North American time zones are aligned to keep nearby large population centers in the same zone. The Eastern time zone should be 15 degrees of longitude wide (with each time zone centered 7 1/2 degrees away from each side - e.g. GMT ideally would be between 7 1/2 degrees E and 7 1/2 degrees W). However - Eastern time extends from around 65 degrees to 90 degrees - making sunrise/sunset times (at the edges and at the same latitude) being around 1h45m apart, instead of the expected 1h. This makes the eastern part want more EDT, and the western part to want more EST.
“In the summers of 1941 to 1945, during the Second World War, Britain was two hours ahead of GMT and operating on British Double Summer Time(BDST). To bring this about, the clocks were not put back by an hour at the end of summer in 1940 (BST having started early, on 25 February 1940). In subsequent years, clocks continued to be advanced by one hour each spring (to BDST) and put back by an hour each autumn (to BST). On 15 July 1945, the clocks were put back by an hour, so BDST reverted to BST; the clocks were put back by an additional hour on 7 October 1945, so BST reverted to GMT for the winter of 1945.[9]
In 1946, BST operated as normal (from April to October) but in 1947, for a single year, BDST was re-introduced with effect from 13 April (BST having started on 16 March). After four months of BDST the clocks were put back by an hour on 10 August (to BST) and by another hour on 2 November (to GMT).” - Wikipedia
Yeah. The point though is that Eastern is 175% too wide and the others are each made too narrow to make up the difference.
Simply moving the time zone boundaries to the astronomically correct longitudes and letting the consequences on the ground fall as they may would resolve a LOT of the dissatisfaction throughout the USA with the clock time of day versus sunrise and sunset times in both winter and summer.
That doesn’t matter to the user. UTC/GMT is “under the hood”, so to speak. It is just a universal, arbitrary time that serves as the basis for calculating elapsed time, even across time zone boundaries.
Kinda sorta. If we really used UTC as the displayed actual local time for all clocks in the USA, the date would roll over somewhere between late dinner time in the east and mid afternoon in the west when it became midnight in Greenwich.
That would be rather hard for average (read “ignorant, stupid, and lazy”) Americans to get used to. e.g. When you wake up on Monday it becomes Tuesday just about it’s time to plop down in front of the TV and watch a sportsball game. Lotta folks will tune in the day before (or after). Oops.
Clocks need to display local time for normal use. The problem is that if you start at 0600 in TX1 and make a three-hour drive into TZ2, which is one hour ahead, your clock (set to local time) will show 1000, and your drive would appear to have taken four hours.
If the elapsed time is important, as with regulated driving hours, then it needs to be calculated from some constant base, and UTC/GMT is a useful standard.
You and I are talking about two utterly different scenarios.
There’s been a convo about switching the world to UTC everywhere as the local time. Just like China uses one time, despite being 5 traditional time zones wide. That’s the convo I’ve been participating in. I seem to have misunderstood one of your comments as being realted to this when it was actually directed at a different sob-convo in this thread.
If you really go under the hood, computer software does not use hours, minutes, days, months etc. It varies from system to system but the internal representation is something like the number of seconds since some arbitrary standard point in time. It is far easier to convert the human readable format into an internal representation on the way in and back to human format again on the way out. The code to handle cases like comparing 1:02 to 12:59 is way too tedious to do more than once.
Explaining that to people panicking over Y2K was incredibly difficult until the big day came and went with a few minor cosmetic issues.
One nice thing about being a software developer is that I hit that 2000 New Years Eve with not a worry at all, and possibly too much to drink, but if it had actually happened… I would be manually fixing dates in quite a lot of databases with a heavy hangover.
Well, yes. 2038 could be an issue unless we invent a datatype called “very-big-integer”, but int64 should be good for a while until we need int128 as a date format.
The scare over 2000 has influenced sane developers to use far more sensible formats.
We could easily last 170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,727 seconds, or roughly 5.39514153540300699e+28 years.
Neither of which, however, fit into any DB format aside from “string”, as far as I know.
Mostly NoSQL style (MongoDB et al), where obviously data types are limited and inferred by the code that retrieves them rather than the storage format, but also SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, MariaDB (the freestanding one) and others. (Google Cloud Platorm is on of the few that does not absolutely irritate me, but it does use ISO 8601. Not used AWS much, but it also encourages ISO 8601)
My languages are Java, Kotlin, C#, and (alas) PHP. Some Python.
Date/time has been the bane of my life ever since I picked up the book “Access for Dummies” back in about 1998, and I have something very rude to say to Microsoft about both Access and Excel, and similarly about SQL Server.
It is probably the only subject upon which I will struggle very hard to argue to victory with my colleagues, rather than the more sensible consensus agreement.
and there are 64-bit and 128-bit timestamps and intervals, albeit in microseconds, but that should not cramp your style too much, for a few years, anyway.
The Chase is a great quiz show. Nice to hear that it’s widely available.
So, to correct my initial trivia question:
These countries are on GMT all year:
Iceland: Often cited as the most notable European example, Iceland has remained on GMT since 1968 and does not observe daylight saving time.
Burkina Faso: Located in West Africa, this country observes GMT all year.
Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast): Another West African nation on permanent GMT.
Gambia: Maintains GMT as its year-round time zone.
Ghana: Uses GMT throughout the entire year.
Guinea: This West African country does not change its clocks and stays on GMT.
Guinea-Bissau: Also observes GMT permanently.
Liberia: Keeps a consistent GMT offset all year.
Mali: Stays on GMT without any daylight saving changes.
Mauritania: Uses GMT as its standard time year-round.
São Tomé and Príncipe: An island nation off the coast of Africa that is in the GMT time zone.
Senegal: Observes GMT permanently.
Sierra Leone: Stays on GMT throughout the year.
Togo: Another West African country on permanent GMT.
Additionally, several overseas territories of European countries also remain on GMT year-round. These include:
Greenland (specifically the Danmarkshavn area and surrounding region in the northeast)
Faroe Islands (a Danish territory)
Canary Islands (part of Spain)
Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha (a British Overseas Territory)
cite goes to DeepSeek
Why not hit DeepSeek up for info I’m sure the “Chasers” would know, besides “Name them…”
Furthest East and West:
So from west to east across the GMT year-round countries, you’re looking at a span from Sierra Leone (~13°W) across West Africa to São Tomé (~7°E) — roughly 20 degrees of longitude.
Honorable mention to that part of Greenland, which extends to ~18°30’W, making it the furthest west if you include non-sovereign territories
. Then the bill comes due. Hard.