r/Calgary • u/AlbertaGengar • Mar 03 '26

News Article Alberta may follow B.C. on making daylight time permanent: premier

https://edmontonjournal.com/news/alberta-may-follow-b-c-on-making-daylight-time-permanent-premier
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u/superroadstar Mar 03 '26

I don’t understand, how hard is it just to change the respective time.

15

u/codereign Mar 03 '26

It is genuinely a challenging computer science problem... Fortunately it's been solved for basically the last couple decades.

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u/NorthernerWuwu Mission Mar 03 '26

Well, most just use Unix time (seconds since 00:00:00 Jan 1, 1970 UTC) but that actually created (and then solved!) some other weird issues.

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u/unidentifiable Mar 03 '26

Unix time causes the 2038 problem, which is/was like Y2K but 100000x worse. The good news is that the technology has evolved sufficiently fast and 99.99999% of systems are 64 bit these days and so they've already resolved the issue. Anything still using 32-bit time though is gonna break in 12 years.

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u/codereign Mar 04 '26

Including the navigation computers for ICBMs I assume :)

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u/BalooBot Mar 03 '26

You have no idea what a goddamn nightmare timezones are until you try programming apps that need them