier. However, currently Samoa's most important trading partners are Australia and New Zealand. By switching time zone the work-weeks and week-ends on Samoa and Tokelau will be synchronized with those in Australia and New Zealand."

Comments

SIgn of the "times"

[LostCluster]

DST changes in the USA caused times to be odd on certain devices such as VCRs to incorrectly make the change... what's Samoa's tech devices thinking for time zone updates or will everybody have to do a lot of twisting to their watch. For anybody with any interest in what goes on there this is a big tech story.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[sconeu]

No change in time. -11 = +13 mod 24.
The only change is the date.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[InterestingFella]

But how does Thailand handle unixtime? It's already year 2555 there. That's way past 32-bit int.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[Empiric]

Going by your sig, I think you should get a bonus +1 Informative for your sheer dedication to posting on Slashdot alone...

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[tepples]

But how does Thailand handle unixtime?

UNIX time is seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00 UTC minus the accumulated count of leap seconds. Thailand just counts it using days since whatever Thai date corresponds to the Gregorian date 1970-01-01.

It's already year 2555 there.

Yeah, and it's 5772 in Hebrew years, which roughly correspond to the time since Adam and Eve were created.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess is that their VCRs are still very excited about it being 12:00.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[neurocutie]

yup, worse than Y2K I would imagine. It is going to be a horror show from a tech/accounting POV, for those countries and for anyone globally that cares to ever know about or interact with them.

off hand, for Unix types, you'll have to know not only what timezone, but also the exact locality to get the calendar right. Does current time code even have the sufficient smarts currently to handle specific countries CHANGING their TZ on a particular date? I kinda doubt it...

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[LostCluster]

This makes me wonder. Are people going to be paid/charged interest for a non-existing 12-30-11 there?

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[InterestingFella]

If you go to north pole and keep running around the pole in same direction, crossing timezones, you can go infinitely back or forward in time!

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[Anonymous Coward]

The typical shortsightedness and pedantry I'd expect from someone with a UID like yours. He specifically mentioned VCRs and related electronics. All of them track and calculate the date. Do you not think this change in date will affect these things? Or did you just want a chance to write an equation with a modulus operation?

Go out and try to get fucked. Hit on 20 girls, and you'll get at least one out of the bar. The naked man technique works 2 out of 3 times. Write an equation for that, and you'll know how many girls you have to hit on to get fucked.

I'm going to go get fucked tonight after I'm done with this 8 to 5 shift. Responding like this to nerds like yourself is what I do during those 3 minute hourly breaks.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[Cyberax]

Sure it does. A lot of countries change DST rules all the time.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[Anonymous Coward]

LostCluster as of 12/28/11 is being held in captivity involuntarily by Dr. David McGarry of Worcester State Hospital.

Tell us more about this?

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[ciotog]

Someone please mod parent "whoosh!"

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[ceoyoyo]

"UNIX time is seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00 UTC minus the accumulated count of leap seconds."

In other words, it's seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00 UT.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[Anonymous Coward]

When the US changed it's daylight savings time to the new date my VCR was off for weeks because the cable system "Comcast" refused to send the correct pulse to change over. Never found the reason for it and don't care now a days since no longer use the VCR and now on FIOS.

Note my VCR was one of those auto date/time update off the cable system, which was the saleing point that you never had to set it in case of a power outage.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[ceoyoyo]

Yes. Apparently they're paying people who were scheduled to work on Dec. 30. I assume they'll charge interest too.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[ceoyoyo]

Until you hit that darn international date line.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[mj1856]

Does current time code even have the sufficient smarts currently to handle specific countries CHANGING their TZ on a particular date?

Yes. Linux/Unix has a long history of tracking timezone changes for specific countries, states, provinces, etc. It's called the Olsen Timzone Database. It was recently taken over by IANA, and is hosted here http://www.iana.org/time-zones

They are discussing this specific issue here:
http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2011-December/008458.html

This makes me wonder. Are people going to be paid/charged interest for a non-existing 12-30-11 there?

It depends. I work for a time and attendance company as software developer, so I have some insight. Basically, this is handled just like a DST change, but for a much longer period.

Many timekeeping systems (hardware and software alike) just keep track of "local time". Some have the ability to keep a list of DST changes that need to be applied at specific times, and some use NTP or other protocols to sync their clocks and pickup timezone changes that way. While these systems handle "spring-forward" changes ok, they are usually flawed in the way they handle "fall-back". If someone clocks in or out DURING the fall-back period, there is no way to tell if they get an extra hour or not, because there is no recorded distinction between the two times that are both called the same thing. The good thing about DST is that the change usually happens in the middle of the night, which minimizes the number of manual corrections that have to be made.

The solution to all of this, of course, is recording time as UTC and converting it for proper display depending on context. Some systems out there caught on early, but really this idea is just now making its way into the market. This is where the timezone database is very valuable. Windows also has a timezone database (different than the Olsen DB), but Microsoft only pushes it out every few months (via windows update), so it is often behind in various parts of the world. Microsoft timezone info here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dst2007

Since Samoa and Tokelau are skipping a day, this is a "spring-forward" scenario - which is very easy to calculate. It is highly unlikely that they will have issues with paying an extra day (or charging an extra day's interest), as long as they consider the change like any other DST change. I would think that this is big news there, so anyone with custom code will probably be aware of the situation and make the correction.

Of course, if you have a bank account in another country, they are going to say a big "screw you" to your request to be charged one day's less interest just because your homeland is skipping a day. :)

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[neurocutie]

Does current time code even have the sufficient smarts currently to handle specific countries CHANGING their TZ on a particular date?

Yes. Linux/Unix has a long history of tracking timezone changes for specific countries, states, provinces, etc. It's called the Olsen Timzone Database.

The solution to all of this, of course, is recording time as UTC and converting it for proper display depending on context.

Since Samoa and Tokelau are skipping a day, this is a "spring-forward" scenario - which is very easy to calculate.

ok, but the question is whether existing code in routine use (Unix: date(1), ctime(3), and similar functions in Windows), actually makes use of this database and regularly gets updates from this DB.

Sure the display from UTC is relatively easy, although is currently deploy code (OS's, applications, etc in common use), *already* set up to handle this? But going from dates to UTC is somewhat more tricky. What do commonly used OSs, apps, do about a user that is entering NONEXISTENT dates, like Dec 30, 2011 *in that locality* (but not necessarily in the locality of the user)? I guess dates are meaningless unless accompanied by the locality of the date.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[Greyfox]

It's TAI. Or GMT. Or Zulu time. Of all the things it possibly is, UTC is not one of them.

Linux systems can be configured to count leap seconds, but I've never seen one actually set up that way. I'd just as soon work in TAI most of the time and check the lookup tables myself if I need to adjust the time. At least that way I know I'm not accidentally deducting leap seconds twice or something. It's a huge pain in the ass to deal with just to know when the sun is exactly overhead.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[Anonymous Coward]

Just jump over it.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[ceoyoyo]

UT and UTC are not the same. It does turn out I remembered it wrong - UT is mean solar time, the successor of GMT, also known as Zulu time, and is kept by observing quasars. Since it's mean solar time, just like GMT, it doesn't have a constant number of seconds per year, and none of them are the basis for unix time.

UTC is TAI plus leap seconds (of both signs). It's an approximation of UT.

TAI is the one I meant.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[Anonymous Coward]

He also mention DST, Timezones and watches which implies he was talking about time vs date. I know you are excited to have a girlfriend and want to tell everyone how you're getting laid tonight but try to act like it's not such an uncommon thing.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[mj1856]

What do commonly used OSs, apps, do about a user that is entering NONEXISTENT dates, like Dec 30, 2011 *in that locality* (but not necessarily in the locality of the user)? I guess dates are meaningless unless accompanied by the locality of the date.

Exactly. There are a whole slew of dates/times that simply do not exist in certain timezones. As an example, March 13, 2011 at 2:30 AM in Eastern Time (usa), which is smack in the middle of a "spring-forward" DST change. Say you use the TimeZoneInfo class in .Net Framework to convert from this non-existant time to UTC:

(c# code)
        var tz = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Eastern Standard Time");
        var localTime = new DateTime(2011, 3, 13, 2, 30, 0);
        var utcTime = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeToUtc(localTime, tz);

You will get an ArgumentException with the message "The supplied DateTime represents an invalid time. For example, when the clock is adjusted forward, any time in the period that is skipped is invalid."

I'm assuming other languages/frameworks/os's do similar things, either throwing an exception, or returning null, NaN, or similar.

In regards to regular updates, Windows gets timezone updates from Microsoft via Windows Update. According to Wikipedia, Linux updates of the TZ database are different depending on distribution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database#Maintenance

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[Anonymous Coward]

Time includes date.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[Anonymous Coward]

Does current time code even have the sufficient smarts currently to handle specific countries CHANGING their TZ on a particular date?

Shouldn't be a problem. But it seems the new zoneinfo files haven't been rolled out yet. Was this some last minute change decided without enough time to actually implement the change? Here is what date tells me on Ubuntu 10.04:

$ TZ=Pacific/Samoa date -d @1325293200
Fri Dec 30 14:00:00 SST 2011

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[mjwx]

But how does Thailand handle unixtime? It's already year 2555 there. That's way past 32-bit int.

Considering that Unixtime only started in 2514.

Epoch fail.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[niktemadur]

Zulu time is kept by observing quasars.

Wait, shouldn't that be pulsars?

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[Anonymous Coward]

If you sitting exactly on the South Pole what time is it?

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[ArsenneLupin]

Sure the display from UTC is relatively easy, although is currently deploy code (OS's, applications, etc in common use), *already* set up to handle this?

Yes. Or at least those written by software engineers rather than painters. So utilities like date and ls are probably ok, whereas firefox and thunderbird might not.

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[nobaloney]

And what about the Jewish residents and the Muslim residents (probably more Muslim than Jewish) who are very invested in the day of the Sabbath. What do they do?

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[mj1856]

Time to see a proctologist

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[neurocutie]

so you mean that if I go to Samoa today, fired up a Unix/Linux/BSD and type "cal 12 2011", I will get this:

$ cal 12 2011
   December 2011
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
            1  2  3
4  5  6  7  8  9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29    31

And date 201112300000?

$ date 201112300000
Non-existent date

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[ArsenneLupin]

Seems my Ubuntu is not yet up-to-date. However, a bug has "already" been logged.

Once fixed, date will act as expected (but the actual message will be date: invalid date `201112300000'), but not cal (cal will black the correct current day rather than yesterday, but still display the non-existent December 30th. The Gregorian fortnight in September 1752 is a hard-coded special case.) Just witness a similar case in Kirimati:

> TZ=Pacific/Kiritimati date -d @$((9131*86400))
Sat Dec 31 14:00:00 LINT 1994
> TZ=Pacific/Kiritimati date -d @$((9132*86400))
Mon Jan 2 14:00:00 LINT 1995
> TZ=Pacific/Kiritimati date 010100001995
date: invalid date `010100001995'

==> date behaves as expected.

However cal shows a non-existent January 1st 1995:

> TZ=Pacific/Kiritimati cal 1 1995
January 1995
Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
.. .. .. .. .. .. .1
.2 .3 .4 .5 .6 .7 .8
.9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30 31
(display garbled by Slashdot's lack of <pre>, so I had to compensate with periods for legibility, sorry)

Re:SIgn of the "times"

[Anonymous Coward]

If three people doing it is a threesome
And four people doing it is a foursome..
You must be handsome.

Your math does not calculate

[InterestingFella]

If they change on January 1, then December 30 would already been passed at that point. So, that would mean it's already Dec 30 there right now and it cannot be Jan 1 yet according to any time zone. The math is fail.

Re:Your math does not calculate

[Yvan256]

I'm more confused about the fact that my calendar tells me there's a december 31st. Are they going to go "december 29th, december 31st, january 1st"?

Re:Your math does not calculate

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Because they didn't want to lose the New Year's Eve parties. They have their priorities in order.

Re:Your math does not calculate

[owlstead]

"This means there will be no December 30, 2011 in these countries." You've just shown that you can skip calendar dates, congratulations!

Re:Your math does not calculate

[Convector]

Yes, they're losing a day by effectively crossing the international dateline westward.

Re:Your math does not calculate

[InterestingFella]

Bah, you westerners with your stupid one new year. I will celebrate western new year tomorrow, then in January I'll be in China when it's Chinese new year, and finally in April I will be in Thailand when it's Thai new year. Yay, three new year parties for me!

(and the Songkran will have country-wide free-for-all water fight, with insane amount of hot girls and ladyboys in wet t-shirts. Woohoo!)

Re:Your math does not calculate

[Yvan256]

But according to the summary they will do that starting january 1st, 2012. The day before that isn't/wasn't the 30th, it was the 31st.

Re:Your math does not calculate

[Anonymous Coward]

We showed that we can skip calendar dates, on several occasions. E.g. when the 'catholic' world switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1582-4. Then most of western Europe and the Americas in 1752-3. Eastern Europe in 1918, etc.

http://www.searchforancestors.com/utility/gregorian.html

Re:Your math does not calculate

[owlstead]

Not according to the article. Fortunately, they don't retrofit the dates in history, they have gone forward 3hours already + switching dates... Wikipedia tells me the same, as does the television journal at home (which I am currently listening to as I'm posting this). Summary is wrong (gosh, what a surprise).

Re:Your math does not calculate

[owlstead]

My post is wrong as well of course, it's not 3 hours ahead and - 1 day.... It was 21 hours later than Sydney, now it's 3 hours ahead according to the article.

Re:Your math does not calculate

[Penguin]

.. and cal even supports it:

$ cal 9 1752
September 1752
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

... however it's not that effective as locale is not taken into consideration. As your link mentions, "only" England+Scotland+colonies switched at that point.

Re:Your math does not calculate

[Anonymous Coward]

yes they are.

Re:Your math does not calculate

[digitig]

Go via Russia and you have a chance of another Christmas.

Re:Your math does not calculate

[Anonymous Coward]

The math is fail.

Ironically, the english has failed as well.

Re:Your math does not calculate

[catbutt]

Probably because dec 31, 2011 is in lots of legal contracts. If you eliminate that date, you have a lot more chances for people to try to weasel their way out of contracts, and more work for courts.

Re:Your math does not calculate

[fotoguzzi]

But Slashdot doesn't support cal! Grrr!

Re:Your math does not calculate

[ArsenneLupin]

Bah, you westerners with your stupid one new year. I will celebrate western new year tomorrow, then in January I'll be in China when it's Chinese new year, and finally in April I will be in Thailand when it's Thai new year. Yay, three new year parties for me!

... and don't forget about the really big "New Year" on December 21st 2012...

But...

[Millennium]

No Friday? How can they properly get down, if not on Friday?

Re:But...

[eclectus]

Yeah, they should have skipped a Monday. Or even a Wednesday

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or Thursdays, I never could get a hang of Thursdays.

Re:But...

[Megane]

If the wanted to skip a Monday, they could have just shot the whole day down.

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what the percentage of people who caught this is....

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.

Re:But...

[742Evergreen]

I'm guessing about 42%

This happened to me once

[Stargoat]

This happened to me once. I crossed the International Date line on December 24. It was December 26 on the other side. It was the year without a Christmas.

Re:This happened to me once

[Anonymous Coward]

Go the other direction. I was on a ship where we were scheduled to have thanksgiving day twice. Seeing how the food was rather mediocre, we naturally assumed this meant we would get two thanksgiving dinners, which would have been wonderful. The ship then rescheduled the repeat day earlier (when you have 10 days between the two ports when you're making the idl crossing, you can schedule it whenever you want).

Re:This happened to me once

[kervin]

It was the year you had Christmas on December 26th

Re:This happened to me once

[owlstead]

Then again, what's Christmas mid travel but a poor substitution?

Re:This happened to me once

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when I crossed the International Date line. I traveled back to the stone age.

I also became immortal. I am several hundred years old now.

Just call me Reeves.

Re:This happened to me once

[archen]

Marry someone from Canada and you can have Thanksgiving twice a year every year (or the other way if you are Canadian).

Re:This happened to me once

[TheSpoom]

Way ahead of you (though I'm the Canadian) :^)

Re:This happened to me once

[Baloroth]

Then again, what's Christmas mid travel but a poor substitution?

Ask Santa.

Re:This happened to me once

[nedlohs]

I skipped over my wedding aniversary on my flight to Australia last year. Best anniversary so far!

Given wanting to do the flying on the weekend I won't be able to repeat that until 2016.

Re:This happened to me once

[nedlohs]

I mean this year - I'm skipping a couple of days right now apparently.

Re:This happened to me once

[roc97007]

Great idea. I'd have to convince my current wife. And probably change religions.

Re:This happened to me once

[niktemadur]

This happened to me once. I crossed the International Date line on December 24. It was December 26 on the other side. It was the year without a Christmas.

If this was in 2004, and you'd have gone from December 25th to the 27th, maybe the Boxing Day Tsunami could have been averted.

fail

[Anonymous Coward]

30 days has September,
April June and December???????

Re:fail

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot November.

Re:fail

[TamCaP]

just count on your knuckles from left to right (both hands); each big knuckle - {31}, each small knuckle - [28-30]

Re:fail

[TamCaP]

s/small knuckle/valley between knuckles/ :-)

Re:fail

[Anonymous Coward]

What about those of us with the normal number of knuckles?

Re:fail

[aix tom]

Move closer to a nuclear plant, that will fix you right up.

Re:fail

[fnj]

It's no use. This technique can't be explained without a picture.

Sorry, Timmy

[Anonymous Coward]

No birthday for you this year. We've been told to skip it.

No 12/31

[colinrichardday]

I read that they actually skip 12/31/2011, not 1/1/2012.

Re:No 12/31

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither. They skipped 30/12/2011 and most certainly not in any other format, since they don't follow the retarded american format.

Fine idea

[PopeRatzo]

I think Samoa has a terrific idea here. So, I've decided that I'm skipping 12/31/2011.

I'm still trying to decide whether I should skip 1/1/2012, too.

Re:Fine idea

[lgw]

Presumably this will be decided by how much alcohol you consume on 12/30, and when you regain consciousness?

Re:Fine idea

[Kalriath]

Samoa doesn't have a 31st month, so they wont be skipping that. Or they already are. Hmm.

Re:Fine idea

[PopeRatzo]

Presumably this will be decided by how much alcohol you consume on 12/30, and when you regain consciousness?

No, it is a decision enabled by my total mastery over the very fabric of space and time.

And how much alcohol I consume on 12/30.

Oops

[colinrichardday]

They skip to 12/31.

First Break in the Seven Day Week Cycle

[dbkluck]

According to wikipedia (admittedly with a "citation needed") the seven day week cycle has continued unbroken for almost two millenia, despite numerous readjustments in the date over the centuries. So although skipping even a whole bunch of dates is not unheard of (e.g., Thursday, October 4th, 1582 followed immediately by Friday, October 15th when the Gregorian calendar was adopted), this seems like the first time in a long time that the day after Thursday hasn't been Friday.

Re:First Break in the Seven Day Week Cycle

[__aajfby9338]

Once I injured my back, and my doctor prescribed a collection of meds that caused Monday to be the day after Friday.

Re:First Break in the Seven Day Week Cycle

[Deadstick]

You left out two words: "in Europe". Google "the day no Filipinos were born".

Re:First Break in the Seven Day Week Cycle

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it happens far more often. The last time a country hopped across the IDL was in 2000: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Date_Line#Historical_alterations

Re:First Break in the Seven Day Week Cycle

[Anonymous Coward]

Alaska had two Fridays in a row in 1867 due to changing the date line and adopting the Gregorian calendar.

Try "cal 9 1752" at a *nix command prompt

[knorthern knight]

Good thing they didn't have VCRs back then.

Re:Try "cal 9 1752" at a *nix command prompt

[owlstead]

It explains why I only have part of "Jephtha" by Handel though.

Re:Try "cal 9 1752" at a *nix command prompt

[Brett Buck]

Damn those Samoans - don't mess with Pope Gregory! He's got friends in high places, you know.

Why does the summary say Jan 1?

[CrimsonAvenger]

TFA clearly says they're doing this on December 29, not January 1.

I know that the editors don't have time to fact-check the articles, but can't the submitter (who presumably read the article before he posted it) at least remember what he read long enough to summarize it kinda-sorta accurately?

New Zealand is important!

[SplashMyBandit]

.. for once.

[Disclaimer: I live there]

Re:New Zealand is important!

[PRMan]

Of course it's important. Without it, we wouldn't have Narnia or Lord of the Rings...

Re:New Zealand is important!

[roc97007]

For once? The geekiest movie trilogy of all time was filmed there.

Re:New Zealand is important!

[owlstead]

...to Samoa... :)

Re:New Zealand is important!

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too!

Hi dude, raining there as well?

Re:New Zealand is important!

[Anonymous Coward]

or Kiwis (they're birds), or Totaras (they're trees), or Tuataras (they're lizards).

Re:New Zealand is important!

[mjwx]

.. for once.

[Disclaimer: I live there]

The most important state in Australia, I think not.

Re:New Zealand is important!

[shutdown -p now]

NZ (and Australia) is extremely important. Whenever Americans start bitching about crappy Internet connections that they get, you guys are always there to helpfully chime in and explain what a truly sucky connection actually is.

Re:New Zealand is important!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually in Aus it is more or less just the international connections that obviously suck.

We are not forced to choose providers based on who owns what phone line, services are available from the quite long list of ISP's.

My local Telephone Exchange has ADSL 2+ equipment installed from 5 different providers which is also resold to at least another 50 providers.

There are no area monopolies here.

As for New Zealand, it pretty much still sucks over there bandwidth is still quite expensive compared to here.

cable and sat DRV get the time form the data steam

[Anonymous Coward]

and you don't have to set it.

Changing trade relationship

[Meniconi,Nando]

Many garments with Made in America labels used to be made in Samoa. Just saying.

Re:Changing trade relationship

[NJRoadfan]

That would be American Samoa, which looks to be retaining the UTC-11 time zone.

Kill timezones already

[Firehed]

Just another example of timezones being confusing and counterproductive. Switch the entire world to UTC (and kill am/pm since they'll no longer correspond to morning/night in half the world). Sure, it'll take some getting your head around working 16h-01h for what's currently an 8-5PT, but just the idea of eliminating "2pm your time or mine?" makes it worthwhile.

Re:Kill timezones already

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I'd think this would be a problem for military folks with ships and planes scattered in time zones? How do they handle this? They must also have date line problems? Do they shift duty times when moving?

Re:Kill timezones already

[Greyfox]

I've suggested this several times and people are all like "waaaah! I don't WANT to have to eat lunch at 2 in the morning!" But if you're going to do that you don't want to use UTC, since it's adjusted for the rotation of the earth with leap seconds. You want to use nice pure TAI. Nothing there but vibrations of a cesium atom!

Even then you still have to worry about relativity and stuff, since the time for people on mountains or in space will differ from people on the equator. I forget if TAI adjusts for that or not...

Re:Kill timezones already

[hankwang]

Switch the entire world to UTC (and kill am/pm since they'll no longer correspond to morning/night in half the world). ... just the idea of eliminating "2pm your time or mine?" makes it worthwhile.

That might be convenient for making appointments for telephone conferences, but it really sucks if you actually travel to such a timezone and need to schedule your daily program; then you will have to calculate the offset relative to your old place every time you wonder whether it is already lunch time, or whether the shops/offices are open. Not to mention that having the date and day of the week change in the middle of the day might also be rather inconvenient: what does "see you on Wednesday" mean?

And as for appointments: calendar applications already take care of calculating the time zones while scheduling meetings.

Re:Kill timezones already

[Anonymous Coward]

Aviation is already in UTC already. They call it "zulu time". No biggie.

Re:Kill timezones already

[Anonymous Coward]

I've lived on military bases as a family member, and on more than one occasion, asking a uniformed soldier/sailor/airman for the time would get you "1800 zulu" which is the current time in Greenwich, England. It's up to each person wherever they are to figure their relation to zulu time, and add or subtract from that to get your local time.

In essence, yes, they already do that. Posting anon since i've already modded in here.

Re:Kill timezones already

[hokeyru]

I've worked on a ship. On US-flagged vessels, it is customary (probably even mandatory) to change the shifts when switching time zones. A one-hour change is normally broken into three 20-minute chunks, to distribute across the three watch shifts. There is a special board labeled 'advance clocks' or 'retard clocks' hung under the clock in the mess, so everyone is made aware.

During the month I spent on a ship in the arctic, crossing time zones every day, they stayed on a single zone. Of course, the sun never set, so it wasn't much of a problem.

Re:Kill timezones already

[hokeyru]

But then, how would we implement DST?

Re:Kill timezones already

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd think this would be a problem for military folks with ships and planes scattered in time zones? How do they handle this? They must also have date line problems? Do they shift duty times when moving?

The military tend to use UTC.

Re:Kill timezones already

[dbIII]

Actually all of China is on Beijing time and China goes something like three Russian time zones to the west. That's a lot of people that are used to the clock time not matching where the sun is in the sky.

Re:Kill timezones already

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother with a calendar at all? Chose a single frame of reference and track elapsed intervals. No need for any other unit of time that can't be expressed as a range in terms of that interval.

Re:Kill timezones already

[Bomazi]

TAI, like the other modern time scales, takes relativity into account. It is defined as the proper time of an observer on the geoid. Thus TAI is the same for everyone.

Re:Kill timezones already

[petermgreen]

It would add other confusion of it's own though. For example the confusion of having one workday spread across two calender days in some regions and the confusion when you arrive somewhere of "what time is daytime here".

Not really, no.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, actually it's not.

First, UT is a bit confusing. You have to specify which UT you mean: UTC, UT0, UT1, UT1R, etc...

All these, except UTC, are based on celestial movement. Which means they will vary due to natural causes. A slight wobble in Earths orbit or a little bit of tectonic shift will cause seconds to be shorter or longer. UTC is based on 'artificial' timing (atomic timekeeping) and as such has slightly different seconds than the other UT's.

So, no, UTC is not simply another UT without counting leap seconds.

Timekeeping is hard. Really hard.

Re:Not really, no.

[Anonymous Coward]

I should have swallowed the other pill.

No the key change is the work-week.

[kale77in]

Their work-week is now in sync with Aust and NZ, rather than only having four days that coincide.

Re:No the key change is the work-week.

[kramulous]

Three days, not four. Australia's Monday is Samoa's Sunday. Samoa's Friday is Australia's Saturday.

No longer. All days now align.

Re:No the key change is the work-week.

[SteveTheNewbie]

My goodness, three days ? let me draw you a little table.

M - S
T - M *
W - T *
T - W *
F - T *
S - F
S - S

The days with a * next to them are 'working days which coincide', you'll notice there are four of them. I'm quite amazed that you got modded to 4.

Why not wait for leap day?

[AthanasiusKircher]

If they just waited two months until February, they could have just issued calendars that skipped leap day, and few people would have even noticed (until the work week suddenly became shorter).

And they'd get to say that they were "leaping" over leap day....

Re:Why not wait for leap day?

[dbIII]

At this time of year it doesn't really matter in a lot of parts of the world while February is way out of holiday season and it may matter.

Re:Why not wait for leap day?

[AthanasiusKircher]

At this time of year it doesn't really matter in a lot of parts of the world while February is way out of holiday season and it may matter.

How, exactly? How does skipping an official day of the year not matter now? If you're talking about paying people for non-holidays, that doesn't seem to be the issue here, since they could have chosen a weekend day. Instead, they chose to delete a weekday, which forced companies to pay salaries for a day that didn't exist. If you're talking about interest rates and such, those would accrue the same way no matter what day was deleted.

I'm not sure how deleting a Friday near the end of the year somehow "doesn't matter," while deleting a Wednesday a couple months later would. No matter what day of the year you choose, if it's a weekday, most businesses are going to lose money. It's effectively an extra paid holiday for everybody. For the small amount of businesses that shut down completely between Christmas and New Year's, it might have been more convenient, but that is hardly a large percentage these days.

By the way, my suggestion of Leap Day was somewhat flippant. I don't think it matters much what day it is, but it just seems a more obvious choice, since it's so close.

Re:Why not wait for leap day?

[dbIII]

For the small amount of businesses that shut down completely between Christmas and New Year's, it might have been more convenient

I see your misunderstanding now. It's not North America. With the summer holiday season nearly everything in shut down between Christmas and New Year in just about every country around and in the South Pacific. The places that are not completely shutdown lost two weekdays last week to public holidays (in most of those countries) anyway.

which forced companies to pay salaries for a day that didn't exist

Salaries are paid over a year and I don't get an extra days pay every leap year either. Wages are based on logged hours so nobody gains or loses there either. I fail to see where you are getting this from. If a payroll system cannot cope with a day where nobody is there then there are much larger problems with it and it will not exist for long. I can't see it creating any increase in costs despite what is written above.

What if this trend continues?

[Anonymous Coward]

and everyone moves their date around and now the US is constantly a day behind the rest of the world? What will we do?

NIGHTMARE

[stanlyb]

As a software developer i assure you, this is going to be a nightmare coming true. Brrrrrrrrr.

Re:NIGHTMARE

[Anne Thwacks]

As a software developer i assure you, every day is a nightmare coming true.

Thats fixed it for you!

Inquiring minds want to know

[jabberw0k]

What will this do to the supply of Girl Scout Samoa cookies? (For the record, I hoarded Manila folders when the Marcos government fell.)

Let me correct this

[tepples]

I apologize for sidetracking the discussion to the leap second issue. Let me try again: "seconds since the UNIX time epoch, counting any leap seconds as 0 instead of 1". This makes each midnight-to-midnight period 86400 seconds long. My point is that the UNIX time epoch is the same regardless of the local civil calendar's epoch.

What do you call?

[johnsnails]

What do you call a Samoan who falls off the lounge? Fella Fell Off A Sofa

I know somebody, who will be born on December 30th

[Anonymous Coward]

...in Samoa. ;)

Mayhem, here I come!

Word and object

[colinrichardday]

The skipped the day, not the notation.

Re:FP

[Anonymous Coward]

YAY, you win! Congratulations, come and claim your prize! Coordinates for pickup are 9156S 1713035W

Re:FP

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, fuck me, where'd the symbols go?
9 degrees 10 minutes 6 seconds S
171 degrees 48 minutes 35 seconds W