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One Step Away from Changing Daylight Savings Time
An anonymous reader writes "Congressional leaders from both parties have signed off on a proposal that will change daylight savings time in the United States as early as this year. All that is left is a signoff by President Bush. If the proposed solution becomes law, DST will be extended two months, from March to November. With many IT applications relying on accurate time information and many having automatic adjustments for DST, how will the IT world handle this change? And with the proposal reportedly taking effect this year, is there enough time to implement change?"
The purpose of DST is not to remind you when to check your batteries. If it works for that too, fine; but that is something extra, not the reason for DST. Support or oppose the DST change for REAL reasons.
From the article:
For years, the International Association of Fire Chiefs has framed a widespread public information campaign around Daylight Saving Time, reminding people to change the batteries in their smoke and carbon monoxide detectors when they change their clocks. The last weekend in November is too late for the reminder, fire officials say.
It's Y2K all over again. :)
Hopefully the consulting companies will be able to sell the scare and raise the billing rates!
Jobs!!!! Jobs!!!!
How about we have our 'puters set for GMT?
Seriously-Many applications have DST deep in the code. I can see the folks that develop things like the Netbackup scheduler (and others) to be freaking. Didn't they just fix bpsched? (again?)
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
"How will the IT world handle this change?"
I'll tell you how they'll handle it. They'll handle it the same way they handled Y2K, and that's by offering more jobs for people like me. The increase in demand for employees posessing the special skills needed to fix this problem will subsequently raise the expected salary for software engineers and IT professionals. Under these premises, I'd say this gives us something to toast and look forward to.
I hope that Bush doesn't screw this up by not signing off.
--
I'm not a troll; I'm just a skeptic.
Falun Dafa is good!
What I'd prefer is that they passed a law making the hours between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm shorter.
US should reaffirm its innovation and move out of the old systems, like the metric one. They should break up the day into 100 hours instead of stupid 24. Potential benefits:
- Easier to calculate amount of hours worked.
- Working 9 to 5 becomes a breeze.
- With minimum wage tied up to the hour everyone could be rich and retire early.
I don't think it will be a huge deal to patch all of the software out there that relies on this. The main problem will be things like VCRs, TVs, watches and such that change the time for you automatically.
It's nice to see the American government coming up with a solution like this instead of concentrating on and suggesting alternate energies.
Really warms the ol' cockles of the heart.
I used to live in a non-DST state. And you know what? It was great, not having to wake up an hour earlier or go to bed an hour earlier, and not have one or two time-keeping devices with the wrong time a month later. It was a real headache this year because I had to travel, and keeping track of time zones is hard enough without worrying about DST.
Heck, I'm not a believer in time zones, either. Let's adopt one time standard and adjust schedules accordingly. I don't need to be tricked into waking up in the morning.
Badly. No.
Score yourself at home. How did you do?
We have these nifty fucking things called ELECTRIC LIGHTS now. You can use them to, like, see when it's dark. It's really fucking amazing.
We have this nifty concept called "conservativism," or not wasting electricity, money, and natural resources now. That's the point behind DST: using less electricity and benefitting because of it.
Area IV, here I am
...other than mine, without permission?!
This is yet one other sign that we need to shoot lobbyists that approach D.C. as if they were a direct Al Queda attack. This is a crackpot idea that not only screws with all the time-sensitive software (right down to our operating systems and their time zone support) but also fucks with the world agreement on such use of DST.
I'm in Indiana, where we have just approved the use of DST for the majority of the state that never observed it (Arizona and Hawaii are similar holdouts). And NOW some politico-corporate lackey wants to change things just for business...never mind that you aren't saving a damn bit of daylight in November, unless their laws affect the Earth's tilt and orbital position to give us more sun than we're to have at that time.
There's no reason for this...and the cost for changing everything will make the costs of Y2K seem like a pittance. Problem is, I don't know who would profit from it. Once I do find out, I hope they're shot. A lot.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
"Surprisingly enough, daylight-saving time was thought up by Benjamin Franklin, not drunken voters. According to http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/, it seems that one day Benjy got bored and wrote a little something called An Economical Project. It was an essay mostly about "himself, his love of thrift, his scientific papers and his passion for playing chess until the wee hours of the morning then sleeping until midday," and it was meant to be a joke.
However, an Englishman named William Willett (how can you take someone with that name seriously? Come on!) was apparently too dense to realize that Franklin was joking. Therefore, he thought it would be a novel idea to set clocks back for 20 minutes on each Sunday in April, and then turn them back on the Sundays in September. Eventually, daylight-saving time came to be as we now know it."
Taken from here
"What is the answer?" (Silence) "In that case, what is the question?" --Gertrude Stein
This isn't a problem; simply get Hallmark to create yet another holiday. Something catchy like, "Don't burn your house down" day to help people remember to change their batteries (maybe even with a pocket to hold replacement batteries).
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
For most *nix systems, look in /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo for zone definition files. If you're lucky (or have Solaris), there's a src directory in there.
You'll find a README file with a reference to a place with updated zone files.
On the other hand you could try to roll your own like I did for Belo Horizonte and edit the rules in one of the source files (I would think "northamerica" for the US ;)
Do a man zic for more info on compiling and then distributing to other systems.
This comment does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the author.
Now if there were only a way to automagically delete all occurrences of the word "automagically." What are you: Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer? Does our world frighten and confuse you? Your cell phone updates from the network because of software. There aren't little demons in there doing it.
But earlier in the morning I can't enjoy it- I'm at work. By placing it at the end of the day, I can still have some time out in the sunlight after work ends. There's a lot of activities people enjoy that are difficult to do in the dark. For people with seasonal depression, this is especially important. If you were to kill DST, you'd probably see a raise in people taking depression medication and suicides that year.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
We have these nifty fucking things called ELECTRIC LIGHTS now
Thing is, I think the point of this bill is to conserve energy dude...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Daylight Saving
I always post this when the topic comes up. I'm a fan of Franklin and really enjoy reading this.
More
What an idiotic idea!
I understand the theory that by changing people's work habits relative to the solar day, we may be saving some energy. I think the reality of it is rather less impressive than the theory, and certainly doesn't justify the expense and hassle, but it's undoubtedly there.
Too bad changing DST is the stupidest way to do it. As has been mentioned before, DST impacts way more than just work schedules. It's buried deep in various applications where it doesn't belong. It's hard-coded into embedded systems where it can't be changed. It's stuck on old software installations that will never see an upgrade. Changing DST is bad enough, but a half-assed mix of new-DST machines and old-DST machines is just a recipe for disaster.
If the government really wants to save energy by changing work habits, there are enormously better ways to do it. Tax credits for corporations that stagger their workers' start times by a significant margin would save way more energy than this DST nonsense, and it wouldn't have the unpleasant ancillary effects that changing the definition of time of day would have. Unimaginably large (you can look for the true numbers as well as I) amounts of gasoline are wasted in rush-hour traffic across the nation. Tax credits for starting 1/3 of employees 2hr earlier than normal and 1/3 2hr later would motivate employers to do it, and reducing the time people spend idling their cars on the freeways, or worse, driving in stop-and-go traffic, would save tons of fuel.
Tax credits (or some other incentive) makes people happy because the government's not forcing anyone to do anything they don't want to. It would have very few unintended consequences. And it would save many times more energy.
The reasoning that leads to a change in DST is just tortured. The government wants people going to work at a different time. So rather than ask (bribe, punish/bribe, whatever) businesses to employ people at different hours, they change the meaning of 8am, and screw up the entire country. Where's the logic in that?!
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
The purpose of DST is not to control when it gets dark. The purpose is to control when it gets LIGHT. People don't mind doing stuff after dark in the evening (much), but few enjoy getting up in the dark or wasting daylight by sleeping through it.
To say nothing of the energy necessary to light the dark hours. Why do you think they implemented Daylight Savings in the first place? Have you seen the price of oil lately?
Personally I think we all should all just use zulu time and let businesses and schools etc. set their own hours. Of course we'd have to stop thinking of 12 as noon and midnight... but then we could learn true times based on longitude instead.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I believe libc/zoneinfo for Linux systems would be able to handle this well enough as there are provisions for changing dst settings without affecting time in the past. pwt (pacific war time) during WWII is a good example of this and zoneinfo handles it correctly.
If we're going to be in Daylight Savings Time 9 months out of the year, they should call Daylight Savings Time "Standard" time, instead, and change Standard Time to "Daylight Wasting Time" (DWT).
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Actually, the Windows patch should be very small and easy to implement. Time Zone definitions are stored in the registry. Part of that data says when the DST changeover happens.
Blessed AZ. Giving the finger to you time switchers the world over.
I agree no DST is awesome.
Except that this moves the time window to include more daylight hours, so you don't need to have your lights on. At least that is the theory.
Except that in practice, I have never, ever seen a place of business actually turn off the lights and depend on what comes through the window.
Quite the opposite, in fact - In rooms with a lot of windows ("Front" offices, for example), in the morning when too much sun comes in at a low angle, people draw the shades and turn on desk lamps in addition to the overhead lighting.
Personally, I think the clocks should stay constant
Agreed. If businesses can save a penny by changing when the workdway begins and ends, they most certainly will, without the need for our Nanny-in-DC to shove the idea down our throats.
In the early 1970's, the USA tried to make daylight saving times go year round to save energy. I was a kid then, and remember waiting for the school bus in the dark. An outcry from parents about safety (deservedly so, in my opinion) caused them to quickly rescind it. History repeats itself, and this attempt may be the "farce" part if parents speak up again. Hopefully some kids won't die in the dark and make it the "tragedy" part.
Sweden changed the DST period few years ago. As far as I remember there were no big problems.
:-)
Microsoft changed it through some Windows patch, and *nix people tend to fix things themself
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/720363 3
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I HATE non-DST time. The winter days are already too short, working standard time in an office means you go to work when it's dark AND you leave work when it's almost dark. No time to go to the park, race RC cars, nothing. It's like living in perpeptual night and I hate it.
Everyone complained a lot about how inconveniect it was going to be, but everything went smoothly.
For my part, I was mainly working with Windows boxes. There was a hot-fix from Microsoft that came out some time before to let Windows know what was going on - and not much else needed to be done.
Believing something doesn't make it true. Not believing something doesn't make it false.
Wow, it's pedant day on slashdot! The point, Captain Obvious, is to provide the most daylight during waking hours for the average diurnal person.
And here DST is all screwed up. We'd need a DST from May to September or something. Currently DST forces us to wake up when the sky's all black.
Why did we do it, you ask? Pressures from the US.
I doubt Mexicans would want to accept a schedule that only makes things only worse. But as usual... we have to obey the all-powerful US otherwise we suffer the consequences.
If Bush wants to sign this to save some bills, why doesn't he stop wasting money in IRAQ. Sheesh.
DST is already bad enough from an Orthodox Jewish perspective, because we our holidays and sabbaths start at nightfall, and this makes "night" exceedingly late for much of the year.
:(
The specific case which shows the problem is the Passover Seder, which has to begin after nightfall, and there's about 2 hours of stuff before eating. Right now, about half the time, Passover falls during ST, and starts at a reasonable hour. With this change, it'll be much harder to keep children up to participate.
-David Barak
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
...and abolish DST altogehter. For much of Canada DST makes no sense anyways--except perhaps in the most souther parts of the country like Windsor. Why do Canadians have to "save daylight" in the summer? WE HAVE SO DAMN MUCH OF IT ALREADY!
I don't live all that far north--maybe around 300km north of the 49th parallel. Even after you set your clock ahead the sun rises before 7AM--right now it rises here before 6AM. In Saskatoon (they do not change their clocks) it'll get light at 5AM...in either case I'll still be asleep for another 30-90 minutes so I'm not going to care.
Where DST REALLY peeves me off is at bedtime. I have to rise by 7AM so I like to be in bed by 11PM...but it's DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME so its still F'in light outside! Let it get dark before 11PM please--thanks but I don't need any more day--it is long enough. A lot of people in fairly norhtern cities like Edmonton will thank you--and people in Whitehorse and Yellowknife won't even notice the difference since the sun won't set again for another few weeks anyways.
So here is what I think Canada should do: Instead of all the expense and confusion around changing DST, or the similar confusion around keeping it the way we have it when the US will be different, we should just go to standard time and STAY there at the point when the US changed their DST. Sure we will still be different from the US, but it'll be the least painful solution because:
* Even though we'll be out of sync with the US we won't have people getting confused when the US TV programmes remind people to change the clock at a different time than Canadians would have to.
* There is data suggesting that the loss of sleep on the first Sunday of April due to DST is responsible for increasing the number of injury and fatality accidents on the following Monday. Abolishing DST would eliminate that risk.
* Since there are already parts of the world that do not do DST all current electronics and computers support NOT adjusting the clocks. Changing DST would be expensive because all those systems would need to change too.
* It'll finally be dark enough to fall asleep at night in the summer!
I've always thought that DST was backwards anyways--if we moved ahead for the winter then it wouldn't be pitch black by dinner time--it would be totally dark at 7PM instead of 6. I dunno...the whole concept of DST doesn't seem worth it at all to me anyways.
In 2000 for the Sydney Olympics. Start of DST was moved forward about a month. No big deal computer wise - just a few registry tweaks (windows) and manual editing on Netware and Unix. Repeat - no-one reported any major issues - the world still turned.
In Brazil, we call DST "Summer Time" (Horário de Verão). Sometimes we jokingly refer to the Standard Time as "Winter Time" (especially during the weeks before/after the switch).
:)
Since in this proposal the non-DST time would last only three months (Dec-Feb), you might as well call that "Winter Time".
The filesystem is the package manager
You Americans are in fact lucky. To put things in perspective: in Brazil the Congress changes the DST rules *every year*.
DST is a stupid, utterly assinine idea and is Ben Franklin's major evidence of being human and prone to occasional, stunning attacks of stupid. Why set the frigging clock ahead or back when all you have to do is designate earlier times: "our summer business hours are 7am to 4pm" would accomplish the same thing without having solar noon arrive at 1:00pm by the clock. Arizona has the right idea.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
DST is there to make factory workers get up an hour earlier, without the government having to admit that it's telling everybody to get up earlier in the morning. Rather than messing with the clocks, they *could* just tell the TV stations to run earlier schedules, and most Americans would obey....
There's no reason to set the clock to some other time - during Standard Time, the sun is at its highest at 12 Noon in the middle of the timezone area, and you could just as well leave it there.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Tzedit.exe from Microsoft will allow you to create your custom designed time zone registry entries. One thing is they MUST be within 12 hours of the system's GMT (UNC) value or they will not load.
The point, Captain Obvious, is to provide the most daylight during waking hours for the average diurnal person.
And having different work schedules depending on season is somehow inconcievable, and changing the actual time for the entire country is, somehow, a better approach.
I mean, change the 9to5 for 8to4? WHAT? NEVER! Lets have all clocks in the country changed instead, duh!
You can't take the sky from me...
I'm now in Australia (where they also have DST), working on a project that involves entering important patient information, which can occur around the clock.
In the course of writing the handler for DST, we came to realise that any standard UI widget that only lets you enter a date and a time is fundamentally flawed for dealing with critically important dates and DST. This is because every possible time that occurs between 1am and 2am on the "fall back" night (in the current system) actually occurs twice that night, an hour apart from each other, and there's no way to disambiguate which one it is given only the date and the time.
I suspect this is not accounted for at all in a LOT of systems. We haven't come across any kind of standard way for the user to indicate whether they mean 1:30am before the "fall back" (for instance) or 1:30am after.
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
I'd be so happy if "they" would give up the daylight saving time. All my clocks are running UTC and I'm just calculating the local time on the fly since years. It's much easier than setting all my watches and clocks all the time. In the broadcasting business nobody cares about any time offsets anyway. It's all about UTC.
The funny thing is, that the switchover is not happening at the same date worldwide. That makes the whole problem more difficult.
It's confusing enough for me, that for example LA is nine (or ten!) hours "back".
You know your government is out of control... when it institutes daylight savings time in the first place, and you know its really out of control when it starts randomly changing when the arbitrary change occurs.
... we are so powerful we can change time and if you ants don't like it you can stick it kind of attitude.
Time and time zones are kind of a creation of governments, especially the British empire, which is why GMT is where it is. Time zones are OK things, especially versus the chaos that they imposed order on.
But daylight savings time is a complete abomination. If the time when kids go to school or you go to work doesn't jive well with the Sun, then change the time you go to school or work and don't F**K with time itself. Politicians who sieze control of time are just engaging in the ultimate power grab, ita a
@de_machina