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joeller wrote: No you mention Twilight Zone to these youngsters today and they just stare uncomprehendingly at you.
True. I date myself. 
Marc
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Need to make them watch more SyFy channel XD
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Richard MacCutchan wrote: I could never get our American programmers and analysts to fully understand time zones, irony, that other countries exist, that "America" is a pair of continents comprising lots of countries, that English accents aren't cute (they just don't sound bluddy awful like yankee ones), or that everything that they believe was invented in the US wasn't.
It must be a developer thing, but I hate seeing incomplete statements.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mea culpa. 
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Marc Clifton wrote: UTC
University Town Center -- it's a mall in La Jolla.
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: University Town Center -- it's a mall in La Jolla.
Yes, I used to shop there, was a frequent customer of the Ritz Camera that was there (is it still?) And is it actually part of La Jolla or University City?
Funny you mention that, I was almost going to post that acronym in my original post, but decided nobody would get it (though I suppose there's a website for the mall.)
Marc
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Marc Clifton wrote: frequent customer of the Ritz Camera
As was I when I lived in the area, 1995 - 2001. There are very few Ritzes left, probably not that one.
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: As was I when I lived in the area, 1995 - 2001.
Interesting. I moved back to the East Coast in Dec of 1999. It's amusing to think we might have been in the Ritz store at the same time. Very small probability, but not 0!
Marc
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Let's just assume we met!  And if you worked at SAIC we can say we worked together.
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
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The US won't be in the world cup long enough for them to need to use blasted-colonial time zones.
With any luck, the UK and NL won't last much longer, so the noise will decrease to bearable levels.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Marc Clifton wrote: Well, what do you think they should use, UTC?
Well, didn't China ("which we call Red China") fairly recently switch to use a single time zone for the entire country?
It makes sense. It really doesn't matter what you call the time when you get out of bed. People in the west DO get out of bed five hours later than the people in the west, so why should they both insist of calling it six o'clock, create a lot of problems. As long as you live isolated, you might want to insist on your day starting at 06:00, but once you start cooperating with someone far away, I cannot see one single advantage of labeling the same point in time with different values. I wouldn't mind UTC beeing established as the "time zone" for the entire world.
(My country, Norway, is a tiny north-south string of land. Nevertheless, we span two complete time zones: The people up north (-east) see the morning sun two hours before the people on the west coast. We live well with that, and have always done.)
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Makes me wonder, if the sun didn't even set the previous day, can you really call it the 'morning sun'? How do you measure the difference in time to other locations' morning sun when you don't technically have one? 
Then again, US citizens may be reading this - let's not confuse them even more 
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Member 7989122 wrote: I wouldn't mind UTC beeing established as the "time zone" for the entire world.
Being from the US, I would object to finding it dark outside at noon.
Fletcher Glenn
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Our app functions across multiples time zones so we've dealt with time zone despair for years as well. We store everything in UTC and convert back to local when displaying to user, but it's a real pain, especially when MS changes standards over time (for those that don't know, they try to automatically adjust times for you by comparing time zones of client and server - not helpful when we're already doing the conversion ourselves). If anyone ever needs help with the horrors of time zones drop a line - lots of experience to share.
As part of your useless trivia for the day, Coordinated Universal Time was originally going to be abbreviated as CUT, but since people couldn't agree on the abbreviation it was arranged so that no one got what they want. That's compromise!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time[^]
The official abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time is UTC. This abbreviation arose from a desire by the International Telecommunication Union and the International Astronomical Union to use the same abbreviation in all languages. English speakers originally proposed CUT (for "coordinated universal time"), while French speakers proposed TUC (for "temps universel coordonné"). The compromise that emerged was UTC,[8] which conforms to the pattern for the abbreviations of the variants of Universal Time (UT0, UT1, UT2, UT1R, etc.).[9]
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Ah, blame the French - it is agreed then - this mess is their fault.
Seriously though in newer .Net and SQL DateTimeOffset is a support primitive type, and 99% of the time that is what you ought to be storing not DateTime. So many issues go away completely whith that simple change.
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Agreed, and we've looked into it. But retro-fitting that is easier said than done.
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G-Tek wrote: As part of your useless trivia for the day, Coordinated Universal Time was originally going to be abbreviated as CUT, but since people couldn't agree on the abbreviation it was arranged so that no one got what they want. That's compromise!
What's amusing is, in the MSDN documentation for SetTimeZoneInformation, is this:
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)
Where, of course, the acronym would be CUT, not UTC.
Marc
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Out apps have to function all over the world from the US East Coast, (where the preponderance of users are), to the west Coast, to Hawaii, to Japan, to the Med and to Afghanistan. Where datetimes are of importance we use zulu time (GMT) . Otherwise we reference the time zone of the system's location and the supporter's location, which Eastern Time, (+5).
Time zones were established in the US to accomodate railroads scheduling from the days when each location kept its own time based on Local Apparent Noon. However, they did not really impact most Americans until airline travel and broadcasting. Since most Americans never leave the country all they care about are their own Time zone and Eastern Time (by which the TV shows are scheduled).
As far as one time zone for the entire country, I really would not want to work an 8 AM to 4 PM shift and never see the sun. I don't think the pharse "Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the Noon day sun" would make much sense, if Noon came before sunrise for most of the year. 
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We store UTC instead of GMT because we also want to be careful to account for DST. We denormalize larger tables by storing both the UTC and Local time. My preference is also to base time on 24hr clock, but there are lots of people that aren't comfortable with that. Time zones are a PITA.
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You know - 12 o-crock, 1 o-crock - talk like an oriental - you'll get it. 
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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What use of time zones anyway? I live nearly 42° N. According to the encyclopedias the earth is ~40000km around equator. That means ~29322km at this latitude, so on every ~1222km east/west the sunset/sunrise differs by one hour and on every ~20km by one minute. And the sunset/sunrise is the only thing that matters in measuring the time.
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I should have asked for royalties! 
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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You get 10% of the nothing I get. 
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
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Wow! That's nearly a whole 'n'!
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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