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North Korea Is Switching To a New Time Zone
jones_supa writes: North Korea has announced that it is winding its clocks back by half a hour to create a new "Pyongyang Time" — breaking from a time standard imposed by what it called "wicked Japanese imperialists" more than a century ago. The change will put the standard time in North Korea at UTC +8:30. North Korea said that the time change, approved on Wednesday by its rubber-stamp parliament and officially announced on Friday, would come into effect from August 15, which this year marks the 70th anniversary of the Korean peninsula's liberation from Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule.
France does the same. It should be on the same time zone as the UK but it isn't due to reasons known to everyone.
No one cares
I'd think to ensure accuracy, they'd wind back their clocks 60 years.
Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
Wouldn't it make more sense to set the clocks at like +14:30? That way they are the future. (meant as a joke)
Keep trying to poke the world in the eye with your little stick..
Seriously? Who cares? It just means that all the computers in North Korea won't show the right time until somebody decides to update the operating system..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Darn, now I need to update all my timezone related code to handle all my North Korean customers correctly...
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
Koreans, even North Koreans, have very legitimate historical reasons to tell Japan to FUCK OFF.
Just like their missiles, the North Korean time keeping industry must be very precise, but the accuracy doesn't match the real world. :-)
Actually, looking at the maps, their new timezone probably means it will be closer to solar noon when their clocks say so. All kinds of strangeness related to timezones anyway, all over the world.
Designed by Microsoft to for us to upgrade to Windows 10, the only version to get this new time zone. This will also mess up the cell phones that can't be updated. That should bump sales a bit.
Where does celestial noon fall now? Before or after 12 o'clock?
What does Korea use for it's constitution, the DSM-5?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Good for them! Yes really for once I approve of their move.
Does North Korea really think that anyone cares about their timezone changes? If so, why then does North Korea keep its network isolated from the rest of the world?
Down at the local watering hole..
Will it also update the year in Best Korea from 1954?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Op, op, op, op
Oppa Pyongyang style.
The Unified Korea actually set a Timezone of +8:30 GMT back in 1910. In 1912 when Japan took over, it was reset to Japanese +8:00 GMT. After liberation, South Korea briefly for a year or two went back to +8:30 for a few years in the 50's I believe, but reverted to Japanese +8:00 for economic reasons.
Time zones are the dumbest thing ever devised and should be abolished. Anyone that has ever had to deal with them extensively would agree. They are a deeply brain-damaged concept. Something critical like time should not be subject to the machinations of politics.
The Great Leader doesn't want to conform to imperialist standards, so his new standard is 13 minutes off hours, and its days are 27 hours long so his people can work longer hours. Also, the Gread Leader made Earth rotate slower, to match is new time standard. On His birthday, as his PR agency announced, Earth will stand still for an hour out of respect for the Great Leader. This is all true, I kid you not.
no, I don't have a sig
SK is UTC+9, like Japan, while they're much more westy. This is a way to get lengthy sunny evenings. NK being even more West side, the change is relevant.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
North Korea has clocks?
Now there's an odd half-hour difference with both land neighbours. On the other hand, now DPRK will have an integer-hours difference between its times and those in India, Iran and Afghanistan.
note: I have at least one, possibly two other, Slashdot accounts because OpenID creds can't be merged with an older acco
Its the best time zone.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
As a north korean coder this is actually a pretty welcome change. Some people would say its more work, that id have to submit zonedata updates, and that my applications would all have to be recompiled with patches for the new zone but those poeple have never seen the kind of inspiring motivation our leader brings to the team. Ever since I started sharing an office with my new coworker, a loaded 152 mm howitzer, ive been incredibly productive. You know what they say about morale in the office these days though, "lunch is an evil lie told by the west!"
Good people go to bed earlier.
I bet N. Korea will be the first country to permanently offset their phase. It'll be just like what happened to Geordi and Ensign Ro. Only it will be the whole country. Maybe someone will get out and explain how they can pass through walls, but don't fall through the floor.
AKA "the dirty zone"
A half-hour off from an international standard, that was supposedly "imposed" upon them specifically by the Japanese? Really? And other then yet another baffling head-shaker of a headline, how exactly do the North Korean people benefit from this change?
From his incredible over-the-top reaction to "The Interview" forcing an otherwise crappy movie into an international limelight courtesy of the Streisand Effect, to his perpetual posturing on the international stage... to this. Does Kim Jong-un not comprehend that it's through moves like these that he makes himself (and by proxy, his entire nation) into such exceptionally easy fodder for jokes?
I mean seriously... why on earth would anyone intentionally take actions which cause them to be the butt of jokes, worldwide? Surely there are better things he could be doing with his time and energies...
You'd think they'd switch to +8:43 or something, just to be different and annoy capitalist IT departments.
I though 'North Korea is BEST Korea', but you're letting me down, here! I'd expect you'd come up with your own complete time standard, with a different definition of what hours, minutes, and seconds are, and a different number of hours per day than all of us 'imperialist' countries! Then you could start working on a totally different definition of what a year is! Seriously dude, how are you going to keep your populace totally off-balance and disoriented unless you're continually redefining reality for them?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Obviously the time offset is way more than 30 minutes.
Like about 70 years, maybe?
This will be a burden to the Sysadmins there though: They will have to manually timesync both of their computers.
Dude, Japan sits to the east of Korea, and Japan's timezone is GMT+9:00.
Keep this shit on idle. Nothing Butterball does has any impact on the rest of the world. Stop giving him attention.
NK already goes by their own calendar system, based on Il-sung's date of birth, it's only natural that they select their own time zone.
The funny thing is - even though their calendar is "their own" - it's based on the same gregorian calendar months and days per month, coincidentally their self-selected timezone is also based on the int'l standard. They're essentially trying to say "fuck you we go our own way", KIGTOW? Except they're doing so within the confines of the system already set (or erm.... imposed) internationally.
Next up: Fatty Kim Jr. shaves his head, pierces his nose, and dresses like the "God King" from 300.
In Japan, it's 10:00. in Indonesia, it's 8:00. in Pyongyang, it's 3:42...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Since this was posted AC, I thought I'd repeat it, because he is correct. Japan Standard Time is GMT+9:00 and so is Korean Standard Time (which is technically a different time zone followed in Korea with the same offset. Neither uses Daylight Savings Time). The half-an-hour back to GMT+8:30 moves the local noon of the time zone to the west, which makes sense.
"What if someone changed their timezone... and none of the OS vendors in the world cooperated by updating their zone files to include the new zone?"
If no one changes their zone info files, it didn't happen, right?
The Unified Korea actually set a Timezone of +8:30 GMT back in 1910. In 1912 when Japan took over, it was reset to Japanese +8:00 GMT. After liberation, South Korea briefly for a year or two went back to +8:30 for a few years in the 50's I believe, but reverted to Japanese +8:00 for economic reasons.
What possible economic reasons could there be? A 30 minute time difference isn't going to make the slightest difference to businesses. It isn't like clocks are sold with fixed time zones and sharing a time zone means they only have to design 1 model.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Is the great leader was late to a minute. By half an hour. But the great leader is never late, it's the whole country who was messed up.
Let's fix that!
The fact that when you agree to make a phone call at 8:00 in the morning, you don't wake me up at 7:30 and piss me grossly off.
I rejected dozens of jobs because the idiotic recruiter did not have the dignity to call me at a decent time and even insisted to call again every five minutes.
Sorry, but your question is utterly retarded.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It actually does. Commerce and Business support hours, co-manufacturing. When you need to get a hold of someone for a business critical decision, and it's 4:30pm one place, 5:00pm somewhere else, it makes all the difference. Likewise stock market and trading as well. There's actually a movement in the United States to throw the Continental U.S. into 2 time zones, down from 4, for economic reasons so that cities in different time zones that border each other are more in sync. http://news.slashdot.org/story... That has a lot of pro reasons. Granted, that's fixing a hour difference, and this is only half an hour. The effect may not be AS BIG, but still present.
each day. Etash is an alcoholic.
Rubberstamp parliament? Could be said about the USA too - our rubberstamp fisa court.
Simply because North Korea doesn't play nice with others is no reason to keep inciting anger at them. Btw - maybe people should look up "Regime" to see what it really means. Every country has a "Regime". Most all countries do not intend to be seen as evil.
Why would anyone living outside of North Korea give a duck fart about this? Just more BS from the country that puts out the most BS in the world!
You can't just arbitrarily make a new time zone! Er... can you? Wow... I never thought of that... Ok! From this day forward I'm living in Greyfox Standard Time! At the tone, the time will be your output from /dev/random, counted in 64 bit seconds from Midnight Jan 1, 1970. Which henceforth will be the very moment I hit post on this message! Enjoy living in the distant past or future! Experience the excitement of trying to agree when everyone was supposed to get together for the daily standup! Have your alarm clock go off 5 minutes after you set it.... or never! From this day forward, Greyfox Standard Time will be the One True Timezone!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Didn't parts of China switch traffic lights so red meant go? I think the idea was red==communism==forward. IIRC, it caused so many problems that they quietly decided the symbolism wasn't that important.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Meh, compared to China being one time zone, this isn't news.
The Royal Family used to have their own timezone - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Perhaps Kim the Third has done if for the same sort of reason - he wants an extra half hour of daylight in the morning for shooting pheasants.
I'm switching to Trump Central Time myself.
Table-ized A.I.
perfidious Albion....
When the location of the International Prime Meridian was being debated in 1884, the Frence were very much against the idea of it being through Greenwich and first preferred a Paris based meridian instead and when that was turned down, proposed ones passing through the Azores and the Bering Strait. When Greenwich was finally decided upon, the French "abstained" and used the Paris meridian as their prime until 1911. It must have made using other peoples charts a pain in the neck...
Getting back to the thread. Timezones are mainly based around meridians, and with Paris being only a few degrees east of London, France naturally fell into the Greenwich time zone, which must have smarted! Anyhow, when the Germans invaded in 1940, they moved France to Berlin time for administrative convenience and as a psychological jackboot on the French neck.
After the Glorious Liberation of France by Gen Charles de Gaulle (The British and the Americans had a background role in this, I believe) it was proposed to restore the time zone as pro ante bellum, but good old de Gaulle, having had his nose put out of joint by Churchill whilst he was in exile, said "NON" as he often did where Britain was concerned, and stuck to CET. (de Gaulle also believed that the Beastly British left France to its fate in 1940 and so took against them on that ground too. If only they had sent all the rest of the Spitfires to France in spring 1940!)
So there you have it. France is CET because of the Germans and a spiteful French general.
And you wonder why the British don't want anything to do with the "European Project"?
Nepal does something even more crazy; they are 15/45 minutes off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepal_Standard_Time When I was there the locals explained that it was done to assert sovereignty, essentially to say, "We are not India."
In Soviet Workers' Paradise, timezone change you!
is no more proof of a "rubber stamp" than similar changes to state time zones are proof of the same rubber stamp judiciary beholden to the government exists in the USA.
Yes, they have slitty eyes and speak funny, but there's no need to keep pretending that they're the bogeymen now that your last go-to bogeyman was hanged on TV.
You're still thinking the old way. Once you put everyone on one time zone, you just have to remember what time midday ("noon") happens in a particular locale. Then, simple arithmetic will take care of the rest.
You can do the exact same mental calculation with time zones as they currently exist. Either you remember different business hours or different times zones, but in either case you have to remember something, because these categories exist for reasons of actual difference that cannot be papered over.
This is one of those recurring topics that generate endlessly circular arguments on Slashdot and lend credence to the notion that we're all aspies arguing over tomato or tamato.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Why 360?
For the reasons stated by the grandparent post.
Half-hour zones are passé. My personal favourite is Nepal Standard Time at UTC+05:45. Mr Kim, needs to try harder to look different.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Korea was annexed by Japan under in 1910. It was a de facto protectorate of Japan for at least five years prior to that.
Good luck to their 3 IT guys. Pretty sure NK will end up with 1-3 openings for IT personnel on August 15th. Any takers?
Based on Saturn Central Time in remembrance of the great Astronaut's Uranus movements, presumably.
Well, I do understand the concept of changing the time zone "just because you can", but half an hour - seriously - that shows complete lack of imagination. If I was in charge, I would have done GMT+31 or something like that - or perhaps GMT+31 1/2 and then adjust the calendar to match too. Half an hour - bah! It just seem so petty.