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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.
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.
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.
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.
Nah. Having that time offset would be admitting someone else is the center of time.
NK is really +0 and everyone else is at a -24 or more offset from them. And it has always been this way since the Eternal President created the concept of time 67 years ago.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
France is in the same time zone as most of Europe, from Spain (9.3W-3.3E) to Macedonia (20.5E-23.0E). Why should it want to be on the same time zone as the UK, which nowadays is part of America? The French lifestyle is already shifted towards late hours: summertime UTC+2 makes the daytime better matched to it, and would do so even in winter. UTC+3 would probably be even better, in fact.
The news is that there is something new to say about North Korea that is neither crack pot pretentious threats nor a violation of human rights.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
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
Now all they need is some electricity to power them up.
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
Second dumbest thing. Don't forget daylight savings.
Um, timezones are needed, but summer/winter time changes are not.
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
That's where it geographically should be (Greenwich meridian) and it isn't for political reasons. It's not just what you said, but also reasons such as differentiating from the UK.France's time was GMT+0 and it was changed by occupying Nazis. When the war ended, there was a decision to change it back but it was canceled.
Spain is in the "wrong" time-zone as well due to Franco's decision during WW2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
why get rid of them ?
what you're saying is totally unrelated to my point. My point is that NK is not the only country in the world that does the "crazy enough" thing of not having the time zone it should have.
it would take about a week for us to get used to UTC, which would be a great time to get rid of AM and PM while we are at it. So, lunch is at 1700 and sunrise is at 1200, who cares?
If you meant dealt with them from a software point of view I have dealt with them a lot. I have dealt with fairly raise issues(how many people live where there is a half hour timezone for example). The rtick in computing with timezone is pretty straightforward and I am always surprised when people don't do it. Store everything in a system in UTC0. All internal times a dealt with in this way. The only time you ever have to worry about timezone or DST is when displaying them to users. This simplifies everything enormously.
ha! You just cleared up one of the great mysteries of my life! I remember sitting in paris watching the Eiffel tower begin twinkling at dusk. It was some ungodly late hour and I thought, "Man, how can it still be so light out? Paris must be way farther north than i originally thought."
mystery solved.
So if he wants to call a company in Germany, and wonder if it is the middle of the night for them, he would simply have to figure out the sunrise and sunset times in UTC for a geographic region, and then estimate normal business hours?
Thats sounds much more complicated than looking up a time zone, and comparing apples to apples.
It happens more than you think. Florida should geographically be in the Central Time Zone.
Have you looked at a map of the U.S. lately??? There is NO way that Florida should be on Central Time. Perhaps the western-most part of the FL Panhandle; but not the majority of the "sock" part of the state, nor even most of the Panhandle. But in the U.S., the Department of Transportation pretty-much insists that ALL of a State must be on the same time zone, and for FL, that would logically dictate Eastern Time.
Now, if you want to see a Time-Zone embattled State, look no farther than my home-state of Indiana. It STILL has some counties that are on Central Time, even though most of the State is Eastern (which it really shouldn't be, either).
Here's some history on Indiana's Time Zone fun.
The "moron" chose noon as that was something one could tell by a sundial. Base 12 is arbitrary but has its advantages over base 10.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
> Base 12 is arbitrary
Not really.
It is chosen because it is divisible by 1,2,3 and 4.
You want also divisible by 5. 60. There are reasons why 12 and 60 have been common for time and measurements. So you can describe fractions of something without fractions (or decimal).
10, on the other hand, is less interesting, except that you can count to ten easily on your fingers. (The reason why it was chosen).
So if he wants to call a company in Germany, and wonder if it is the middle of the night for them, he would simply have to figure out the sunrise and sunset times in UTC for a geographic region, and then estimate normal business hours?
I'm sure there's an app for that. I mean, it is the 21st century last I checked. You can check the web. Heck, I remember seeing clocks like this when I was a kid.
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.
And that "app" is called .... are you ready for it .... TIME ZONES!
In Napolions times, Germany was divided into half a hundred principals, Dukedoms, and small Kingdoms. Everyone having its own time zone. As the principal of the realm liked it to have his personal 'noon' at 12:00 when the sun was at the highest point above his palace.
And even after Germany was united into an empire, most regions kept their 'private' time. Often just 10 or 11:30 minutes of from the neighbour.
The unified german time was forced upon the regions by railway companies. It simply makes no sense that a train starts 12:00 local time and arrives at 11:55 local time.
So yes, the reason why Europe basically only has three time zones is to make trade and travel more easy
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yea, just don't try to connect up to a NTP server or build a strat 1 server from a GPS receiver when you fudge the hardware clock... You are going to be on your own. And that's going to make things like navigation and advancing technology all that much harder there.
Little'Un just made life harder for his people by doing this, but he doesn't care. Folks have to remember ONE very important fact. Little'Un does what he does for consumption INSIDE of North Korea and that's it. The world will deride him for doing stupid things, but what matters is how the North Korean's perceive it. You can bet they all praise "Dear Leader" for his strong defiance of the Imperialist Japan and most will actually believe what they are saying. Few will realize that he's really showing his impotence, his lack of power and how the rest of the world is making fun of him and the ones that DO realize this won't say anything different because they know it means death for them and their extended families.
So while we laugh because we find it funny, in reality this is really very sad for the people it most concerns..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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?
Countries like North Korea are like nation-sized McDonald's restaurants: none believe the corporate bullshit, and the management knows perfectly well they don't, but everyone play their roles anyway while the clown in charge rakes in the profits. It's a little piece of Hell on Earth.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The 'time' obviously follows a circle, which has 360 degrees.
But time is actually of a cubic nature!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }