Reason #46231 why daylight savings are stupid

[pphaneuf]

They're changing it in the US and Canada this year. The governments are controlling time. I feel this should be restricted to Time Lords.

As part of the fun, Microsoft will not update Windows XP and older (only Vista will have it), and in true "I am a slave to the machines" style, are recommending such workarounds as specifying the time again in appointments made in Outlook, for example. Clever, eh?

Comments

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

But if the government won't save my daylight, then who will? :)

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

I don't see any interests on those savings now, don't I?

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

That's because you're not looking here. See? Interests in daylight saving time!

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, four people, as opposed to this!

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

That's only because everyone misspells it "daylight savings time".

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

That's still less.

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

Hey, you asked for interests in the savings, you got them. What more do you want?

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Monotonically and uniformly increasing flow of time!

[peaceful-dragon.livejournal.com]

According to that page WinXP-SP2 will be updated but SP1 and lower is no longer supported, period.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Oops, off-by-one error!

But it's not really Microsoft I'm after. I hacked calendaring software, and the single greatest element of complexity in those isn't calendar data storage or indexing, distributed databases, synchronization or any of those things that would usually be pointed at as "difficult" by developers. No, those were manageable. It's how to figure out recurrent meetings across timezones that is rocket science.

Consider a phone or IRC weekly meeting. During the daylight savings changeovers, the time of the meeting will actually change, and not once, but twice for some people, as people in countries where it doesn't changes the same day as the "authoritative" timezone (which you have to record in the meeting informations) have to temporarily compensate, until they change as well (that is, if they do, if they're in a sane timezone, they'll be in that offset the whole time of the savings).

On my Linux system, the /usr/share/zoneinfo is using about five megabytes, filled with dense, small binary files describing all these idiotic rules over time. For Montreal, where there's been a certain number of changes over the years, the file is 1252 bytes (UTC is 56 bytes). This should give you an idea of the amount of crap going on.

This has funny repercussions, such as that embedded systems have no chance in hell of getting things right, with people putting in their local time in them (which can only possibly tell you the time when accompanied with the timezone), leading to streams of logs that can't even tell you when something happened, which is, you'll have to agree, the main point of telling the time...

Gah, I'll go take my pills now.

[peaceful-dragon.livejournal.com]

Wow, I had no idea. Thanks for taking the time to write about that, it was mucho interesting.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

It's possible I'm a little bitter.

And it also explains why cpirate is my arch-nemesis.