Universal TimeStamps

[Roedy Green]

I get the impression perhaps one in 100 people in the general
population understand timezones, at least the level they could
translate a time given in some other timezone to their own local time.

These poor boobs try to post information about when an event of global
interest will occur. As often as not they will get the local times
incorrect.

How could the situation be improved?

First any such event, no matter what else it does should post the time
in UTC in some rigid format with some sort of sandwich to make it very
clear that it is indeed an UTC time for some event.

Then you could have a cell phone app to scan the information from a
poster and tell you what it means in local time.

Then if were embedded in a web page, the browser could convert it for
you into local time.

The nice thing about this is even if it were date far into the future,
the and local DST rules changed, the representation would
automatically adjust.

I wonder what sort of politics are needed to bring this about. More
and more people trying to co-ordinate events across time zones, so the
need in increasing.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is,
the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith (born: 1908-10-15 died: 2006-04-29 at age: 97)

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:54:36 -0700, /Roedy Green/:

> First any such event, no matter what else it does should post the time
> in UTC in some rigid format with some sort of sandwich to make it very
> clear that it is indeed an UTC time for some event.

That's what generally timestamps are, and that's what java.util.Date
objects hold data for - the UTC time. For display purposes the UTC
time value in java.util.Date is converted to the local timezone, for
example.

--
Stanimir

[Roedy Green]

On Sat, 01 Oct 2011 22:10:48 +0300, Stanimir Stamenkov
<s7a...@netscape.net> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who
said :

>That's what generally timestamps are, and that's what java.util.Date
>objects hold data for - the UTC time. For display purposes the UTC
>time value in java.util.Date is converted to the local timezone, for
>example.

But those are not embeddable in ordinary text, html, magazines etc.
We need something that can be mechanically plucked, not confused with
anything else, not confused by many format variants as ordinary dates
are.

--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

It should not be considered an error when the user starts something
already started or stops something already stopped. This applies
to browsers, services, editors... It is inexcusable to
punish the user by requiring some elaborate sequence to atone,
e.g. open the task editor, find and kill some processes.