The seconds and time zones

[Sarah Reichelt]

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 10:36 PM, Bernard Devlin <bdrunrev at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hang on :-)  I seem to remember Jacques saying recently that she'd
> found that the internet date was more reliable across time zones than
> storing seconds.


It all depends what you want :-)

The seconds translates to a date & time that depends on the time zone
settings of the computer doing the conversion, so the same number will
translate differently around the world. This may be what you need, but
it is not always useful.

I used to operate a series of kiosks in multiple time zones across
Australia. They would send their reports back with time stamps. If I
had used seconds, then the times would have been altered by the time
they got to me, but I needed to know the times as they were at the
kiosk.

e.g. if a kiosk in Western Australia has a problem at 4 pm, when this
gets to me, it gets translated to 6 pm. It was at 6 pm my time, but if
I have to ring up someone on site, I need to tell them that the
problem was at 4, not 6. So for me, using the seconds was not useful.

The internet date is one alternative, but it doesn't account for
daylight savings.

I ended up using my own time stamp routines, with an AppleScript
routine for working out daylight savings.

To avoid all these issues, there is an enhancement request in the Rev
QA <http://quality.runrev.com/qacenter/show_bug.cgi?id=4949> asking
for "the universal seconds" which would be a number of seconds that
was not affected in any way by the time zone of the converting
computer.

Cheers,
Sarah