Excellent explanation! Someone was talking about adding timezones at work recently...I'm forwarding this to explain why I groaned.

Someone needs a pint.

lol brilliant!

The device I am working on now, I keep the UTC in a real time clock, then the offset from that for local in whole seconds, and then a +1 optional hour for daylight savings.

It always makes me cringe when I hear, "Can you take account of X special circumstance?"

This is what makes a programmer drink coffee to get through the day and alcohol to forget it all at night. Make it a double if they add, "That shouldn't be too hard."

It's nice to hear I'm not the only one!

I love this guys passion for what most of us would never ever remotely consider.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'apps, tech, conundrum, solved, headasplode' to 'apps, tech, conundrum, solved, headasplode, unix time, time zones' - edited by xxovercastxx

Can't you (or shouldn't you) rely on the OS to handle this stuff? Seems a bad idea to put this functionality in your own program where it then has to be continuously maintained by you.

Ultimately, as the planet continues to get functionally smaller, we all need to shift to UTC and no DST. Everyone who doesn't live in GMT will just have to get used to sunrise at 11:00, lunch at 17:00, and sunset at 00:00 or whatever the local equivalents are.

My team at work has people in EST5EDT, GMT, AEST, and CST. My company also has people in IST, CET, MSK, CST6CDT, MST7MDT, PST8PDT, etc. And, of course, we have customers in every populated time zone on the planet. It's a constant pain in the ass to be doing these conversions.

So that's everyone in the world except......Iceland. I quite literally live a 30 minute drive from Greenwich but for half the year I'm not in it's timezone.

The astrophysicists need to be able to reliably predict when leap seconds will be needed and then the world switch to a UTC which is on a four week cycle with no leap year bullcrap.

Edit in fact I'd ditch the whole hour minute thing altogether and mark each day as a percantage. That would negate the UTC weirdness and instead of going to work 9-5 you'd go 37.5 - 70.8 or in utc for new york (gmt-4 currently) 20.8 - 54.1