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in reply to Re^8: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
in thread Daylight saving time in my region should be...

Right. When's the last time you saw a brochure/ad/service agreement that said "We are open from 9-5, whichever timezone you happen to be in"? On the contrary, here in the US at least, it's much more common for such things to say "we are open from 9-5 Eastern time. [If you don't live in the Eastern time zone, you'll just have to do the math accordingly.]" This might not be improved much if at all under the above proposal, but it certainly wouldn't be any worse.

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Re^10: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Dec 06, 2011 at 21:07 UTC
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're saying: It won't make a difference most of the time, so I'll ignore the times when it does make a difference.
[reply]
      Correct me if I'm wrong

      Gladly. I think it comes down to the following:

      1. It eliminates ambiguity. 0900-1700 has exactly one meaning, globally.
      2. It eliminates the need to do timezone math. (I.e. They say they're open 9-5. What do I have to add/subtract to turn that into my time?)
      Whether these differences are huge or minor, and for whom, will depend on various factors, but I believe that they'll be very significant much more than they'll be insignificant.

      I think one test of whether the proposal would work is to look at how the scheme is already being used. There are organizations already who run exclusively on UTC. How do they fare?

[reply]

        This might not be improved much if at all under the above proposal, but it certainly wouldn't be any worse.

        You're now saying UTC would be way better (not merely "not any worse") in this case. And I agree in this specific case. "1400-2300 from dates X to Y, 1300-2200 the rest of the time" is a tad better than "9-5 Eastern".

        It comes down to how often one has to specify dates along with times. Of course, that stops being an issue if daylight tracking is also eliminated, but there are good arguments to track daylight.

        Note: Your argument rests on the premise that UTC eliminates math is true. It's not true unless you only deal with people who also live somewhere that abandoned time zones.

        Update: Added second and third paragraph.

[reply]

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