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Impact of Daylight Savings Time Changes?
jason718 writes "With the pending changes to U.S. Daylight Savings Time, what impact will those changes have to existing systems and their applications? Are some operating systems more open than others with regard to the configuration of Daylight Savings Time start and end dates, or will we need yet another update or patch to modify the internal calendar?"
Let me just look around my room here... My TV does. So does my VCR. There are lots of things out there besides 'computers' that adjust for DST. Certainly my TV and VCR aren't 'patchable' to changes to when the time changes occur.
I hae no idea why Congress thinks this thing will svae oil. Back when DST was invented, it was understandable. Now, we're different. Now we have people who work at any time during the span of 24 hours. We have 24 hour stores and there's more activity at night now then ever before. I bet that the existing DST does nothing to save oil now at this point. Sure, it's nice to have those extra daylight hours and what not but is it worth causing untold number of devices (regular desktops and servers will be fine, but it's the embedded stuff that is the problem now). Changing it now would not make a difference in oil usage.
Gorkman
Upton noted that the extension means daylight-saving time will continue through Halloween, adding to safety. "Kids across the nation will soon rejoice," said Upton, because they'll have another hour of daylight trick-or-treating.
:)
This is the silliest reason I've ever heard of. Energy consumption I can understand if the facts support that it will really make a difference.
Here in northern Michigan for our family at least we always wait for it to get dark before we go out. Maybe it's like having snow for Christmas, but it's doesn't seem like Halloween would be the same when you can see just how cheap all the costumes and decorations really are.
Also how would this affect livestock? How do they know what time it is? If daylight savings time is so great, why revert at all why not just move it forward the whole year and let Indiana print their own TV Guides.
Could be worse - you could live in Indiana, a small state which effectively has THREE time zones (Central with DST near Chicago, and Eastern time with or without DST depending on where you are in the state.
If there is something to draw out of the recent energy bill is that politicians at least know that shit is about to hit the fan in a big way and those who prepare themselves for what's coming will fare much better than those who don't.
So what exactly is the cause of our impending doom? Peak oil, that's what. In other words the world is about to reach (possibly already has) the peak of sustainable oil production levels. Beyond this point we enter the right hand side of the gaussian curve of oil production. This subject has been beaten to death on various internet sites (just google for peak oil) so I won't repeat the reasons why a major adjustment is not avoidable. I'll just mention a few things one should do to make sure they are ready for the greatest emergency in American history:
- Get out of debt. Make sure your mortage is paid asap and lock your rates now. When the peak oil fallout unfolds debt collectors will likely be armed.
- Make sure you have a ready source of food. Befriend a farmer or get a job on a farm. Preferably a small self sustaining farm which is diversified in its production and does not rely totally on fossil fuel inputs. Organic farms are usually the closest to fitting the bill.
- Live close to your work place. This is sort of obvious but may be very hard to do for most people. Public transit will keep going at least a bit longer than private vehicles.
- Make sure you can make yourself useful after the oil crash. I doubt there will be very many positions for PR executives in the future, but this may actually benefit some geeks on slashdot as the need to fix all kinds of things and hack homegrown power supply systems (such as home made wind turbines) will be unprecedented. No more chucking old stuff on the curb once it develops a simple fault! The world will not be nearly as wasteful.
- Make sure the area you live can survive without significant oil inputs. Arizona isn't likely to be habitable after the oil crash. If you happen to live there it may be prudent to move now especially if you happen to own a property there as those will become next to worthless once the price of fossil fuels becomes prohibitive.
Anyway, the doomsday scenario may unfold involving wars, civil strife and famine or we may be able to gradually power down and switch to a more sustainable life style. One thing is certain though. It will not be business as usual in the coming years and a serious societal readjustment is coming and frankly, long overdue if you ask me.Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Many of the packages are expecting the 1st Saturday/Sunday in April to have 23 hours and the last Saturday/Sunday in October to have 25 hours.
Do you really want the power grid to put into production a patch that hasn't been tested for many months ? ( Or do you want blackouts, or the cost to quadruple ? )
UPS Sucks
http://www.standardtime.com/proposal.shtml Check out the proposed replacement for daylight saving time, which also shrinks the number of timezones in the continental US from 4 to 2. It seems to make a lot more sense overall than what we have now...
yup, and the next logical step would be to *frigging use the same time all over the world*, sheesh! it's just a convention after all! all i need to do is remember that starting next year, the new day begins at XX.XX and i go to work at YY:YY instead of what i'm used to. quite easy. huge advantages. no cons. deal. sign me up. oh, wait, i'm alone here? uhm...
Global warming is a cube.
Minting pennies costs a lot of money, and after all these years inflation has made them more trouble than they're worth. Worse than worthless, really, as handling them is a burden on cash-handling facilities like banks and stores.
We should just round to the nearest nickel, as we currently do with half-cents.
New Zealand did this quite some time ago. It has caused very few issues, and has greatly reduced the amount of useless change people carry around. It would definitely be a good idea if the US could ever get around to it. Then again, that would imply change, and we all know how averse the US is to actual change. You still use paper for your notes for god's sake.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Well, the radio signal does not include DST information; that's a "client-side" feature of the clock itself. Most clocks allow you to configure which time zone offset you wish, as well as to specify whether you want the clock to observe DST during the appropriate time of the year.
And therein lies the problem!
I can't exactly "patch" my clocks/watches with an update to handle this absurdity. These aren't exactly field-upgradable. If this goes through, rather than being zero maintenance, each of these timepieces will need to be adjusted 4 times per year!
(Yes--four--go count if you don't believe me: once to compensate for DST starting before the device thinks it should; again to un-compensate upon the traditional DST start; once more to compensate upon the traditional DST end; and finally yet again to un-compensate for the real end of DST.)
So count me as one, I certainly care!
It seems to me that I had an old 486 AMIBIOS that would do DST, and that I had to turn it off to make it behave sanely with Linux. I'm assuming that any such system could be set to UDT, and then let the operating system handle timechanges. Maybe there's some hardware out there that have some problems. That's the difficulty with older systems.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Forget thumbing our nose at the federal government. We have more daylight than we want here in arizona. Nothing like driving home from work at 11pm and having it still be 102F out. We don't stand to gain much, if anything from changing.
As for the reservations, they pretty much do whatever they want within reason, and if they want to screw around with daylight savings time we're not going to stop them.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Absolutely. In fact you don't go nearly far enough. Let's not have ANY timezones. Make the whole country a single timezone and deem noon in the capital 12:00 be midday.
... no, wait ...
I mean, it worked for the USSR
[Yes, this is true. The whole of the USSR, spanning five timezones, used to run on Moscow time. People in Kamchatka used to get up at midnight. Well, the clocks said midnight, anyway]
"Cats like plain crisps"
I live in Queensland, Australia. Not totally OT, but this is one of the main states in australia, but doesn't go to daylight savings with other states that are normally on the same time zone.
The end result is that we have the sun rising at 4-30am, going down at 5-30pm, and the locals (I'm a recent addition there) see it as perfectly reasonable. Personally, time with a little sunshine in the evening is more useful than getting up at an unholy hour of the morning to "enjoy" the sunshine, as much as it is possible to so early in the day.
I'm not clear on your objection here; with Daylight Saving Time, you'd have sunlight from 5:30am to 6:30pm -- an additional evening hour.
I'm currently in Boston, and I wish we'd go to DST year round (i.e., shift to being on Atlantic Time instead of Eastern Time). As it is, we have sunset at 4pm in the winter, and that pretty much sucks.
Of course, the countries of the world that do change their clocks don't change their clocks at the same time.
:-)
It gets even better - In Australia, some states don't observe DST at all, and of those that do, not all of them start and end it on the same dates (Yes Tasmania, I'm looking at you). Making things more interesting is that the Northern Territory and South Australia are only 30 minutes different from their eastern neighbors (but only SA observes DST), so for part of the year Adelaide is 30 minutes behind Brisbane, and for the remainder it's 30 minutes ahead since Queensland doesn't observe DST. That's fun to deal with when you're working with an airline check-in system where the host has to be able to determine what time it is at any arbitrary airport in the country. On the positive side, I've got that code written and debugged now, so to Congress all I have to say is "bring it on"!
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I don't think so.
Source: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen. html
The page I cited has actual numbers to back up its claims. You provide nothing with which to back up your claims. I think I trust that page more than you.
In fact, timezones themselves are stupid.
Everyone should be on UTC.
Who said that local Noon should be when the Sun is directly above our heads?
In fact, with time zones, the Sun can be directly above your head anywhere in the range between 1130 and 1230 (or even earlier/later, because time zones are not strictly longitudinal), and DST can increase the range even further.
In the "old days", each town/city had its own time zone, synchronized to local Noon.
The railroads were largely resposible for our current system of hourly time zones.
There are places on Earth today that don't follow the hourly convention, and are one-half, or even one-quarter, of an hour "off" the conventional system.
Why does the local day have to change when the Sun is on the other side of the Earth?
I could kind of understand this back in the "old days", when everyone went to bed at sunset, but in our increasingly 24-hour society, in makes much less sense.
What detrimental effects would there be if the day changed from Monday to Tuesday when it was light out?
When everything is open 24 hours anyway, I doubt that there would be very many.
Note that I don't mean that kids should be going to school in the middle of the night, etc.
In some locales, kids would go to school at 1100 UTC, in others, at 1700 UTC.
Note that they do this already; it's just that 1700 UTC may be 9 AM local time.
People's schedules wouldn't necessarily change vis a vis daylight and nighttime; only the time measurement would change.
If everyone used UTC, communications across time zones would be much easier.
(No more "Is that 10 AM East coast time, or 10 AM West Coast time?".)
People wouldn't have to reset their watches every time they visted Aunt Mabel in the next state over.
The International Dateline would disappear.
Oh, and since we would be doing such a massive change anyway, this would be the perfect opportunity to decimalize time (and it's about time that we decimalized time).
Just think: With decimalized time, most people would be working only 3.3 hours a day!
(On the down side, whenever anyone said "Just a minute!" or "Just a sec!", you would have to wait longer.)
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
I'm all for simplifying baroque systems, but this doesn't seems like it would help that much. If, as you said, people would still get up in the morning and go to sleep at night, schedules would still be different everywhere, they would just be mapped to different numbers.
If I wanted to communicate with someone in europe from the West coast, I would know that since it's 800 UTC here, it's 800 UTC there, but the significance of that number itself would lose meaning. So what if it's 800 UTC? Does that mean the sun's up there? Would they be eating dinner?
In order to keep track of what 800 UTC means in different regions, we'd have to come up with a system of "zones" which could tell us approximately where the sun was in each region at a given UTC time, so that we'd know when it was okay to call, or whether they'd be doing business at 800 UTC.
Maybe we could call this system "time zones", or something. Though I like "chrono-differential sectors" better.