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?"

Comments

Re:Didn't we just argue over this?

[LurkerXXX]

Few devices adjust for DST. To my knowledge, only computers do this.

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.

DST is BS anyway....

[Chanc_Gorkon]

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.

Think of the Children...

[PetoskeyGuy]

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. :)

Re:No daylight savings time here

[CrazyTalk]

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.

Windows and Linux aren't the issue.

[SirGeek]

Specialized software like the power grid uses will be the issue. Most of this software will need large amounts of regression testing to ensure that the proper 23 and 25 hour days are handled.

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 ? )

So-called "atomic" clocks

[dereference]

I have several of these, including a wrist-watch, and all of them are normally zero maintenance. As if you didn't know, these beasties listen for a NIST radio broadcast signal and synchronize themselves automatically.

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!

Re: DST and Time Zones in General

[some guy I know]

You'd think no one else in the world had ever dealt with DST before.

What's stupid is the entire concept of Daylight Saving Time.
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.)