time change

K. Ari Krupnikov konstantin.krupnikov at sun.com
Fri Sep 20 17:07:18 EDT 2002


"Jerry Feldman" <gaf at blu.org> writes:

> Lots of very good reasons. The military has used UTC (ZULU time) for many 
> years, even before computers.

Not just the military; civil mariners and aviators use ZULU, but of
course you know that :=)

Unless events are tied to a time-of-day reference point, such as dusk,
dawn or business hours, it makes little sense to tie timestamps to
locales. A number of years ago, Swatch tried to invent their own
locale-independent time scale, dividing the day into 500 "beats". The
scheme didn't work, because most events in people's daily lives *are*
related to locales through dusk, dawn and business hours. But events
in most files' lives (e.g., ctime) are not.


Speaking of aviators, is anybody on this list into warchalking? I'd be
happy to volunteer my flying skills: http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/story/0,10801,73901,00.html

Ari.




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