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Extra Daylight Savings May Confuse the Gadgets

Posted by timothy on from the abolish-daylight-savings-time dept.

CrimeDoggy writes "In the energy bill to be signed by the President today (August 8), changes are to be made that extend daylight savings time. The bill would start daylight time three weeks earlier and end it a week later as an energy-saving measure. Many devices such as VCRs, cell phones, and watches would still operate on the previous schedule, potentially causing problems."

34 of 933 comments (clear)

  1. Time for a change... by TripMaster+Monkey · · Score: 3, Insightful


    Super. It's about time we monkey with the way we reckon time again...after all, we had almost gotten used to the current insane standard.

    I would propose a rather radically different option...eliminate time zones in the U.S. altogether. That's right, no time zones at all...everyone can just use GMT. I'm not advocating that everyone go to work at 09:00 GMT...business can determine what hours they want their employees to work, based on the amount of daylight available at that particular time of year, but the time standard would be the same everywhere. That way, there would be none of this bullshit confusion about 'what time is that here', or 'what is the time there'. It's GMT. The same damned time everywhere.

    We're already a global community...it only makes sense to adopt a global time. Of course, asking the country that still uses Imperial measurement units to spearhead this change might be asking a bit much...

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    ~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey

    1. Re:Time for a change... by wazootyman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But what happens when I'm in Michigan and need to call a client in California? It's still relevant that 9 am here is 6 am there. If you eliminate time zones, you'll still have to adjust your schedule based on the fact that their day is about 3 hours behind yours.

      We already use a global time in a sense; time zones make GMT into a format that's easier to understand. Knowing that it's 05:00 GMT doesn't necessarily tell you whether you're going to be calling a person in the middle of the night or not.

    2. Re:Time for a change... by Peyna · · Score: 2, Insightful

      .business can determine what hours they want their employees to work, based on the amount of daylight available at that particular time of year, but the time standard would be the same everywhere. That way, there would be none of this bullshit confusion about 'what time is that here', or 'what is the time there'. It's GMT. The same damned time everywhere.

      Of course, this also creates a similar problem, it just shifts it to a different area.

      Instead of "what is it there"? The question becomes "What time do you start work over there?" "What time do you wake up over there?"

      So you still have to remember the same information, except there's less standardization aside from being able to say "Meet me at 10:00" and everyone can look at their watch and understand it to mean the same thing no matter where they are.

      So we'll all have the same time on our watches, but we'll be doing whatever we want whenever we want and coordination would become even more confusing.

      --
      What?
    3. Re:Time for a change... by brunson · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Anyone with a background in math will tell you base 12 or base 60 is much better to do math in. The more integer divisors your base has, the easier it is to do division without going into fractions. In a 12 hour day, what's half of that, or a third or a quarter? It's even better in a 60 minute hour where you have a factors of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. What do you have for 10? 2 and 5. 100? 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25 and 50. Don't push for getting rid of base 60 time, push to change our number system to base 12.

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      09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
      Jesus loves you, I think you suck
    4. Re:Time for a change... by badasscat · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That way, there would be none of this bullshit confusion about 'what time is that here', or 'what is the time there'. It's GMT. The same damned time everywhere.

      I think you're missing the basic purpose of telling time. Which is to say that no matter what it says on the clock, it's the "same damned time everywhere", so your solution accomplishes nothing. Time is linear - you don't actually go back in time if you take a flight that lands in one place "earlier" than when it left (I know you know this, but your premise suggests otherwise). The purpose of having a time standard that we can all read is as a frame of reference. Your solution is to eliminate that frame of reference. I don't see how this makes things simpler.

      If it's morning where I am in NYC, it's still going to be night in Hawaii regardless of what the clock says. I still need to remember that if I want to call somebody there, or otherwise communicate. Just because my watch says it's 4 AM (GMT) doesn't mean all those Hawaiians are going to be awake.

      You're looking at things backwards. Time zones make it easier to deal with this issue, because we can easily say "oh, it's six hours earlier in Hawaii - that means people must still be asleep." Take away the time zones and you're stuck doing calculations about distance and solar cycles for every single place on the planet you've got to deal with. Is it really easier to say "well, Hawaii is 5,500 miles east, and the earth rotates at X miles an hour; therefore, Hawaii will have sunlight in 6 hours" than it is to just know that Hawaii's 6 hours behind us?

    5. Re:Time for a change... by brunson · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The question becomes "What time do you start work over there?" "What time do you wake up over there?"

      You have to ask that anyway. Just because I start work at 8am in Denver doesn't mean I can assume that everyone everywhere starts work at 8am. I can't even assume that in the *same* timezone.

      --
      09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
      Jesus loves you, I think you suck
    6. Re:Time for a change... by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2, Insightful

      But what happens when I'm in Michigan and need to call a client in California?

      You know his hours of operation.

      You work from 12:00-20:00, he works from 15:00-23:00. You keep that in your contact information from him. He publishes it in his .VCF.

      Your PIM tells you when you bring up his record if he's working now so you don't have to burn any neurotransmitters figuring it out.

      This is the same as figuring out if the Target down the street is open yet.

      It's also great in that it would let people work closer to their natural circadian rhythms. Here in New Hampshire people assume everybody works 8-5, but in New Jersey, people start work at 9. So, already the current system is broken.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    7. Re:Time for a change... by lgw · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Ever try to choose a meeting time on a con-call with 3 or more time zones? It always turns into an incoherant babble until someone asks "OK, what time *EST* do we have the next call". The current system sucks for agreeing on a time.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    8. Re:Time for a change... by makomk · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That'd be Relative Univerrse Time. Absolute Universe Time would probably be the time since the start of the universe, in Planck periods. It's as close to a universal measure of time as you can get. The only downside is that watches would have to be rather on the large side to fit the display on.

  2. Moral travesty by fruity_pebbles · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Daylight savings time is an idiotic solution to a non-existent problem.

    (Yes, that's an opinion. Feel free to disagree.)

    1. Re:Moral travesty by Overzeetop · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Which seems to be the problem?

      8:30 is a fine time for the sun to set. It sets by six in the winter (Virginia) and there doens't seem to be outcry.

      7am and the sun is "high overhead"? I'm still trying to figure out why that would be a problem. I work a relatively normal 8-5 day, and I have a sunrise simulator that I use - even in the summer - to get up at 6 so I have time to have breakfast and get my kid out of bed / dressed / fed / off to school. If it were light out at 5am, that'd be great.

      Of course, I have TiVo, so I don't have to worry about all that "but I can't watch Jay Leno and get up at 5am" shit. (No, I don't watch late night tv anyway). I don't play evening (insert sport here), where light is a problem. I can't get in 18 holes of golf after work regardless of the sunset time, so evening play is a moot point.

      Now that I come to think about it, if it got cooler an hour earlier in the evening, it would probably be much nicer. Young kids could spend more evenings chasing fireflys insead of having to go to bed while its still light out. The fireworks on the 4th could start at a reasonable time.

      Tell you what...I'm still looking for a down side. Even my wife would have one less day to be in a bitchy mood 'cause she lost an hour of sleep each spring. (Yes, she seems to treat the extra hour of sleep the fall change offers as a holiday akin to Christmas)

      --
      Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
    2. Re:Moral travesty by ergo98 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The only other solution is to shift your work schedule to get back those lost hours of daylight in the summertime, like the company I worked for in Indiana did.

      This is exactly how people should adapt to the increased sunlight hours during the summer - get up earlier and go to the gym, do gardening, whatever, during the copious hours before work if your work hours are static throughout the year. Alternately if you're an employer then adapt your hours (or even better adapt flexible hours for the majority of workplaces where it isn't detrimental to do so).

      The idea of changing the clock to force it on everyone is ludicrous, and it's imperfect anyways as there remains tremendous sunlight "waste" during the height of summer (in my area the sun rises just before 8am in the height of winter, and at 5am in the summer). In the past, when life was much more synchronous and people needed direct and immediate contact with others to a vastly greater degree, it was necessary for this mass coordination, but today we live largely asynchronous, queued and disconnected lives, and everyone clogging the streets at 8am and 5pm is insanity.

    3. Re:Moral travesty by dave_mcmillen · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is exactly how people should adapt to the increased sunlight hours during the summer - get up earlier and go to the gym, do gardening, whatever . . . The idea of changing the clock to force it on everyone is ludicrous . . .

      Ah, but you've pointed out one of the problems: Go to the gym? But it's 5am, the gym isn't open yet. Neither is anything else, unless everyone gets together and agrees to start earlier. You can do this by asking every business to change schedules, or you can do it all at once by changing the clocks.

      Not so ludicrous, I think. No, for ludicrousness, wait until someone reasons that if extending it by another month is supposed to save energy, just think how much we'd save by extending it to the whole year! Wait for it.

  3. Awful idea. by hoborocks · · Score: 1, Insightful

    This is so short-sighted it's not even funny. Coming into effect in 2007, as the article states...does anyone actually think that that's enough time to update everything that depends on human time?

    I'm all in favor of changing things around, sure...but in under a year? More like 8 months? That's not nearly enough time to switch our major infrastructure over to use the new daylight time.

    --
    AccountKiller
  4. Raise your hand! by Zediker · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Who else thinks this is a phenominally stupid idea! If anything we should just get rid of Daylight savings, it costs us tons of money each year to be out of sync with the rest of the world.

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    I love to slaughter the english language.
  5. Of all the things in the Energy Bill by bgfay · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It seems that this is the one that people are concentrating on. Nutty stuff, really. I keep thinking about how we're killing the environment, that we can't get our President to even mention the word conservation, that we are making little to no progress toward using alternative energy sources, and on and on. But the fact that my cell phone might get confused by the new Daylight Savings Time is what we're hearing about not just on /. but on all sorts of other media outlets.

    Alright, so I'm going off on this. I understand that /. is news for nerds and tech oriented. This story fits that. I'm not saying that this story doesn't belong on /. (Got that?)

    What I'm trying to say is that somehow this is the BIG idea in the energy bill as it is being reported and it doesn't deserve that status.

    The Energy bill is a mess the likes of which haven't been seen since the Patriot Act. That's where the focus needs to be.

    Oh well.

    --
    Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
    1. Re:Of all the things in the Energy Bill by garcia · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The Energy bill is a mess the likes of which haven't been seen since the Patriot Act. That's where the focus needs to be.

      People only care about the here and now (I'm one of them although I don't care about how this might screw up my computer automatically correcting for CDT and CST).

      Global Warming is something that cooks and liberals care about and it doesn't affect anyone in the next two days so it doesn't matter. What's on TV is what matters to people right now.

      As long as the media and the Government can divert people's attention with stupid bullshit like their mobile phones and VCRs (remember anything that interferes with Survivor, The Bachelor/ette, and/or any other stupid reality TV show is far more important than anything else).

    2. Re:Of all the things in the Energy Bill by Buran · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If you are going to claim that conservation does nothing good, back it up with sources. While not every conservation project is as successful as originally hoped, to say that all conservation is useless is ludicrous. If it were totally useless, no one would do it -- and instead there are many, many people -- paid and unpaid -- who work to ensure that conservation happens.

      The same is true for recycling programs.

      Also don't forget that many projects have long-term effects and take some time for the true effect to be realized. Your recycling example, for instance. While recycling processes are different from raw manufacturing, there's more to it than just that. Consider, for instance, the long-term effect of cutting down mature forests in terms of oxygen production, erosion, destruction of natural beauty, the effects on the biosphere as a whole, the destruction of habitat for animals that live in those forests, and so on.

      We can specifically point to the short-sighted actions of a logging company that destroyed the then-last-known habitat of the ivory-billed woodpecker -- in full knowledge of what they were doing as a result of information given to them by scientists. And look at how long it has taken to find out that the damage may not have been permanent after all -- but undoing their mess may not be possible if it turns out the birds have been wiped out to the point where the ones that have been sighted can no longer reproduce.

      You fall into the trap that so many others do of failing to think of the long term and thinking only in the short.

      Again, let's see some sources to prove those ridiculous accusations.

      --
      i am a soviet space shuttle
  6. Politicians? by daed350 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Shouldn't the whole physics and time measurements be regulated by a scientific body rather than a group of political morons? Maybe I'm crazy.

  7. Why? by Glendale2x · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm still waiting for someone to point out a really good reason why we need DST. All it does is irritate me having to deal with resetting clocks.

    Furthermore, what the hell does this have to do with energy conservation? I'm still going to turn the fracking lights on when it gets dark; I don't look at the clock and go "hey, it's 7, time to turn on all the lights."

    --
    this is my sig
  8. A great big DUH by jandrese · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Of course stuff that is hardcoded with the old DST dates is going to have trouble. Yeah, that's a lot of gadgets. What can we do about it though? Most of those gadgets are not upgradable, so you're going to have to change the time on them twice a year now (once they figure out how to turn off the automatic DST updates).

    I wish the president would have had the gumption to just extend Daylight Savings Time to all year long and ditch the date changes entirely. Nearly every device can be configured to ignore DST changes and it would have saved the world a lot of confusion each year.

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
  9. There is no problem... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Some US states have no DST, yet these devices work fine in them, why because you can turn off auto-DST and manage time manually.

    1. Re:There is no problem... by petermgreen · · Score: 2, Insightful

      the other problem with manual DST is if people get it wrong.

      the windows user interface in particular pushes the idea that local time is all important and the timezone is just some internationalisation setting.

      if you have local time right and timezone wrong your computer gets the wrong idea of UTC which is a bad thing for any protocol that bases things like caching on UTC.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
  10. Re:Please just drop it. by cruff · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I agree. It seems to me that no additional energy will be saved by this stupidity, it will just shift the period in the day when it is used.

  11. Re:Please just drop it. by the+phantom · · Score: 4, Insightful

    May I also add that extending Daylight Saving Time even farther into the fall is a bad idea(tm). I work at an elementary school. The kids tend to show up between 8:30 and 9:00 am. Understandard time in November, the sun has been up for maybe 40 minutes by the time they get here. Extending Daylight Saving Time even further means that they will be walking to school in the dark, which just seems like bad policy to me. Furthermore, I bike to work at about 7:00. I really don't like being on the road when it is very dark, which it can be at 7:00. It will be even worse with more DST.

    In short, I think this is a bad idea. I think DST is a bad idea in general, and I wish that more states would do what Arizona has done (but not the Navajo Nation), and dispense with DST altogether.

    --
    Rhapsody in Numbers
  12. Why is it so easy? by MikeDawg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why is it so easy for lawmakers to make a change to the time, yet they can't make the freaking change to the metric system to be like "the rest of the world". I wish we (speaking as an American) would convert to the metric system. Even though it doesn't negate the S.A.E. completely, it will overtime take its place.

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    YOU'RE WINNER !
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  13. OT: sig... by shmlco · · Score: 2, Insightful
    It is as impossible to steal "intellectual property" as it is to steal fire.

    And it's equally possible to extinguish both...

    --
    Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
  14. The only other solution... by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And what exactly is wrong with this other solution? We shoudln't change the definition of the gallon to make our cars appear more fuel efficient and similarly we shouldn't change the definition of the time to give the illusion that we can have more time for barbecuing. We can have more time for barbecuing by going to work earlier and coming home earlier. Why is that so difficult for people to grasp?

    --
    Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
  15. Re:Please just drop it. by Steve525 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I agree that extending DST further in fall is bad idea. The problem is DST is very assymetric. The winter solstice is Dec. 21. If DST was actually about daylight, it should be close to symmetric around this date. However, we fall back only 2 months before this, and spring ahead 4 months after this. So, the fall transition happens too late, and the spring transition could stand to happen sooner.

  16. Conservation is stupid by Kohath · · Score: 1, Insightful
    we can't get our President to even mention the word conservation

    That's not true. The president talks about conservation a lot. But...

    Conservation is stupid. Conservation is simply artificially impoverishing yourself. There's no benefit.

    You're saying:

    I want to accomplish X. It would improve my life to accomplish X. I can afford to buy the energy to accomplish X. Spending the money and using the energy and accomplishing X would be better for me than not doing that.
    But I'm going to conserve the energy, forgo the accomplishment, and give up all the benefits.

    Why? For future generations? So they can grow up and not be able to accomplish their goals because they have to conserve too?

    What's the conservation endgame?
    1. Re:Conservation is stupid by GlassHeart · · Score: 2, Insightful
      What in the world are you talking about?

      It would improve my life to get from point A to point B. I can do so in an SUV, or I can do so in a car that uses half as much gasoline. Conservation is to use the least amount of resources to accomplish the same goal. Conservation is not the opposite of need, but the opposite of waste.

  17. People unclear on the concept... by DragonHawk · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "What's the conservation endgame?"

    There isn't one. That's the point. As opposed to the endgame for not conserving, which is resource exhaustion.

    I find your question so absolutely hilarious that I just had to reply.

    (Note that "conservation", in sane circles, does not mean "abandoning everything but solar power", the way some nut-jobs (on both ends of the spectrum) seem to think. It means intelligent management of your resources. "Sustainable resource consumption" would be a better term, but that's doesn't roll of the tongue as well.)

    --

    dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
    I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
    1. Re:People unclear on the concept... by WalrusSlayer · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Resource exhaustion is economically impossible.

      As resources become scarce, the price increases to balance their scarcity. At some level, substitutes become more economically attactive and use of the now-expensive, scare resource declines.

      Geology doesn't adhere to economic principles I'm afraid, but I digress...

      The point isn't that we'll use up every drop of oil---you are correct that economics will turn price/supply into an asymptotic curve. The problem is the steepness of the curve and what kind of alternative fuel capacity will be online, at what time, and at what cost. The catastrophic scenario is that fossil fuels could very well spike in price decades before alternative fuels are practical. Or even worse, the scarcity of fossil fuels means that developing the alternative fuel infrastructure is infeasible. We should be developing the technologies and building the infrastructure now while we can afford to do so.

      Or to put it another way---imagine that fossil fuels become completely unaffordable (say, $30/gal), and there is no alternative energy in sufficient supply to fill the gap. How, exactly, is that different to the consumer than the scenario where we've hit resource exhaustion? In either case, the consumer ain't going see no oil coming his way...

  18. How surreal! by Hosiah · · Score: 2, Insightful
    A program that does nothing is augmented to do even more nothing for reasons which have nothing to do with it.

    Daylight Savings was originally implemented by Ben Franklin (simplified version: "to get farmers out of bed and milking the cows"). When was the last time Daylight Savings had an impact on your life, except twice a year when you change stuff or check it? Or give you an annual convenient excuse to roll into work an hour late?

    And it's just plain Dadaism to think it has anything at all to do with energy consumption. Do y'suppose Bush actually believes he controls the seasons by moving the clocks and calandar pages around? Wouldn't surprise me in the least.