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Subject: half-hour time zones
From: Paul Hirose (paulhirose@XXX.XXX)
Date: Fri Nov 02 2001 - 21:44:40 EST
Anyone know why some places have time offsets not an integral number
of hours from Greenwich? Like Newfoundland. According to my atlas (a
few years old), standard time there is some hours and 30 minutes
behind Greenwich.
I don't see any advantage to such an odd time zone, and several
disadvantages. For example, I've heard that some GPS receivers won't
allow fractional hour offsets for the local time display. And my
watch, which has a secondary time zone, is the same way.
Years ago I wrote a program which had to know the local time offset
from Greenwich, and it accepted any offset, down to decimal seconds if
you wanted. No arbitrary limitations for me! But I can sympathize with
programmers who decline to cater to (or are ignorant of) weird time
zones.
I'd like to hear how Newfoundland got that time zone.
--paulhirose@XXX.XXX (Paul Hirose)
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