[ILUG] [OT] RE: Unix date "IST " collisions

[Caolan McNamara]

On 17-Oct-99 David Slocombe wrote:
>Sorry, if this has come up before, but I was looking at your mswordview
>pages and noticed a date which used "IST" and said to myself "Oh, where is
>this guy? maybe he's local!" (I'm in India, actually in Bombay today), and
>then I realized that you are in Ireland. 
>
>
>Well, IST certainly makes sense for Ireland. But IST is what is used here
>in India too, 5.5 hours away! So which country is non-standard? Certainly
>led to brief confusion in my case! :-)

Well this is an interesting one, there is a collision, but its not just an
obvious one between both Ireland and India beginning with I. Check out
http://www.timeanddate.com/time/abbreviations.html

We get IST for Irish Summer Time, while on the other chart I is a prefix 
meaning UTC (universal coordinated time) + 9 hours, which is where India
is sitting. This would also mean that B is a prefix for UTC + 2, which would 
mean to me that if we go west of Ireland by 1/24 of a planet revolution that 
during the summer a unix machine there would also claim to be using BST, even 
though that is usually British Summer Time. Though I don't think there any 
actual landmass in that position. There are other collisions between CST, EST
MST, HST and PST, though some of those might align on top of eachother handily,
it looks like a complete mess altogether.

Hmm, seems to me that I(rish)SummerTime is a bit out of order really. I'd make 
the case for getting rid of Summer Time altogether :-), as its the easiest 
solution. 

C.

Real Life: Caolan McNamara           *  Doing: MSc in HCI
Work: Caolan.McNamara at ul.ie          *  Phone: +353-86-8790257
URL: http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan    *  Sig: an oblique strategy
Do we need holes?