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OriginalGriff wrote: rather than use UTC and convert to client local time when they display it
Because that would solve all of their problems, right? 
Storing UTC is not a silver bullet | Jon Skeet's coding blog[^]
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Why don't we use UTC all over the place and abandon local time zones entirely?
Why is there a "need" to everywhere call it 08:00 when people go to work and 16:00 when they return home, when the socalled "same time" really can vary among 24 different real times across the world?
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I agree, we should have a global time based on GMT. Americans would go for it if they realised they could sleep in until noon instead of having to wake at 7am (07:00)!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Whether it makes sense or not, every government would have to legislate it, every door or website that posts business hours would have to be changed, and people would have to get accustomed to talking about having meals at times that previously seemed beyond bizarre. Even places that switched to metric or Celsius also quoted Imperial or Fahrenheit for quite a while thereafter. Canada converted when I was in my teens, so I still often do a mental conversion to the previous system, and you still find lbs/ozs in grocery stores (although in smaller fonts, probably because that's mandatory).
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China did switch to a singe time zone (although not UTC - there is no principal difference). I have not heard any signs of that causing havoc.
UTC does not change unit (size), just the zero point on exactly the same scale. Like going from Celsius to Kelvin - not like going to Fahrenheit.
All modern computers already handle UTC. For the great majority of them, UTC is The internal time representation; any "time zone" conversion is for external presentation only.
In several areas, UTC is in regularly use for unambiguous time references, e.g. in military operations, but also in numerous other international operations / technologies.
If everyone had breakfast at 07:00, started work at 08:00, went home at 16:00 (sorry ... 4pm) and had supper at 17:00 5pm, then having meals or working at other times would be "bizarre". But around here, craftsmen usually start work at 07:00, some at 06:00. Brits (at least office workers) tend to start work at 9am; south Europeans may have their supper at 8pm or later. Even tiny little Norway spans two full time zones: What is called 08:00 on the east coast is - by the sun - two hours earlier than 08:00 on the westernmost islands. Yet it is called the same time. This idea that supper at 5pm all over the world is some sort of 'law of nature' is nothing but a figment of some cultural imagination. It doesn't hold in little Norway. It doesn't hold within the single Central European time zone.
We are prepared: The standards for handling it are several decades old. The technological solutions are decades old. It has been in partial use for decades. Handling it mentally requires nothing but adding or subtracting a small integer.
It might be convenient if all nations went to UTC at the same time, but it isn't a requirement. Especially in North America, values shown for indicating e.g. business hours would be obvious whether given in the old base (and by am/pm) or UTC (24h clock). There is currently a discussion in EU about abandoning Daylight Savings Time: It is clear that the EU will leave the decision to each country, including whether to go for summer or winter time as their all-year time. That is considered manageable. If EU had mandated UTC as the new year round Standard European Time (not just central European), it wouldn't be significantly different.
It would require Europeans to adjust their clocks by one to three hours, a fairly small change (and, seen by sun time, within the variation we already have e.g. within Norway). The risk of confusion between old and new time would be there. For North America, the change would be larger, but hey, adding six or seven isn't that different from subtracting one or two! And: The risk of confusion between new and old is almost zero.
So I certainly do not agree with your pessimism about a worldwide change to UTC. It takes a minimum of technical changes (essentially, not reformatting time values for display!), and people would accept it just as easily as DST changes or when travelling east-west. It could even be introduced gradually, say by EU legislating that any time table, any time stamp, any sort of time reference may be given in UTC (only). If no time zone is indicated, in a legal conflict UTC is assumed. If enforced in transatlantic / international business, e.g. flight schedules always state UTC departure / arrival times, it would gradually sink in. I mean, even North Americans are capable of handling 24h time indications, aren't they? If they are mentally capable of handling that, I am 100 sure that they are capable of handling UTC as well!
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I'm curious. What's referred to as the "east coast" in Norway?! Vardø?
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That is the closest you'll get, in terms of populated communities. Consider it a good enough approximation. If you go for the extreme: Hornøya – Wikipedia[^] is how far it goes, at 70°23′12,64″N 31°10′06,94″Ø
For the western extreme, go to Holmebåen – Wikipedia[^] at 61°04′24,0727″N 04°29′57,0166″Ø
The span is not quite two time zones, 30°, just about 26°40' - but close enough that I took the liberty to call it two time zones for the purpose of the discussion.
Small sidetrack: A friend of mine spent an extended summer vacation walking on foot from Norway's south coast, a Lindesnes, to Norway's east coast, near Vardø. He soon got a routine in explaining "Norway's east coast"; it surprises even Norwegians. So you are not the first curious one.
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trønderen wrote: Why is there a "need" to everywhere call it 08:00 when people go to work and 16:00 when they return home, when the socalled "same time" really can vary among 24 different real times across the world?
The problem is not what we call the different times, but what people in different timezones are doing at those various times.
If you want a conference call when you're just getting in at work, but it's already quitting time over here...then F U and horse you rode in on with your call[*]. What you really want is all people to start work at the same time, and leave work at the same time. But that means all people in a given timezone would have to start to do nothing but night shifts, so just everyone's schedules are synchronized.
[*] Sorry, lately I've had to "accommodate" people from a different time zone, and it's been affecting my routine.
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dandy72 wrote: The problem is not what we call the different times, but what people in different timezones are doing at those various times.
That doesn't go away by labeling different real times by identical labels. Quite to the contrary. People do different things at various times. Having a common time reference makes that obvious, makes us aware of it, so we can relate to it, and handle it.
Using the same time label to indicate (or rather: vaguely suggest) daily activities is usually somewhere between 'directly misguiding' to 'approximate, at best'. You can't deduce anything from it. It causes a lot of problems when you need to coordinate things across time zones.
If you want to set up a conference call that possibly spans multiple time zones, I cannot see any advantage whatsoever doing this by relating specifically to EST/EDT, CST/CDT, MST/MDT, PST/PDT, AKST/AKDT or any similarly varying European, Pacific or Asian time zone. For anything but your local time zone, you will have to consider the "sun time", as well as local customs: Standard working hours may start a different times of the "solar day", in different cultures. Relating such aspects to a single, unified time scale may be far easier than having to convert everything into your personal conception of time.
You will have to relate to all the time zones anyway! You may juggle around MET, EST, CDST, NST, PST as you like - maybe you will never confuse them (yeah, I trust you 100%), but will everyone around you be equally perfect? I wouldn't trust that unconditionally.
if you feel a draft, it may be coming from my side.
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Is a cat on TV actually a Teletabby?
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Possibly on digitail media? A modern day replacement for rabbit-ears, perhaps? Beclaws cats are so inscrutable it's litter-ly a puzzle.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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And would you record a female kitten on a videocattette?
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Only if it's a Caturday morning cartoon.
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If a hairless cat was running away from a dog, would it be a BalderDash?
there is no such thing as a free lunch
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Just why.
I spent an hour fighting with XmlSerialisers to try and get my object mapped to a schema. Changing names, trying to get attributes setup, dealing with CDATA. I gave up. I got so fed up I simply wrote the XML directly as a raw string. If I could have kicked it I would have kicked it.
I totally get the beauty of having data in a class and throwing it at different serialisers and having it Just Work. Switch between XML and Json and maybe binary and text and build out this whole massive ecosystem that screams "I'm trying to do too much!".
But dear lord. It's like root canal surgery.
Is anyone actively using XML as a data transport format? I get that we all use it in things like XAML and ASP.NET pages and the whole HTML thing, but as something that is not seen or edited by humans, that needs to be cognizant of bandwidth, is it still being used in that manner or am I just really, really intolerant this morning?
cheers
Chris Maunder
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I had the same problem just a couple days ago.
I ended up throwing the XML into this[^] and it generated the C# code which worked perfectly and showed me what I was doing wrong. 
Chris Maunder wrote: s anyone actively using XML as a data transport format?
Sadly, yes. Lots of legacy systems or old API's that never got updated to JSON. 
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oooh! That is SO useful - thanks for the link, Marc!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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THANK YOU A LOT 
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Marc Clifton wrote: Lots of legacy systems or old API's that never got updated to JSON.
Exactly.
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Message Closed
modified 12-Jan-21 10:41am.
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It looks pretty good - ReSharper is going nuts on it but who cares!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Dang, what did Raddius say or do, he is trusted member of ![Green Alien | [Alien]](https://www.codeproject.com/script/Forums/Images/alien.gif) 's court.
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perhaps he tried to delete the post, and the system made the message closed because others responded?
I thought it weird as well.
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