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AFKTrack Update - Timezones


Arthmoor

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Just a heads up that the AFKTrack software has been given timezone support. If you log in and notice that times on things are way off, you can adjust your timezone in your profile now to fit your local timezone.

If you happen to notice an appropriate timezone for your location does not exist, let me know. They're easy enough to add with the way the timezone libraries work.

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I just login and couldn't find the correct timezone and I usually have GMT +1 Copenhagen, Stockholm.

Although, the GMT +1 timezone was there, but had a little misleading location as the GMT +1 timezone was for France/Germany/Spain.  Which I think is wrong at least for France and Spain since both countries are more or less South or South West of the UK.

Also, I haven't seen any site that uses GMT instead of UK for a timezone.

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The timezone can't tell you every single country it covers, there's too many, especially in the EU.

GMT is the standard abbreviation for Greenwich Mean Time. It's what time has been going by for eons now. In any case, GMT+1 is definitely correct for France, Germany, and Spain according to all of the time sources I was looking through.

Unless there's timezone names that get used in the EU like they do here with "Mountain Time" etc. I'd have preferred to use those if they existed but I couldn't find anything.

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Maybe so, but all web sources I referenced are still addressing it as GMT, so I assumed that's what people are familiar with when picking the one they're in.

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UTC is like the 24 hour clock, a bastard stepchild that some folks equate to the worlds Military Services.  

 

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Yep. Seems like one of those things that just didn't need to be renamed since UTC = GMT anyway. Sort of like how PC types are pushing BCE/CE as replacements for BC/AD in calendar dating.

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Whether anybody likes it or not, GMT was abandoned in the '70s. Same with frequency in cycles per second. My grandfather used to say "It hurts to say Hertz." When even 61-year-old official "Old Farts" such as me find references to GMT to be anachronistic....

36 minutes ago, lmstearn said:

From WickedPedia:

Ewww. The second part of that assertion wants a reference.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Mean_Time instead, where a suitable reference is cited:

Quote

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. GMT was formerly used as the international civil time standard, now superseded in that function by Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Today GMT is considered equivalent to UTC for UK civil purposes (but this is not formalised) and for navigation is considered equivalent to UT1 (the modern form of mean solar time at 0° longitude); these two meanings can differ by up to 0.9 s. Consequently, the term GMT should not be used for precise purposes .[1]

1. Hilton and McCarthy 2013, p. 231–2.

Computers and computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, physicists, et alia use UTC.

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12 hours ago, Arthmoor said:

Sort of like how PC types are pushing BCE/CE as replacements for BC/AD in calendar dating.

If you mean the intellectually aware, then please don't confuse with Personal Computers.

BC/AD is another Medieval Latin anachronistic dating system based upon the Dionysian papal calendars. Not only is it offensive to Protestants (full disclosure, the faith in which I was raised) and many other faiths in the rest of the world, it's archaeologically and technically incorrect. So it was replaced some 400 years ago by Vulgar Era, and 300+ years ago by Common Era.

Computers and computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, physicists, et alia use BCE/CE.

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I suppose in further full disclosure, et alia includes licensed amateur and commercial radio operators (my early training), and airplane pilots (my later training). Although in both cases we have a tendency to say Zulu rather than UTC.

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Edited the Wikipedia UTC article- but couldn't directly copy the ref over as the UTC article uses a reflist.

Are we using GMT precisely? Is it only hours and not milliseconds we're worried about?

Common Era. Vulgar Era. It's all so terribly scientific- so get used to it. :P

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1 hour ago, lmstearn said:

Edited the Wikipedia UTC article- but couldn't directly copy the ref over as the UTC article uses a reflist.

Are we using GMT precisely? Is it only hours and not milliseconds we're worried about?

Common Era. Vulgar Era. It's all so terribly scientific- so get used to it. :P

I see your Wikipedia edit. The community thanks you. Although somebody will probably come along and munge it some more.

I'd always thought the first letter in your name here was an 'I' (verbalized in my head as "I'm stern"), but on Wikipedia it's "L".

I've gotten out of the habit of fixing Wikipedia, where I'm "DayDreamer", "Day dreamer", and "Day Dreamer" (pre-dating single-sign-on) -- but moved my main "Daydreamer" edits to camelcase "WilliamAllenSimpson" and then "William Allen Simpson" back in 2005 (or 2006?) as the software was updated over time. Some years later somebody else came along and made a lot of edits under the Daydreamer user on the Greek version (where it was supposed to be in greek letters), then claimed the global Daydreamer single-sign-on. Sneaky and annoying.

Anyway, Latin vulgar originally meant common. As in those non-religious elitists who claimed the Earth circled the Sun, rather than the true believers who knew otherwise!

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{Blah Alert!} Here's one: Since most of us this side of the Golden Age reside somewhere in the vicinity of the twilight zone, then BC = Before Crepusculation?

Not a word quite yet, but it's gaining traction- see this 'ere fine article at Reddit.

If not the Twilight Zone- then the Twilight Tone?

Spoiler

 

 

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4 hours ago, DayDreamer said:

Whether anybody likes it or not, GMT was abandoned in the '70s. Same with frequency in cycles per second. My grandfather used to say "It hurts to say Hertz." When even 61-year-old official "Old Farts" such as me find references to GMT to be anachronistic....

 

Whether this is true or not is irrelevant when every common reference point - including the Wikipedia chart I was using - is referencing GMT and every forum I'm aware of references timezones in GMT for when they offer them to users, I see no reason NOT to offer timezones in GMT to everyone on the tracker.

4 hours ago, DayDreamer said:

If you mean the intellectually aware, then please don't confuse with Personal Computers.

BC/AD is another Medieval Latin anachronistic dating system based upon the Dionysian papal calendars. Not only is it offensive to Protestants (full disclosure, the faith in which I was raised) and many other faiths in the rest of the world, it's archaeologically and technically incorrect. So it was replaced some 400 years ago by Vulgar Era, and 300+ years ago by Common Era.

Computers and computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, physicists, et alia use BCE/CE.

I think you'll find that you're quite wrong here and/or living in a very small bubble of influence. Common usage in the real world is still very much on BC/AD. If it had been replaced 300 years ago, we would not even be having this discussion. I'm quite well aware of what types of sites have begun pressing this into use, but a political discussion on the subject is off limits here anyway so I will go no further on this.

Suffice it to say, I am not going to go through and change the code to say UTC instead of GMT when they mean literally the same thing anyway and most people don't actually know what UTC is without having to get it explained first.

Oh, and for the record, I find it insulting that you'd assume that one only uses GMT or BC/AD because they're stupid.

@lmstearn No, we're not concerned with millisecond precision here, just with hours and perhaps daylight savings info, which is why there's a number of odd selections to make in the timezone list.

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15 hours ago, Arthmoor said:

Whether this is true or not is irrelevant when every common reference point - including the Wikipedia chart I was using - is referencing GMT and every forum I'm aware of references timezones in GMT for when they offer them to users, I see no reason NOT to offer timezones in GMT to everyone on the tracker.

I disagree, as it is relevant.  Check these links and you'll see that both forums/sites are using UTC rather than GMT.

https://www.phpbb.com/community/

https://forum.sovngarde.se/realm/index.php

Although, vBulletin are still using GMT so I guess that it depends about what forum software one are using.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forum.php (scroll down to the bottom)

I also want to ask a question about GMT vs UTC.  Does GMT only show 12 hour (AM or PM) while UTC can show both times 12 hour/24 hour?

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Look, I'm going to lock this topic now before this escalates to stupidity and beyond. This post was meant to announce the support. Not spark a dumb debate about UTC vs GMT (good lord, they're identical for Christ sake). It seems people can't handle that for some reason though. Drop it already.

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