Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/russia-winter-time.html

by makuro • 15 years ago

109 114 15 years ago

orangecat• 15 years ago

Good for them. It makes much more sense to shift government/business hours if needed than constantly mucking with the time and screwing up millions of software installations.

andresmh• 15 years ago

can't the OS's handle the change automatically?

doyoulikeworms• 15 years ago

Sure, but it's just another point of failure for dubious benefit.

ig12• 15 years ago

No. Every piece of software that deals with time in any kind of sophistication needs to have logic to handle it.

I used to work on a share price alerting system where you could say "if the price of stock X goes up by 10% during these hours than alert me", that creates a nightmare when it comes to DST changes. Do you use the timezone of the person who setup that alert (what if they're now in a different timezone do you change ?) or do you use the DST rules of the country the share trades in.

Imagine you have a calendaring app and someone from another country sends you a meeting request for the future that's past a DST change in one of your countries, but not past it in the other. It's possible for the time to be ambiguous unless you specify DST handling rules. What happens if a country changes DST rules (this happens far more often than you think) how do you adjust previously set appointments ?

Imagine your Google Analytics, what timezone do you save analytics data in and do you adjust for DST (the answer is PST by default, and if you change it, historical data won't be adjusted so you end up with a mishmash of time data).

In any scenario where you have to handle timezones it's complicated enough as it is, DST handling makes it a nightmare.

technomancy2• 15 years ago

Software is often written with the assumption that time always goes forward, because, well, that's how time works. However, according to the rules of daylight savings, time actually goes backwards once a year.

pavel_lishin6• 15 years ago

If by "automatically", you mean "after thousands of man-hours have been taken to implement and debug the process" - and then only for so long as the system remains precisely the same.

Like it just didn't, in Russia.

arohner2• 15 years ago

Not really. On *nixes, there's a library called zoneinfo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database) that has the list of rules about "if you're in living in California, then DST starts on March 23" or whatever. When a country changes the law about when DST is, that data needs to be updated.

For example, last year Chile gave a month's notice that daylight savings time was changing. (http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/chile-extends-dst-2010....)

That can cause headaches, if you have a mission critical system that needs to be updated, otherwise it may do something important an hour early, or an hour late. For example, Postgres has to be rebooted when the timezone information is changed.

gbhn• 15 years ago

That's a great precedent! I hope the US abandons winter time, too.

wtn• 15 years ago

More likely this will deter Congress from taking action, out of spite.

pavel_lishin6• 15 years ago

You simply have to present it to the Right in the way they can hear it.

"Are you gonna let a bunch of commies beat you in the modernization of time? We didn't land the first man on the moon just so we can be beaten out by savages with beet-powered potatoes!"

pkulak2• 15 years ago

Lousy farmers...

pig• 15 years ago

Farmers work whenever they want.

VMG• 15 years ago

It's probably not about farmers: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4172

ecaron• 15 years ago

Actually the farmers in my family have to reprogram their clocks twice a year to avoid DST, since cows are incredibly sensitive to their milking schedule and the twice-a-year hourly shift really screws with the herd.

I would go so far as to say that farmers hate DST more than programmers/sysadmins do.

jlangenauer• 15 years ago

This is where I get to offer a famed quote from one our politicians in Queensland, Australia, who was arguing against daylight saving when Queensland was considering adopting DST in the 1980s.

She said we shouldn't adopt DST because the extra hour of sunlight - and I quote directly here - would "fade the curtains".

pkulak2• 15 years ago

Okay, that was a bit too subtle:

http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F05.html

ars2• 15 years ago

Winter time is the standard time (i.e. based on solar noon).

It's summer time that is moved.

Maybe that's only in the US and Russia has the reverse?

weinzierl4• 15 years ago

As far as I know there is no such thing as winter time. Russia had standard time (UTC+3) in winter and changed to daylight savings time (UTC+4) at same dates as the rest of Europe. Now they decided never to switch back to UTC+3 but stay UTC+4, effectively making UTC+4 Moscow standard time.

As Moscows longitude is 37 degree East, they should really use UTC+3 as their standard time, but that's a different story.

speleding• 15 years ago

I wish they would do that here. As a parent of two small kids I dread the clock changes, it takes forever for them to adjust.

k_shehadeh• 15 years ago

As a father, I completely agree. As a c++ developer I'm counting down to the russian support calls.

anigbrowl6• 15 years ago

It costs the US economy billions every year. Exactly how many billions depends on how you measure, but the direct costs of adjusting for the extension in 2007 were $1.1bn, according to the well-sourced Wikipedia article on the subject. DST all year round, say I. Dark winter mornings are OK by me.

Vivtek• 15 years ago

Indiana just went to daylight savings a couple of years back. Pissed me off - the new Republican governor said it would attract jobs (which is the reason anybody ever does anything in Indianapolis), and the success of that was predictable.

technomancy2• 15 years ago

I live in the Pacific time zone, and for a long time I've been tempted to reset my clock to Pitcairn Island time, which is just like Pacific time, but without observing daylight savings.

Haven't made the jump yet, but it's only a matter of time before some stupid DST error fills me with enough rage.

joeyh• 15 years ago

I am not observing DST this winter. When living off the grid on solar power, messing with the time the sun is up is annoying. It's been working out well enough for me. Did a custom DST-less EST timezone. http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/howto_create_your_own_ti...

yason• 15 years ago

Isn't winter time the standard clock and it's summer time that is the deviation from that? So Russia would be abolishing summer time that is also known as daylight savings time?

msbarnett• 15 years ago

No. Per the article, they're staying on UTC+4 (aka DST) permanently, rather than falling back to UTC+3 in the winter.

weinzierl4• 15 years ago

Absolutely, but that is no counter argument to yason's statement. There is no such thing as winter time. As far as I understand it it's just that Moscow's time zone is UTC+3 and they are changing that to UTC+4. It's not that unusual that a country is in an another time zone than it should be geographically, look at Spain for example.

GiraffeNecktie• 15 years ago

China also maintains the same time year round.

dhughes• 15 years ago

Yes but for the entire country!

That's a lot of real estate under one time zone, it may be silly to have summer and winter times but having one time zone for a country approximately the same size as Canada (5,000km wide) seems silly, Canada has six time zones.

pavel_lishin6• 15 years ago

> having one time zone for a country approximately the same size as Canada (5,000km wide) seems silly

Why?

In America, people already get up at 7am (insert your own time here, obviously) regardless of what the local sunrise actually is - which varies based on how far north or south you live.

It's pretty arbitrary. But one time zone at least makes the arbitraryness easier on coders.

nathanb• 15 years ago

I think the title of this post is incorrect; they're not abolishing DST, they're permanently moving to DST.

weinzierl4• 15 years ago

I'd rather say that they are changing their time zone from UTC+3 to UTC+4. It's not that they will have permanent DST, but rather standard time is now UTC+3 and will be UTC+4.

gojomo2• 15 years ago

Ho-hum. Want to be really forward-thinking? Follow the example of China, which discarded 5 time zones for a single national time in 1949. (We'd then adjust the office/retail hours to mimic local daylight, rather adjusting the numbers on the clock.)

evgen• 15 years ago

One timezone covering enough longitudinal variation to want five timezones is a dumb idea. Doing the same thing in a country with enough east-west span to cover ten timezones would be an incredibly dumb idea.

aaronblohowiak• 15 years ago

What, why? Does waking up at 6 have any different intrinsic value than waking up a 3.5 or 11 ? Ever since time zones, there hasn't been an intrinsic meaning to time (who uses sun dials?) We should all just be on the same time, the whole world around.

arohner2• 15 years ago

Why are timezones a good idea? 12:00 is not solar noon for essentially everyone.

gojomo2• 15 years ago

You're assuming your conclusion ("want five timezones"), and calling the alternative 'dumb' and 'incredibly dumb' isn't much of a reasoned justification.

Why is adjusting the clock numbers better than adjusting local practices?

Why does a single time work well for China... and the US armed forces globally?

Shouldn't we be optimizing for long-distance collaboration, now that we have the telecom technology to do so?

rdl2• 15 years ago

USSR did exactly that, historically (there was one time; Moscow time).

madcaptenor2• 15 years ago

Parts of Western China observes "Urumqi time" (UTC+6, compared to Beijing's UTC+8). There's a point at which people won't let you screw with their clocks arbitrarily.

furyg3• 15 years ago

Can we all just have a 24 hour clock based on GMT, no other timezones, and no daylight savings time?

It seems a whole lot easier to change our time format just once and get used to it... instead of half of us changing the clocks twice a year, the other not, drawing all these weird lines all over (grumble India grumble), and keeping track of it all.

pavel_lishin6• 15 years ago

What do you mean by "we"? First, you'd have to get all of the states to sign off on this, including the weird ones that half-follow and half-don't-follow the conventions. I'm not even sure if this is something the Federal government could just demand.

Oh, and then you also have to convince every other government to implement, too.

JoeAltmaier• 15 years ago

No! Even better! "Metric time" - a minute has 100 seconds, an hour 100 minutes, a day is 10 hours (100,000 seconds). Makes perfect sense on a space station so we'll have to face it sooner or later.

zeteo4• 15 years ago

Well while we're at it, what's the fetish with 10? We should use powers of 2 for everything :)

rue4• 15 years ago

http://decimalti.me

There's a few ways to do it: as you can see, I like to use the 1/100 as the base unit (it's a little under 15 minutes in current reckoning) and go decimal beyond that since you have a neat percentage as a result, and you can drop off precision as needed.

Groxx3• 15 years ago

Already done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

And loads of date parsing / string emitting libraries already handle it :)

kinofcain• 15 years ago

The problem is, if you ever need to deal with events before the Big Switchover to 24-hour time, you'd still need to have all the knowledge of previous zone boundaries, offsets and seasonal rules. Any 24 hour time still has to handle leap years and leap seconds.

Time is a pain in the ass.

drdaeman2• 15 years ago

First, most humans are extremly reluctant to any changes. You see, US are still using imperial units and Fahrenheit scale.

Second, timezones are used for globally-recognizable time of a day. No matter where you are on Earth, 08:00 (by 24-hour scale) is certainly in the morning, and 20:00 is evening.

exit• 15 years ago

your second point seems interchangeable with the difficulty of knowing what timezone some random location falls into.

i think it might be slightly worse in that "solar noon"-zones would stick to straight bands.

rue4• 15 years ago

It's true that 8:00 can be considered morning, but I think that's useful in fewer situations than one might think. You can't know, for example, whether I'll be at the office anywhere near that time so you'll still need to ask if you want to get a hold of me.

rdtsc2• 15 years ago

Even China, which is officially on one timezone, has local "un-official" timezone.

tedunangst• 15 years ago

What's stopping you? Starting now, whenever you give someone a time, specify UTC. If someone tells you a time that's not UTC, ask them to provide it in UTC.

koenigdavidmj• 15 years ago

What? Then some musician would have to work during the day and sleep at night.

antirez2• 15 years ago

Hope that Berlusconi in one of his delirious of madness will do the same for Italy. But I want to stay always in DST, that in Italy means more daylight.

eru9• 15 years ago

If you want to get up an hour earlier to have more light, then just get up an hour earlier.

antirez2• 15 years ago

The problem is that the rest of the world will instead follow the clock. So for instance my son will still exit school at 2:10 pm, I'll need to prepare something to eat, and then we could spend some time to the park, but it's already too late to get some decent sunlight.

rjrodger• 15 years ago

Woohoo! Good riddance.

zdw• 15 years ago

Move to Arizona. We don't have DST here. It's awesome... until you get a machine shipped to you from somewhere misconfigured with DST turned on running a time-criticial task...

Seriously, I wish we all went to GMT, everywhere, and just were done with it.

madcaptenor2• 15 years ago

You can generate a table of sunrises and sunsets from the US Naval Observatory, http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneYear.php . Unfortunately I don't see a way to link directly to the table; Moscow is 55 45 N, 37 36 E, and now four hours east of Greenwich. From their location, they're "naturally" around UTC+2:30 (37.6 degrees, divided by 15 degrees per hour).

The table says that in late December the sun will rise at around 10 AM and set at around 5 PM. This doesn't seem preferable to the 9-4 they'd have under standard time. I'm not sure about Russian time zone boundaries, though; is Moscow time used in areas to the east of Moscow?

listic• 15 years ago

Moscow time is used in the North-West region, there are 9 time zones in total: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Russia_-_Time_Zones...

Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (DST)

Related Stories