How 1927-12-31 23:54:08 happened twice
stackoverflow.com
stackoverflow.com
cal 9 1752
You can also use this to troll developers that are doing anything that has a calendar.
>The Gregorian reformation was adopted by the Kingdom of Great Britain, including its possessions in North America (later to become eastern USA), in September 1752. As a result the September 1752 cal shows the adjusted days missing. This month was the official (British) adoption of the Gregorian calendar from the previously used Julian calendar. This has been documented in the man pages for Sun Solaris as follows. "An unusual calendar is printed for September 1752. That is the month when 11 days were skipped to make up for lack of leap year adjustments." The Plan 9 from Bell Labs manual states: "Try cal sep 1752." [0]
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cal_(Unix)#Feature...
For us Julian calendar folks, there's upsides and downsides. We get to celebrate Christmas late, but my kid will celebrate both (since my wife is of a different religion). And of course, Easter falls on Cinco de Mayo this year (but we had remember to buy enough egg coloring well in advance)! :)
cal 2 1712
should show February 30th...
(I am coming around to a suspicion that a lot of "wow, that's cool"-type SO questions/answers are more or less fabricated to show off something the person knows, rather than genuine knowledge-seeking, in case you can't tell)
There's no conspiracy here.
I can imagine that a question like this could arise as a narrowed-down test case for a bug found in production.
In short, I find this kind of fabricated Q/A an acceptable workaround the "burden" of the highly specialized knowledge bearer who would like to share it and get rewarded.
Not to mention this question requires someone to be in the Chinese locale, and the asker is actually Chinese.
When I stumble on some unusual behavior I pare it down to the simplest case possible, then ask about that problem. If I don't, the top several answers will invariably be "Why are you writing in X?! Y is so much better for this" and critiquing other parts of the code that aren't causing the odd behavior.
Short, Self Contained, Correct (Compilable), Example
This applies to answers on SO/lists/forums/etc, as well as questions. Everyone benefits from clear communication and examples.
Better (IMO) to use the zoneinfo ID, e.g. "Europe/London" - along with the offset as well, in case the local time is ambiguous in that time zone due to a daylight saving transition.
It does seem weird that it may be customary to eat lunch at 12pm in one place, but have it normal to eat lunch at 4:30am in another. But is it any weirder than having arbitrary discrete jumps in time based on geography and time-of-year?
You are just pushing the complexity somewhere else. It might make computer programming a bit easier, but everything else would be harder.
And people still sleep at night, so you would still need to know when they are awake, when they work.
It would make communicating times easier and less prone to confusion.
> And people still sleep at night, so you would still need to know when they are awake, when they work.
Right, you would need to know when the particular people you are dealing with would be available, but when communicating times to coordinate an event, the numbers used would have the same meaning. I don't see where any complexity is being added to compensate for that that is being lost.
You are focusing on only a single usage of a clock: To coordinate time to speak.
Clocks are used for much more than that, for example: Our store hours are 9-5 days, well no, 9-5 in this city, but in that city it's 8:30-4:30, and so on and so on.
Every place you go you'll have to find out the local time when stores close, or when a tv show is on. Of course you could setup regional borders where all the cities in that area close at the same time.
Maybe we'll call it zones instead of areas - I know! Call it time zones!
Or laws like: Checks must be cashed if received before 4PM that day. Except now you'll have to create a system to be able to say, no, it's 4PM in this city, but in that city it's 3PM.
Congratulations: You've just invented time zones.
You actually have to find that out for specific stores even with local time, and TV showtimes actually vary by location now (sometimes because they shown at constant universal time, sometimes because they are shown at region-specific time that doesn't happen to equate to a constant either in local or universal time), so neither of those is an additional cost.
With a universal time, you'd need to keep track of what "11am-4pm" translates to in your local area and determine it that way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
1000 beats in a day, 0 is midnight at UTC+1 but it doesn't adjust for time zones. It never took off and I think they scrapped it but it would be useful for coordinating between time zones. I'm sure people would fairly quickly adjust to it for their longitude but it'd be very confusing when you were travelling.
I studied abroad in Beijing--the time felt "normal" there as the sun would rise around 7 AM and set around 5 PM in the winter. When visiting Lhasa, those times were shifted to 8:30 AM and 7 PM. It felt somewhat disorienting.
I wonder why...
I was far more impressed by Nepal's proposal (later dropped, I believe) to have a 1:15 daylight saving transition:
http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/nepal-daylight-saving-t...
I'm not usually prone to hero worship, but I've got a lot of time for him. His book C# in Depth is absolutely fantastic, he's helped me (and probably many others on here) with questions on SO, and he comes across as such a nice guy.
In Java I millisecond instead.
Another interesting post about the weirdness of calendars.