36. Two timezones that differ will differ by an integer number of half hours.
37. Okay, quarter hours.
38. Okay, seconds, but it will be a consistent difference if we ignore DST.
37. Okay, quarter hours.
38. Okay, seconds, but it will be a consistent difference if we ignore DST.
40. You can wait for the clock to reach exactly HH:MM:SS by sampling once a second.
The best part was that this was in Javascript (and obviously he was not using a timeout). The entire page would lock up while it waited for the second to elapse. He never even figured out the obvious usability concern because he was so confounded by the fact that the procedure wasn't getting called after a second had passed.
Ok, to be fair, it was a freshman year programming class - not an unexpected or even unusual mistake. But it gave me a chuckle just now remembering it.
Another amusing anecdote: I got an old PowerBook out of storage and booted it up. The battery had run flat, so the clock reset to 1970. Spotlight noticed this and decided it had to reindex the entire drive. At some point during all of this, NTP kicked in and reset the clock to the correct year. I wanted to see how long Spotlight would take to finish indexing, so I popped down the menu. The progress bar indicated that it was about halfway done, and based on how long it had taken so far, it estimated that only another 40 years would be required to finish!
I just found out today about Calcutta time, which until 1948 was GMT+05:30:21, but I didn ’t realize it could be even worse than that.