3 Jan
2018
3 Jan
'18
8:42 a.m.
A lingering gripe that explains my latent
anti-Americanism goes back to
when I had to support Uniplus 2.2/2.4 (sorta SysIII-ish) on the WICAT boxes
in here in Australia. At installation time, we had to express the time
offset as hours *west* of GMT; this left me with a lingering belief that
Americans didn't want to be perceived as being backwards (yeah. it saved an
entire keystroke out of the dozens that were otherwise required).
But east postive is an artifact of north up. I remember Australian
souvenir shops selling maps on "MacQuarrie's corrective projection",
in which south is up. In fact this orientation was not uncommon in
Europe between medieval maps that really were oriented, with east up,
and later convention that put north up and shoved Australia down under.
Surely an Aussie would prefer south up and west positive!
Doug
3 Jan
3 Jan
8:19 p.m.
New subject: OT: American Culture
On Tue, Jan 2, 2018, at 21:42, Doug McIlroy wrote:
Who says right is positive? Anyway, there's a natural reason to want east to be
positive in this case completely independent of maps - so that your timezone offset is the
number that you add to UTC to get the current local time, rather than subtracting.
Incidentally, the V6 code for ctime has the number of *seconds* west of UTC as an *int* -
a situation rather worse for parts of Australia than simply requiring a negative number.
I'm not exactly sure what AUSAM does. The archive shows ctime.s (its own
implementation) with "timezone" as zero, with a note saying to set it to
1*60.*60. for daylight saving. This suggests that the time was simply maintained with an
epoch of 1970-01-01 00:00 AEST, but the time(II) manpage says GMT.
A lingering
gripe that explains my latent anti-Americanism goes back to
when I had to support Uniplus 2.2/2.4 (sorta SysIII-ish) on the WICAT boxes
in here in Australia. At installation time, we had to express the time
offset as hours *west* of GMT; this left me with a lingering belief that
Americans didn't want to be perceived as being backwards (yeah. it saved an
entire keystroke out of the dozens that were otherwise required).
But east postive is an artifact of north up.
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