[TUHS] OT: American Culture

[TUHS] OT: American Culture

[Doug McIlroy]

> 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

[TUHS] OT: American Culture

[Random832]

On Tue, Jan 2, 2018, at 21:42, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> > 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.

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.

[TUHS] OT: American Culture

[Warner Losh]

On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 9:48 AM, Tony Finch <dot at dotat.at> wrote:

> Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> >
> > A thing that nobody has mentioned, and for which I can't find a
> > reference easily: didn't System V have time zone offsets the wrong way
> > round?  I have some recollection from about 1988.
>
> It's enshrined in POSIX but I believe it goes back earlier than that.
> http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/tzset.html
>
> As I understand it, POSIX TZ offsets are the wrong way round because it
> was more convenient to omit the sign on the TZ offsets, and because Unix
> comes from America that meant no sign -> west, negative -> east.
>

There's also a time interval measurement convention from the high precision
time keeping world that has negative offsets 'forwards' and positive
offsets 'backwards' which this matches. It sure was confusing to me when I
first encountered it when the time scientists were telling me the
measurements were backwards...

Warner
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[TUHS] OT: American Culture

[Tony Finch]

Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
>
> A thing that nobody has mentioned, and for which I can't find a
> reference easily: didn't System V have time zone offsets the wrong way
> round?  I have some recollection from about 1988.

It's enshrined in POSIX but I believe it goes back earlier than that.
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/tzset.html

As I understand it, POSIX TZ offsets are the wrong way round because it
was more convenient to omit the sign on the TZ offsets, and because Unix
comes from America that meant no sign -> west, negative -> east.

Tony.
-- 
f.anthony.n.finch  <dot at dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/  -  I xn--zr8h punycode
Rockall, Malin: Cyclonic, becoming mainly northeast later , 5 to 7, increasing
gale 8 or severe gale 9 later in Rockall. Very rough or high. Rain or showers.
Moderate or poor, occasionally good.

[TUHS] OT: American Culture

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Wednesday,  3 January 2018 at 17:49:31 -0500, Norman Wilson wrote:
> Random832 (a good year for randomness, that):
>
>>   Who says right is positive?
>
> Good question.

Time here is round 14:00 UTC+11.  UTC time is 3:00, so UTC+11 = 14:00
makes sense to me.  UTC-11 = 14:00 doesn't.

A thing that nobody has mentioned, and for which I can't find a
reference easily: didn't System V have time zone offsets the wrong way
round?  I have some recollection from about 1988.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
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[TUHS] OT: American Culture

[Norman Wilson]

Random832 (a good year for randomness, that):

  Who says right is positive?

=====

Good question.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Left-handed

[TUHS] OT: American Culture

[arnold]

Yes, this really is OT ...

> The problem is too many American',
> (particularly younger ones that experience our 'excellent' educational
> system), have often never travelled that much and experiences other places,
> cultures or social norms.

This is very true. I discovered this when, at the age of 18, I came to spend
a year studying in Israel. At that point I realized that Americans are
terribly parochial.  ("Whaddaya mean you don't speak English?!?  Whaddaya
mean I can't get a hmaburger here?" etc.)

> Which brings me to >>my complaint<<.   We, as American's, project so much
> about 'us' via TV.  The said truth is most Americans are not like what they
> see on TV

It's worse than just TV (and movies). It's huge parts of the culture. We
moved to Israel 20 years ago, and on the highways are signs for: Ace
Hardware, Toys 'R' Us, Office Depot, McDonald's ...  UPS and FedEx trucks
are common sights.  As well as the culture, many of the values (that
I personally moved to Israel to get away from) have seeped in as well.
"Cultural Pollution" wouldn't be too strong a term.

> When I run into things like what you just described (and I seem to run into
> then most often with MicroSoft based tools), I think to myself, it must
> have been a cold day in Redmond, WA and some programmer did not want to
> make an effort to do make her/his solution really general ;-)

I suspect that said programmer didn't even know enough to think about
making it general.

FWIW,

Arnold

[TUHS] OT: American Culture

[Clem Cole]

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On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 7:15 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> 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).


​Dave I'm not so sure it's about being perceived as forward or backwards -
its just shallow, provincial and often lazy because the program did not
really knowing any better.  The problem is too many American',
(particularly younger ones that experience our 'excellent' educational
system), have often never travelled that much and experiences other places,
cultures or social norms.

I admit this is extreme example, but about 8 years ago, my daughter had a
friend, who was approx 16 at the time, that we took to the big city
(Boston) to play in a orchestra concert at Symphony Hall when they both
were named 'All State' for the instruments.   I don't remember why said
friends family did not/could not come - but it made sense and we said we
would take her with us.  On the drive in-town, we were talking with her and
I discovered that she had never gone to Boston before ... ever -- she was
excited to see it (we live less than 1hr North mind you.  Note quite the
boon-docks).  She had not gone to a 'Bo Sox' game or anything.   Never went
to the Science Museum, etc.   She grew up in her town (mind you happy) and
using TV as her window to world.

Which brings me to >>my complaint<<.   We, as American's, project so much
about 'us' via TV.  The said truth is most Americans are not like what they
see on TV [e.g. Rice-A-Roni is made up!!, Benihana's is an American
invention, and "the big yellow school bus" is dirty/noisy and usually
without seat belts].   Sadly, many Americans do not know any better - queue
the famous quote about never under-estimating the taste of the American
public.  But think about what folks outside the US see and think?   Many of
my European friends in particular all want to visit NYC.  [I tell them all,
visit Boston or Philadelphia first if you can.   Those cities are much more
representative of America then LA, NYC or Dallas; if for no other reason
they are more 'European' in feel].

When I run into things like what you just described (and I seem to run into
then most often with MicroSoft based tools), I think to myself, it must
have been a cold day in Redmond, WA and some programmer did not want to
make an effort to do make her/his solution really general ;-)

Clem



FWIW: Not only did we take my kids all over the world as children, we
brought the world to them by sponsoring kids from all sorts of countries.
But I fear, my wife and I are less the norm then I would wish.
ᐧ
ᐧ
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