[tz] Utah may drop DST

Paul_Koning at dell.com Paul_Koning at dell.com
Thu Oct 16 19:26:02 UTC 2014


On Oct 16, 2014, at 2:42 PM, Zoidsoft <zoidsoft at gmail.com> wrote:

> ...
> No, I'm suggesting that we collect data from systems that show user manual adjustments.  There are many different uses for this data and I wasn't focusing on the use of current data, but of past time stamps.  I'm a developer of software using astronomical calculations to accurately represent the sky and I have done this with my devices when they are wrong.  Of course this will not solve the problem of future time zone info, but since it is the future, these are always guesses anyway and such info will only be as reliable as the political structure.  If such a system could be perfected, we could at least take some of the workload off Paul for time changes up to the present.

But while those changes are ongoing work, they aren’t the hard part.  The hard part is the mad scramble when a rule is changed with little lead time.  Also, it is the future changes that matter most; the historic stuff is usually quite accurate for recent years, and less and less critical for dates further into the past.

Note that future entries are not “always guesses”.  Just the opposite: they are guesses only in a few cases where we’ve had insufficient information.  Apart from those unusual cases, the future rules reflect the known published laws or regulations.  Of course, those are subject to change and we don’t know about that until it is announced, but even so the term “guesses” is quite inaccurate.

	paul



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