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Prepared for Next Year's Time Change?
wohlford puts forth this query: "Next year, daylight saving time will be extended another four weeks. Slashdot has covered the time change proposal and its estimated impact, already. Since then it has been signed into law. Looking around on the Net I don't see anyone taking this seriously. Will this become the next tech doomsday or just another joke like Y2K?"
Why is this important? Wouldn't most servers get their time from a central time server, and wouldn't this be that time server's problem?
Personally, I hate daylight savings time and see no need for it. Just get up earlier or later as needed. Further, I don't see why we can't just all use GMT. So you get up at 08:00 and I get up at 21:00, big deal.
I got my time changing fingers all ready and I am standing by to press the "time" button and the "hour" button on my digital clock.
My alarm clock automatically switches to/from DST on the prescribed date. However, with those dates now changed, not only will it fail to switch at the NEW dates, but it will continue to switch at the OLD dates. So, I have to get a new alarm clock. Shame, too...my last alarm clock worked great for nearly 20 years. But the one I have now will get replaced after only 2 years.
Damn gov't. Haven't they learned that you shouldn't play with time unless you use a DeLorean?
We don't care about how you silly mainlanders play with your clocks.
Aloha!
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Its just formatting.
The only time that matters is seconds since Jan 1, 1970. Actual seconds. Not extra (or fewer) seconds to keep time nerds happy "reconciling" time with some unperdictable-on-the-scale-required, obsolete, phscial process that matters not at all. All that is just polish. And pointless polish at that.
Go to hell. A lot of people put a lot of work into resolving a real problem. We'd sure as hell have heard about it if we hadn't.
One of those damned if you do, damned if you don't things I guess.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
In various past implementations I've been involved in, the teams I've worked on have generally decided to use GMT as a base, and convert to the locale using the local OS system features. By this I mean all dates/times were stored GMT, and converted to/from local time only when interacting with end users etc..
/F
This was on Linux and/or Solaris.
Certainly this isn't a solution for all cases, but from the application development side it was relatively easy, and very stable. Assuming the OS handles the time change properly, of course...
Stupidity... has a habit of getting its way.
...Y2K a joke? No, your opinion of that is an uninformed joke. Billions of lines of code had to be audited and fixed,all over the planet, if they hadn't been, it would have sucked really bad. Really bad. As late as 1999 a huge amount was still *not fixed* and it was a race to the wire for a lot of companies and governments. I even had a talk with my state's main remediation contractor, he was very concerned over it and is/was by no means some raw noob coder.
I live in Arizona
I'd think that one could turn DST off, and have the NIST automatically make the changes.
I'd not be surprised if there's resistance to the idea of changing time. People are strange in a way. It's of great importance that people stick with something they know, and are comfortable with. Just so, too, when leap years were introduced people were afraid of losing days off their lives because they believed that the date of their death was set. Also, take metric time - it never had a chance in hell because it was so different to what everyone was used to that it was effectively alien (even though, on some levels it makes a great deal of sense). I, personally, have no problem with global time completely disjoint from the location in which I live, so long as it's GMT. As it is, my sleeping patterns already have no correlation with the actual time of day.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
I still wonder why we bother with DST. At this latitude (49 north) the summers are plenty light anyway (latest sunset about 2100 PDT, still light after 2200), and the winters are dark (earliest sunset about 1600 PST), no matter what we do. It's even more pronounced the further north you go.
I agree with others: Y2K wasn't a joke. There were real issues, but these were identified and resolved ahead of time. It only looked like an anticlimax. It wasn't.
...laura, who babysat computers and satellites the evening of 31 December 1999
If you are really offended by the submitter's ignorance or ungrateful nature, don't just post an angry message. Make him a foe. Here, I've made it easy for you. Just click on this link, select "Foe", and hit the "Yup, I'm positive" button. Don't simply complain -- vote!
BTW, this advice is useful for next week as well.
One for each -- Europe, the East Coast of the USA, etc. I've never had to worry about Australia, though -- do they play with clocks down there or do they have better things to do?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Now, when someone tells us about how wonderful it is to crank the clocks forward one hour, we get all gushy about it and tell them that twelve must be even better. Moonlight Savings Time is a wonderful idea when your summer temps regularly run above 45C and the only decent time of day is around dawn.
Like I need to have that be 0300 instead of 0400. They can stuff it.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
is using a time and attendance system that i wrote and next year, they are going to find out that it needs to be fixed for the people who log in from the chicago office (the server is in arizona-- they'll be o.k.)
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Well, for those of us using Windows stuff (hopefully for nothing important :) ), Microsoft has a tool called tzedit which you can use to specify a custom timezone/edit a timezone, so you can specify daylight savings time.
Then you have to export the registry keys and deploy them to all relevant computers (I used group policies).
Here's the relevant example for my country (which is entirely inconsistent in its use of DST), just replace Uruguay with whatever country you're in:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/886775
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
It's only the US, who cares?
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
If I didn't have my tinfoil hat on I'd think it was part of a plan from the religious right to do away with it
They would vote on something like this in China...
d =6
:)
http://app.beijing.gov.cn/beijingtv/doindex.jsp?i
The daylight saving time is embedded in millions of devices/systems. An example would be the elevator system in my office building. It's used to control access times for secured floors. There is no patch for this, the control system will have to be completely replaced.
Our phone system has the change encoded. It will require a full software upgrade to fix this.
So... it's a bummer!
As someone who used to live in Japan and was tired of the sun waking me up at 4AM, I for one welcome our new extended daylight savings overlords.
I know there will be lots of consumer appliences such as VCRs and Clock radios that currently know when daylight savings time is and will either be wrong for some weeks in the spring and fall or have to be changed 4 times a year.
Unix/Linux should be fine as long as you update your timezone files appropriately.
And there may be some apps and/or websites that may have problems, but I expect the consumer appliences will have the most problems exactly because they won't get updated even if they could be.
I haven't been keeping up with this, so please don't bite.. I gather that this has bene passed in the U.S., but are any other nations planning on following suit? I have to say I agree with many of the posters above in that the whole concept of DST is silly.. I don't need the sun to rise at precisely 6:47am for my day to be right.. In fact, I'm already off-kilter since I'm much more comfortable with a 25 or 26 hour day (left to my own devices, I go to bed a few hours later than the previous night, and thus wake up a few hours later as well).
Ideally I'd like a move to a global standard time, such as GMT, but I'd even be happy with time-zones.. Just don't change the hour halfway through the year!
Aikon-
Yes, you're right! This could be horrible! Nobody, I mean NOBODY, runs without Daylight Savings! If people don't change due to Daylight savings, everything will fall apart! Nobody ignores daylight savings without HUGE technical repurcussions!
Plenty of people still do it manually. They won't care. It's easy enough to override that extra hour on computers, or tell them not to auto-flip.
I fail to see the major issue here, and DEFINITELY fail to see the correlation to Y2K.
I have to say that I'm greatly anticipating this. After just getting out of daylight savings time and having to deal with the depressing, irritating new time where everything gets dark far too early and I'm constantly failing to properly estimate the time I wish we'd stick with the earlier, DST time year-round.
Then again I also think that times should be shifted by 6 hours making midnight 6 PM, dawn (roughly) 1 AM noon 6 AM and dusk 12 AM (12 should be the end of a time section, not the beginning, it's amazingly counter-intuitive).
Of course the issue remains: should time be localized to where the sun is in one particular place (Zulu time) or should everyone use GMT?
Changes to daylight savings time start and end times are hardly a big deal. In Australia it happens all the time. Just this year, daylight savings time was extended by a week in March, and no planes fell out of the sky. About half the computers I used updated and showed the real time, and the other half (including some apparently independent clocks that were set by some remote mechanism) switched back early and were an hour slow. Everyone coped just fine.
Most people know what hour it is anyway, so it's only important computer systems that matter. And if Microsoft can have a patch for two states and one territory in a relatively small country, then they can have a patch for the vast majority of their home country...
Absolutely nothing to worry about. Just enjoy the extra daylight in the evening!
Look out!
I don't expect there will be any issues for Windows PC's, as long as they are on the current version, which at that time will be Vista.
10 minute intervals of change, that way everybody can see the sun rise at the prescribed "optimal" time within 10 minutes instead of a whole hour. We could do it by locality, county, and state. Heck, every town could chose their own implementation to match local custom and maximize efficiency. It will be a power and labor saving coup!
[/bizzaro politicians world]
I'd be happy to ditch the whole thing. For those of you who complain about skipping DST and having the sun wake you up at 4am I have one word: Curtains. If you ask me, DST is just a way for those folks who commute on east-west roads to have to look directly into the rising/setting sun for a good portion of every spring and fall.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Ohnos, I can't bare to get up at 6am, we must adjust the clock so I can get up at 7am instead....
Legacy Code.
Your argument could just as easily have been, "Honestly, there's no good excuse for anyone not using 4 digits to represent years these days, yes even on MS DOS", 10 years ago.
You're making the same assumption that people made in the seventies. The "Nothing that runs today will still be in use in 2000" brigade. They were proved so right, weren't they? All those expensive mainframes? Phht, they'll be dead in 30 years.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
I love changing the clocks. I want more, more, more! Instead of all that '2am on the first Sunday of April' crap, we should put the clocks back two hours at 4am every day. And put them forward again at 2pm.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
The announcers on national radio are calling out five times each half hour. I live in the tropical and subtropical state that voted on it - 49 percent for, 50 percent against changing and less than 1 percent informal votes in a compulsory election - it looks like people actually cared.
Last year daylight saving was extended in one state and Microsoft operating systems were still set to change back early - I beleive it annoyed a lot of southern sysadmins but I didn't hear of any real chaos.
Java has had support for the new Daylight Saving changes since 1.4.2_11.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
The real issue is that we don't need daylight saving time. We can just stagger when we work and go to school. Changing the time that it is light outside isn't going to change anything than our television schedules, and those can be staggered too.
Personally, I wouldn't mind year-round daylight saving time, where solar noon is pretty much at 1pm, give or take. Since we're on DST most of the year, this is just a minor change during the lesser-light months. Plus, how many would enjoy having more light toward the end of the day in Winter?
Concerning school schedules. Start school no earlier than 4 hours before noon. If noon comes at 1pm, then start school, whether elementary, middle, or high, at 9am. Let them sleep in. Let them go when it's always light out, which would be 4 hours before noon during the winter for most of the U.S. if I'm not mistaken. So what if they have to end school at 4pm to 5pm. What about sports: stadium lighting. School cannot afford stadium lighting? Maybe the federal government could provide grants. Afterall, this is more or less a safety issue, if they need stadium lighting to do what I said.
I want a patch for my operating system that will automatically let me know when Congress does something stupid...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
with the change EST will only be in effect for 4.5 months. If EST is so unwanted, why don't we just go all the way and do away with EST and use EDT all year around?
It's stupid, right now its getting dark at 6:00pm, its about damn 'time' they did this. They should make the change 2 hours as well. 90% of the population is no longer farmers, damn it takes the gov a lot of time to catch up.
"I've never had to worry about Australia, though -- do they play with clocks down there or do they have better things to do?"
The sheep are hoping the clocks will get picked on more.
I work for one of the "dying breed" of Daytime ONLY AM radio stations. Because of the effects of the sun on the ionosphere, Medium Wave (AM Broadcast) signals bounce off of a layer the ionosphere at night, and are absorbed by a different layer which forms during daylight hours. As a result, a number of stations were allowed to operate only during daylight, when the dominating station on that frequency would not be affected.
Case-in-point, WFIF where I work. WTOP (now WTWP) has operated on 1500Khz for many decades. They are the dominant station on that frequency for the entire Eastern half of the US. (At night, you can hear them from Maine to Florida. Been there, done it.) They are located in Washington, DC. WFIF was licensed to operate on that frequency in 1965, as a daylight-only station. Thus, every day at the FCC-established "legal sunset", we must sign off. We cannot return to the air until the FCC-defined "legal sunrise". (The FCC defines the sunrise/set times for each month, based on an average, so the actual sign-on/off times remain the same through each month.)
Now we throw the DST/Standard time curveball into this. Because the sun doesn't change, only our clocks do, this affects when we can sign-on and off, and it affects our program schedule.
Example- under the present system, in October, during DST, we sign-on at 7am and off at 6:30pm. When we change to Standard time on that last Sunday, we get to sign-on at 6am and off at 5:30pm until we hit November. In November, we sign-on at 6:45, and off at 5pm.
Now throw this new monkey wrench into the works...
We will no longer have *any* Standard time operation in October, because it won't kick-in until November... so, that means we won't be able to sign-on until 7:45am! (Right now, our latest sign-on is 7:15am in December & January.) That's pretty darned late in the morning to be signing-on! Once Standard time takes effect, we'd be back to where we are, now: 6:45am to 5pm.
In March of '07, we're going to have another curveball to throw at our audience... we will have been signing-on at 6am for the first few weeks of March. Then the clocks will be changed. Now, we won't be able to sign-on until 7am! Programming that had already re-established itself with our audience will go on yet another hiatus, before returning in April. (The early morning music program already goes away in October & Dec/Jan due to the later sign-on.)
So, as you can see, there are some radio stations and listeners that are going to be ***VERY*** inconvenienced by this mess.
We won't even go into the issue of how many computers are out there still running Windows 98SE, which won't be getting any help from Papa Bill to patch it's internal time-shifting routines. I am hoping for a 3'rd party solution... but won't hold my breath. Since we still have a fair number of perfectly functional Win98SE boxes running, we'll just have to disable the automatic time-shift routines, and do it manually.
Willie...
President Bush signed this into law (Energy Policy Act of 2005). It was under the guise of energy conservation. Perhaps the Democrats can come up with a better solution.
Obviously, the real reason they are doing this is to force the entire country to buy new clocks which will spy on you, figure out if you are a "political dissident", and send the data to the Haliburton death squads.
We're all fucked!
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
The switch from Standard Time to Daylight Savings Time results in an increased number of
car accidents. (The switch back doesn't have much affect on the accident rate.) We would
save lives by not doing the switch.
Why would you want more of it? When are you fuckin' normals going to learn that the Sun is a killer?
How we know is more important than what we know.
is, much to my disgust, considering DST. I think my wife said they were calling it natsunojikan. She doesn't care for the idea, but doesn't get up in arms about it either. (Lousy Japanese attitude of trusting the guys in charge.)
She also said that the initial experiments were in Hokkaido, and that the farmers up there are really impressed with it. They seem to think it gives them extra hours to work.
I have to admit, though, I find DST much less disgusting than e-voting.
Only embedded apps that don't phone home will be affected. And apps written by people who don't know how to code. I'm sure Windows has a similar library.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
2006-08-17 14:21:13 Standard Time/Daylight Savings Time changes (Ask Slashdot,Enlightenment) (rejected)
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
At least one of the key airline ground systems I worked on during that time would have failed if we hadn't done an audit and discovered the fact that it wasn't ready for Y2K.
It wasn't that the application code wasn't smart enough, but the system binary-to-character and character-to-binary time conversion routines had a data table they used which was generated at assembly time, and that table was only set up in the code through 31 December 2000.
It would have failed on 01 January 2001.
It might be that the quantity and thoroughness of testing we did was overkill, but some serious issues were found in the process, and in the end it was probably well worth it (a failure in some places would have cost us a LOT more than the whole Y2K project).
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Remember there are two time changes per year, spring & fall.
The problem is that you have to deal with systems that get it wrong - twice. So next year in March you deal with the systems that should have changed but didn't, and then in April, the systems that shouldn't change but did. True, they should have been dealt with in March, but their is a reason Murphy's Law exists.
Then you can repeat in October & November.
It really sucks that people think of Y2K as a "joke", when the only reason it passed without incident is because so many people worked so hard and so long to prevent the chaos from happening.
I was one of them, and it was a *LOT* of work. I think we did damn well.
You're making far too many assumptions about people's time habits and occupations.
Just because it's 8am local time doesn't mean that everyone is having breakfast. I've just gone to sleep at that time, out of preference. And many of my colleagues keep hours scattered all around the clock because they do Internet support.
Life's not as conveniently packaged as you seem to think. UTC everywhere would make a lot of sense, and we'd soon get used to it. And DST just makes zero sense in this day and age.
Why on earth does the US have a law on when should a bar close. I used to own a bar with some friends and would close it when we saw fit. Usually between 3 and 5 am. The "land of the free" sure seem less "freer" each time i look.
I'm still running RH9 and when I do yum update zoneinfo or yum update timezone none of the repos I'm using has such a package. Where do you get them? What package are they in? What legacy repos are out there that provide them?
I'm hypothyroid and find I tend to go to bed later & later. I think it's usually slight hormonal problems. Some people talk about adrenal fatigue coexisting with hypothyroidism, and cortisol is an adrenal hormone that regulates your activity during the day (I think).
Interestingly, when I was painting & repainting my skin with iodine (self-treatment), I found I'd get tireder in the evening, and at the same time every evening, so I naturally fell in to a normal day-time routine (and generally felt less ill/hypothyroid). I've commenced thyroxine treatment now (although at a very low level of supplemental hormone at the moment) and stopped iodine painting, so my symptoms have become worse again. I'll be getting a higher dose of thyroxine soon!
My TSH: 4.72
thyroid antibodies: 'suspect/elevated'
GrimRC
Hummm... the only reason y2k turned out to be a joke was because a lot of people like me put in long hours upgrading systems and rewriting programs.
By the way two months before y2k I got a new job. I spent about 60 hours a week for those whole two months planning for and fixing y2k problems on servers that probably have at least a little of _your_ financial data on them.
Happily y2k came and went in my data center without incident.
Every wrong attempt discarded is a step forward - T. Edison
I think shifting daylight savings around randomly is flat-out stupid.. in fact the very existience of daylight savings is too. But, my system has locale and zoneinfo files that take care of this. Pretty much, as long as I update my gentoo boxes by next year whenever DST is, I'll be fine.
I'm using a WWVB radiop controlled alarm clock. MST/MDT conversions are made when Big Brother says to do it. Likewise, running nisttime daily keeps the computers on schedule. If you NIST says it's daylight savings time, it's daylight savings time.