Samoa to jump forward in time by one day
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
And lest you think that's an historical artifact (to be fair, they didn't worry about sysadmins in Renaissance Rome circa 1582) many Orthodox / Eastern European countries like Russia, Greece, and Turkey made that change in the 1920s [1].
And yes, that's why Russia's October Revolution took place in November, 1917.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar#Timeline
I cross the IDL semi-frequently and it always depresses me. It depresses me when I completely skip a day going west, and it depresses me when I fly back the other way and have to live through the same day twice.
Let's say there is <something> that requires a certain length of time, whether it is a 3 day waiting period to buy a gun (totally made up law, I have no idea about Samoan laws), or some prize given to any Samoan who turns 100 years old. Would it go by number of actual days, i.e. how many 24 hour periods have passed, or would it go by date?
Yeah, two terrible examples, and like I said, I doubt the answer would ever have any practical use. And for that reason, perhaps there is no definitive answer. Is there?
If the stipulation is in days (eg 3 days cooling off) then 3 days is 3 days - the date doesn't matter.
If the stipulation is months or years, then the missing day is simply ignored.
I mean, we have a February 29 every 4 years. We already have "months" being an indeterminate number of days (28, 29, 30, 31). So December will have 30 days instead of 31. Big deal. Lots of countries have a time change twice a year, and it doesn't cause any major issues.
For the sake of computer "elapsed time" (interest calculations and so on) it's equally a non-event. The easiest way to handle interest for example is just to treat the missing day as if it had occurred. So it was a really short day, a holiday, which you slept through. Folks will still get paid for the "whole month" of December and so on.
I'm not sure what they'll do, but as long as it's trivially simple I suspect people will adapt very easily.
The worst that'll happen is that everyone will miss out on a whole Wednesday worth of TV. Bummer!
Folks will still get paid for the "whole month" of December and so on.
As you said, different months have different lengths anyway, so it's not like an end-of-the-world problem, but for someone in that situation, they will none-the-less be losing money as a result of the change.
And as to your judgements on days vs months, it's fine to say "it doesn't have to be a problem if we do it like this", but when it comes to any sort of law or contract, that would rely on both parties agreeing, and it's not impossible that they would take opposite views to both try and improve the situation for themselves.
On a side note, if I were in Samoa, I would have great fun buying a 2011 calendar from as many shops as I could, then go round on December 29th complaining that it was factually incorrect and wanting a refund. Well, I say "I would...", in actual fact I wouldn't be quite that bored. But I like the idea of doing that.
No, they're not really losing money, it's more like they're losing the opportunity to make money on that missing day. So a freelancer can, for example work in an extra day that week if they choose.
Public Holidays have the same effect every year, especially in countries where the actual day of the holiday follows the date, and thus in some years falls on a weekend.
Actually they've chosen to shorten a month which has 31 days to 30 days, which is no different than say April, June, September or November. So, by your measure they're being shorted for at least 5 months of every year anyway.
Plus, they've done it between Christmas and New Years, which in the Southern Hemisphere is the middle of the summer holidays. So pretty much no-one is working anyway.
The opposite way of looking at the same data is that they get a "free day" in every 31-day-month. And one of these "free days" is being discarded.
In other words, only us programmer types would try and nit-pick the thing apart. People on the ground haven't "lost" anything really.
My point about the contracts is that nothing is affected. Contracts that say "days" mean days, contracts that say months mean "months". This is built into contracts already because months aren't the same length. a 30 day December is no different to a 30 day April.
"Business Day means a day on which trading banks are open for business in London, United Kingdom excluding a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday."
This therefore leaves no room for doubt. A skipped day would not count as a day or business day.
Say Bank A lends $10M to Bank B on Monday at 0.1% per day. On Tuesday B pays $1k to A. The following day is a Thursday. How much B owes A? $1k or $2k? $1k sounds reasonable but unless you modify your date library you'll probably get $2k.
There's one spot where you can cross the date line 3 times traveling strictly west to east and not changing your latitude!
Heck, there are a lot of possible globes where there's no sensible place to put an international date line at all... every north-south slice goes through a populated landmass.
This continues the broad change in foreign policy.
Obviously, it would be possible to learn these things, but it's much harder to look up. Imagine a table of different countries, how do you define this stuff? Much easier to define what time the 24 hour day starts based on the sun than to define people's behaviour, as not everyone will have the exact same schedule for when they start work, when they wake up, etc.
For scheduling meetings with people globally, you'd have to figure out the day/night cycle but I doubt it would be all that much different than it is now.
But! There would be no goofy daylight savings time differences and there would be no ambiguity ("Oops, I thought the meeting was at 1pm my time, not yours...").
Plus, all us programmers could sleep peacefully at night knowing that our time-based code would just work, instead of waking in a cold sweat wondering what will happen when a government across the globe decides to erase the existence of a day.
Examples: (for some definitions of here and there) It's 1300 here which means that it's 1700 there - do people tend to go home at 1700 or 1800?
Lunchtime in France is typically 1200-1400 (local), whereas in Israel it is 1400-1600. If I'm in France, and I need to call up my Israeli colleagues after lunch, simply adjusting for timezone won't do. If I call at 1430 Israeli time, they will have just gone out.
In these situations you currently have to know two things: what time it is over there, and what the cultural norms for work and mealtimes are. If time were internationally uniform, you'd only need the latter.
For some time now I've included my time zone in the mouseprint of my email signature block; it'd be easy enough to include one's usual hours of availability as well.
With flexi-time and "24 hour working", that's becoming difficult with even the current system. I don't know the hours most of my contacts work but it frequently seems to be well into the small hours..
EDIT: s/things/thinks/
There is no net benefit.
I propose that we just drop DST, base local time on solar noon and calculate our associates' time based on their longitude.
(of course, we do that on a smaller scale in the USA once a year, when we set the clocks back from DST)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database http://cs.ucla.edu/~eggert/tz/tz-link.htm
Luckily for most people the ZoneInfo DB is part of the OS and gets updated with your system updates, but if you care about time in your app, you need to be aware of these.
Governments dictatorial and democratic alike love to screw with the engineers of the world by changing this stuff around all the damn time.
Actually, that's NOT true, because most people use Windows, whose TimeZoneDB is horribly implemented, and only cares about the present (and only if you updated recently). If you ask it about 2003, it will answer with today's rules, not with the rules that were in effect in 2003.
While this is just a little bad for the US (rules changed only twice in the last 50 years), in some countries they have changed every other year, or they cannot be expressed with the rules that Windows has.
Windows date and time handling is a joke.
(I bet Samoa will join this conspiracy of silence when they make the jump.)
Are not they gaining two days in the 5 day week. Just like US-India, there is always somebody from the company working and available due to the 12-13 hour gap.
This change is because Simoa does business with people/companies in Australasia, so they want as much time when both time zones are working as possible, not to get the longest combined amount of work time between the two zones.
That said, because they are on the International Date Line, they are moving their calendar by exactly 24 hours, so their day/night (i.e. working hours) will still have the same relationship with those in Australasia. The difference is that, after this change, they will have five weekdays that overlap with Australasia's five weekdays, whereas right now they only have three, as demonstrated in the BBC story.
I'd pick a Monday.
Not a chef d'oeuvre like "Foucault's pendulum" but well worth a read.
Anyway, I love the passionate discussion programmers have when it comes to dates. Remember, it's only 86400 seconds that they are losing.
I assume the actual reason they chose that date is that they want to stick it in the xmas/NYE dead period which is mostly holidays anyway to minimise disruption.
Also, "time == money" is probably on the list of "things you're least likely to hear anyone say in Samoa".
This would yield flexibility, what about all the Samoan companies that still do most of their business with the US?
To be specific, the Sabbath is the last day of the week, so all the Christians who use Sunday both as the first day of the week and as their day of rest are already ignoring the Sabbath.
If you're interested in how that happened, it's to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, which was on the day after the Sabbath (because Jesus was crucified the day before the Sabbath and rose on the third day, the day after the Sabbath). So no matter where you put the Sabbath, Christians will still observe their day of worship on the day after.
IOW - probably wouldn't work if eg India and Brazil wanted to get cosy.
The change comes 119 years after Samoa moved in the opposite direction.
As to "a day isn't just some thing", a day is a 24 hour period as defined by how long it takes a planet to rotate on its axis. They aren't changing that, their days will still last 24 hours. Dates, however, are indeed just some thing, purely defined by humans, and there have been multiple different calendars over the years. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_calendars
Samoa sits practically right on the International Date Line, this is the line where GMT -12 meets GMT +11, so that you are travelling forwards or back 24 hours whenever you cross over it, depending on your direction. Therefore, whichever side of the IDL they chose to base their time and date on, the time will still fit the day as we know it (i.e. dark at night). And, whichever side of the IDL they chose to base their time on, there will always be other islands very, very close to them that are 24 hours (i.e. one whole day) away from them.
Ultimately, the only difference this makes is whether their weekends coincide with those of the Americas, or those of Australasia. Since, in the past 119 years, their businesses have moved from mostly dealing with the Americas to mostly dealing with Australasia, so it makes sense to move back to being in sync with Australasia.
2) The Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582, not "thousands of years" ago.
A day really is just a thing: I'm not any younger.
After all, it's possible to fly around the world in less than 24 hours, but you can't use that to travel forward or backwards in time, you can only ever get to a maximum of 24 hours ahead or behind of another place.
Edit: In retrospect realise that wasn't particularly helpful. I skipped an awful lot of Mondays for which the only consequence was utter joy at the two cocktail hours every other Saturday. Contrary to the great grandparent, a day really is just a thing.