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?"

Comments

I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Loconut1389]

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.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[porkThreeWays]

Great idea! Hey, while you're at it why don't you get America to use the metric system too.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[__aaclcg7560]

America should be using metrics anyway. :P

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[kfg]

I don't see why we can't just all use GMT.

Because when you say 12:00 I know you mean noon, no matter where in the world you are.

If you ever leave the bunker and go out in the big blue room (or even the big black one) you'll discover that times still have real, physical meaning. Like any good techie use whatever reference or system of units that is most appropriate for the problem at hand.

KFG

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[ereshiere]

Are you a vampire?

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Loconut1389]

I'd vote for that too- they've been teaching it in schools here for at least 20 years. Maybe not flip the switch overnight, but start putting highway signs in both on every sign (not just a few every hundred miles on major highways)- then people will have a real feel for how fast 100km/h is and how long it takes them to go 40km to work. Once people 'feel' the distances/measurements, it'll be much easier.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[BoberFett]

Yeah, times have real, physical meaning. Unless you live in some place that doesn't do daylight savings. Arizona does not observe daylight savings. Or are in some weird time zone. Kathmandu is a 15 minute time zone instead of a full hour. Or live on the edge of a time zone. I've heard rumors of a bar in Florida that is somehow in two separate time zones. When it's closing time on the east coast, people pick up their drinks and move to the other side of the bar where they continue to drink for another hour.

What a joke.

No, times and time zones are arbitrary and have no real meaning. I've often thought the world should just use GMT. Wouldn't it be nice if you would just know what hours a business was open without having to calculate time zone differences, and then try to remember what the rules are for that timezone? I just recently missed a new episode of a TV show I enjoy because the time I saw was given in EST instead of CST. (Fortunately they rerun that show several times) Times only have a meaning because we give them one. If the country can adjust to a new daylight savings schedule, I'm sure we could adjust to a decent universal time system.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Loconut1389]

ok- so you know I mean noon, but then you still may not know exactly when that is depending on whether that state observes DST or what part of the state they're in for states that are in more than one timezone. Basically, wherever you are in the world, you still need to know the offset. The confusing part about DST is, like here in Iowa, we're -5 GMT for some of the year and -6 the rest. Most of the time, I don't remember whether DST means we're -5 or if it means we're -6. Restated- I know our time just changed, but I don't know if we're now -in- daylight savings or we just got -off- daylight savings. Sure, I could google it, but I don't just know offhand. IMHO, it'd be much easier if you just knew that your friend around the globe gets up at 23:00 and goes to bed at 13:00. Most of the time, you need to know that anyway so that you don't wake someone up. What does 'noon' have to do with anything? Just ask when they have their lunch hour, unless you're planning on having a duel at high noon (which isn't at precisely 12 by the clock anyway).

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[WilliamSChips]

Because when you say 12:00 I know you mean noon, no matter where in the world you are.

Only in 12-hour time. This ambiguity is why my watch is set to 24-hour military time even though the closest to the military I plan to get is watching SG-1.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[kfg]

. . .your friend around the globe. . .

How many radians apart are we?

KFG

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[kfg]

Only in 12-hour time.

I knew you'd show up. :)

KFG

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[MeanMF]

You'd still have to know more or less what time zone other people are in...And I don't think the Japanese, Australians, Californians, etc. would appreciate their normal business hours spanning two days.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[aduzik]

Quick: the current time is 00:30 -- is it morning, midday, or night where I live? If I open my business at 12:00 and close at 22:00, what kind of business do I most likely own: a coffee shop/lunch place, a retail store or a restaurant? If I open at 16:00 and close at 02:00, can you make a sign that (in a non-confusing way) makes it obvious to my customers that, while I open on Monday and stay open continuously until Tuesday, that I'm actually only open for ten hours?

Now what if I tell you it's 6:30 PM local time? I don't even have to tell you where I live, do I? You would know that it's about dinnertime here, regardless of where "here" is.

I live in the states, but the time is 00:30 UTC everywhere right now. If I call my grandma in Australia, is she going to say, "ugh! Why did you call me at 00:30?" or is she going to say, "oh, you picked a perfect time to call." (My grandma does, in fact, talk like that, by the way.)

The point of time zones and "local time" is that it provides *context*. Wednesday is going to turn into Thursday (or already has) in the middle of the night -- for everybody. With UTC, it would be Thursday here in most of the US already. So while it may be a pain to have to adjust for local time in other localities, at least you'll know about what time of day it is there. Unless you happen to live in Greenwich, or maybe one or two time zones in either direction, using UTC would be nothing but a pain in the ass. Do you really think it would make sense for me to leave for work on Sunday "evening" and get home on Monday "morning" -- to say nothing about how lame New Year's Eve parties would be in most of the world. (In Eastern Europe and Asia, you'd enjoy a celebratory cup of joe first thing in the morning. How fun.)

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Doogie5526]

What about making the KPH larger and the MPH smaller on the sign? Back home, on a major highway, they switched exits from numbers to mile markers a couple years ago and that's what they did. Old exit numbers were small, new ones were big. It made it easier for people who knew "To get to the park, get off on exit 21."

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Loonacy]

Even if you moved everything to GMT, you'd still have to account for geographical locations. Bars would have to close at the equivalent of 1AM (or whatever the law is where you are) meaning your bar in Florida would still likely have 2 different closing times for each half. Time zones won't just "go away" if everyone started using GMT, because time zones DO have real meaning. Or are you implying the sun would miraculously rise at 06:00GMT everywhere in the world?

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[WilliamSChips]

Glad to be of service. :)

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[hal2814]

I LOVE Daylight Saving Time. I'd love even more to not need it but I have an 8AM - 5PM job. As long as that remains the case, I'll take going to work while it's still dark over going home at dusk.

As an anecdotal story, I used to drive to work going East. Starting early fall, the sun would be in my eyes every morning. Then it would finally be dark my whole commute when DST would end and put the sun right back in my eyes!

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[cloricus]

Erm since when does the military own 24 hour time? They use it to make sure people aren't idiots and mistake timings though the system of time itself comes from Europe and really has nothing to do with any army much like the mills system.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Instead of 12:00 it would be 1200 hours. It's twelve either way.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[WilliamSChips]

They don't own it but you rarely see 24-hour time in the United States outside of the military.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[WilliamSChips]

12:00 in a 12-hour system can mean either midnight or noon. In a 24-hour system it's always noon.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[fbartho]

not enough apparently. ;)

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[cloricus]

Hmm ish. You are really replacing one hard problem with one easier problem. For example people currently say 5 pm EST with the rude assumption that who ever is reading it a) knows whos Eastern Standard Time that is talking about and b) its GMT conversion amount. Where as if you moved to global 24 hour time you kill both of those problems and have one new problem of a) I have to learn which times mean what in my area (eg for Australia sun up would now be 2000 hours instead of 0600) with the huge advantage that you can easily move times around and make missing international meetings impossible...You may need to know when their sun up is to have an objective view on their day (from sun up to sun down) though that isn't a requirement for every zone you see a time for, only those you need to directly interact with unlike the current system. In reality it is just different to the system you use now; adapting to it would be rather easy and there are some clear advantages.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Anonymous Freak]

Go near the Canadian and Mexican borders. On many highways, they are signed primarly in Metric.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Anonymous Freak]

Aviation, medical, police, fire, and others where unambiguity is essential all use 24-hour time. (I had a heck of a time finding my wife a stylish women's watch with 24-hour markings on it, as she works in a hospital, and needs to write everything down in 24-hour notation.)

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[cloricus]

I plead cultural ignorance! ;) In Australia 24 hour time is some thing every person knows of and can convert to and from...Few people use it often though it is 'about' and required learning.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[BoberFett]

So the two halves of the bar in two separate time zones are actually an hour apart? Those alcoholics must be breaking some of ground speed record every time they get up to use the john. Until our clocks and watches are continuously and automatically adjusted based on our longitude and the rotation of the Earth, no there is no physical meaning. It's simply the agreed upon time for your little portion of the planet. So if time is simply that which society agrees upon, how is it any different to use GMT rather than some half baked time zone lines and the rules which come with them?

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[BoberFett]

Yes, I truly believe that once time zones are eliminated, the world will flatten and god will simply flip the earth toward and away from the earth every 12 hours. Feigning idiocy will get you nowhere. Come up with a real response, I'll give you the same courtesy.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[BoberFett]

We also capitalize the initial words of our sentences in English. Got any more smartass remarks, dipshit?

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick: the current time is 00:30 -- is it morning, midday, or night where I live? If I open my business at 12:00 and close at 22:00, what kind of business do I most likely own: a coffee shop/lunch place, a retail store or a restaurant? If I open at 16:00 and close at 02:00, can you make a sign that (in a non-confusing way) makes it obvious to my customers that, while I open on Monday and stay open continuously until Tuesday, that I'm actually only open for ten hours?

Quick: the current local time when I made this post was 00:30 -- how long ago was that? If I scheduled a conference call at my local time 11:00 that ends at my local time 12:00, what your-local-time time will you have lunch? If I don't live in the Western Hemisphere and am online starting at 16:00 until 2:00, can you make a profile for my corporate intranet data page that (in a non-confusing way) makes it obvious to my global co-workers that, while I log on on Monday (my time) and stay online continuously until Tuesday (my time), that I'm actually only online for ten hours?

They are two different systems, and each has its advantages. They both require some additional information to get the full picture: one needs extra info (amount of sunlight) to determine local time of day, and one needs extra info (location) to determine amount of time lapsed.

I'm not trying to make a case for or against either, I'm just saying calm down.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[cpt kangarooski]

Hm, I haven't heard of a bar in FL that actually sits on the line, but it is certainly possible to walk from one to another and cross the line in the process. Of course, having lived in the FL panhandle, I can certainly attest to the fact that an extra hour of drinking time is about all there is to look forward to.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Propaganda13]

DST is stupid. The sun rises at ~6:30 now instead of ~7:30. It sets at ~04:45 instead of ~5:45. How does this help anyone? I can't even see how it would help save energy.
Getting rid of DST would have little to no impact for most people.

As far as using GMT, I'd have no problem with that either and might as well get everyone on a 24hr clock too while we're at it.
This would involve a lot of small changes - business hour signs, clocks, etc. plus take awhile for people to get used to it.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[hpa]

Because when you say 12:00 I know you mean noon, no matter where in the world you are.

Only in 12-hour time. This ambiguity is why my watch is set to 24-hour military time even though the closest to the military I plan to get is watching SG-1.

Actually, 12:00 is noon in 24-hour time too. However, midnight is not 12:00 in 24-hour time; that, of course, is written 00:00 (or 24:00 if you want to associate it with the previous day's date.) 12- and 24-hour time agrees from 01:00 (AM) until one minute after 12:59 (PM).

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[honkycat]

Using GMT is easier for the specific problem of arranging international conference calls and similar things. It's less convenient for almost any other use. If I want to book a flight to Ouagadougu, I want to arrive at a reasonable time (locally) so I want to see a flight arrival time in local time. When I get there, I want to ask the guy at the hotel what time they serve breakfast and get an answer that I can immediately relate to the behavior of the sun and moon. Further, it's not any harder to look up what the offset for EST is than it is to look up whether Adelaide has daylight at 14:30 GMT. If you frequently work with people in a time zone, you learn the offset.

Still, for the specific purpose of arranging conference calls, it can be convenient to work in GMT. So use it for that! You've still got to check that it's a reasonable time for all the attendees, involving table lookups, but at least only one person has to do the lookups. For my conf calls, we just post the time for each location in the announcement.

Overall, I really don't see the logic to switching wholesale over to GMT time being that compelling. Local time is useful beyond being what we're just used to.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[91degrees]

Ireland switched over a couple of years ago. Their society hasn't collapsed just yet. The US is a bigger place, so might not be quite so easy to do so quickly but it would be possible. The real problem is ingrained habits. Britain has been nominally metric for quite some time, but people still want to know about milk and beer in pints, butter in pounds, and fuel efficency in mpg.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[guet]

Quick: the current time is 00:30 -- is it morning, midday, or night where I live?
I live in the states, but the time is 00:30 UTC everywhere right now. If I call my grandma in Australia, is she going to say, "ugh! Why did you call me at 00:30?" or is she going to say, "oh, you picked a perfect time to call." (My grandma does, in fact, talk like that, by the way.)

Let's look at the present situation - before you call your grandma, you need to know 3 things :
What time (local time) does she get up/go to bed
What is the local time offset from where she lives to where you live
What is the daylight savings offset where she lives?
Then you do a calculation based on your local time (unless you have a clock on your wall set to grandma time)

If everyone uses the same time you need to know one thing
What time UTC she gets up/goes to bed

No calculation involved, and less things to know. Now maybe for your grandma you've already memorised this information, but if you deal with a lot of people in different time zones, it becomes a pain quite fast.

The reason for daylight savings is to have more daylight in the hours we are up doing stuff - a far better system would be to have a universal time and properly local decisions (taken by your place of work or institution) on when to go to work and when to vary those hours in winter. If you lived someplace slightly out of the way you'd know that the current daylight savings system is a farce for many people anyway, because it's chosen to fit a whole country/state, some of which it doesn't suit at all.

The point of time zones and "local time" is that it provides *context*. Wednesday is going to turn into Thursday (or already has) in the middle of the night -- for everybody.

Just because you change the times to UTC doesn't mean you have to make days change at absurd times. Days and concepts like noon etc could stay attached to the solar calendar, since that's what they describe, and switch over at an arbitrary hour in different regions. For most places in the world you'll still be on the same day, just offset a bit, and people care far more about the time than the day in other places. If I want to talk to someone, I don't really care if it's Wednesday or Thursday where you live, but I do care if you're available. If you did what you're suggesting (divorced days from the solar clock), you'd be better off getting rid of days, months and years altogether and working with kiloseconds, gigaseconds etc. At some point we may do this, particularly if we don't all live on the same rock. The current calendar is a bit of a mess anyway, and doesn't even fit the solar year very well.

Daylight savings (and indeed local time itself) is confusing and anachronistic, and it's time it was replaced with something which was more useful and locally flexible. Getting rid of it would help a lot of people who at present have hours imposed by a central authority rather than just deciding on them themselves, and also people who live far apart and want to plan meetings etc.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[maetenloch]

If it wasn't for drugs, most Americans would probably never learn the metric system - well at least the mass and volume parts of it. Too bad there's not something illegal involving kilometers.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[famebait]

Millimeters are also quite popular in some circles. At least if there's nine of them.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[tomknight]

Okay.... I guess all of the US, China and Russia will be only too glad to switch to GMT, so 12 noon would be in the morning or evening depending on where you are. Would you then expect people in those countries to start work at 9am GMT, or would you allow them to consider the local lighting conditions (caused by the sun)? Maybe then we could say "Okay, it's 9am here there and everywhere, but I understand that Mr Rostov on Vladivostok might not be out of bed at the same time as Mr Jones of London, so I'll ring him in 6 hours (or whatever) when he'll in the office.".... is this perhaps what time zones are for?

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[tomknight]

GMT only.... d'you think the French would like that?

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[CAIMLAS]

Well, obviously we'd have to change the way we refer to time. Instead of saying "it's 11am here" (as it is currently for me, at US Central Standard adjusted forward 6 hours to match gmt) you'd say "I'm -6 GMT here" or maybe "11am minus 6" or something to that effect. Not only would it tell the same information but it would provide more.

But: I do agree that changing it is stupid. Daylight savings does have application - particularly to farmers, ranchers, etc. who by essence set their daily schedule to the light of the day. In many parts of the US that's not so much the case anymore (ie automated machinery can do the work for you while you sleep/fish/hunt/whatever), but it is in some respects still.

Not only that, but the concept of a day is still determined by one rotation of the sun. One rotation from point A is the same amount of time as one rotation from point B or X. There's nothing "special" about Greenwich which should give it preference (no, no, we should base it on Springfield, Missouri! that's the ticket!)

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[A beautiful mind]

In Eastern Europe

While it's just a nitpick I thought I'd correct you that Eastern Europe is GMT+3 at max, so there is three hours of difference, not suprising since GMT is in Western Europe...

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[dctoastman]

No, DST has nothing to do with farming. Farmers don't give a squat about the clock. The sun rises when it does and sets when it does. Artificial means of tracking it won't change it.

However, DST _was_ implemented during WWI to conserve energy. Once the war was over, DST was no longer nationally observed. Then it was observed again during WWII for much the same reason. But when that war ended, we didn't switch back.

http://www.standardtime.com/

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Phreakiture]

Hey, how about this. Here where I live I will call tomatoes oranges and you call them apples where you live.

Kind of makes me think of "chips" (as in potato)...

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[stanmann]

Yes, but when dealing with strangers you only need to know basic human behaviour. and the UTC differential.

Most people get up between 0530 and 0800 local. so after 0800 local is a socially acceptable time to call.

Most people eat lunch between 1030 local and 1330 local so if you call their place of business you are likely to miss them.

most people go to bed between 2100 and 2359 local, so after 2100 local is an inappropriate time to call a stranger.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[fbjon]

Time zones are just to avoid having a continuum of changing time around the world, instead opting for discrete zones so that clocks can be synchronized in a sane way, while preserving the way people use them.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[fbjon]

That has no bearing on the issue, it's still the same context of evening. Consider: even if everyone used GMT, you'd still need to check what the local customs are to figure out if it's dinner time or not, and that's after checking if it's even evening or not.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[kabocox]

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 have the same feelings towards it. I've never understood why they couldn't just shift us 30 mins one way or the other and just be done with it. So what if the days or shorter in winter and longer in summer. If I got up around sunrise and did out door work I'd notice. I work in an office building with these things called "lights." It really doesn't matter what it looks like outside as long as my work environment is properly lit.

I don't think this will be that big a deal for business. It certainly won't be a big deal to the average person. Why? Becasue the average person has to spend the two daylight savings weekends changing clocks. The only clock that I own that auto updates is my WinXP computer. All the other clocks, the alarm clocks, TVs, VCRs, stero, microwave oven, stoves, watches, and car radios. I like have clocks all over the place. I don't understand why they can't have an auto time sych for all those devices so folks would never, ever have to set or change a clock's time. Come on, it's 2006 we should be able to figure that one out. Oh well, we are spoiled even having all these mass cheap accurate clocks around everywhere.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[FacePlant]

Back home, on a major highway, they switched exits from numbers to mile markers a couple years ago and that's what they did. Old exit numbers were small, new ones were big. It made it easier for people who knew "To get to the park, get off on exit 21."

The best part of making exit numbers reflect the mile markers that they're near is that
folks who can do simple math can figure out how far it is to the next exit.

If I just passed exit 125 and I know the next exit is at 142, I can ask my kid if their
bladder is going to explode right now, or can they hold it in for another 7 miles. If we
just passed exit 5, I more than likely have no idea how far it is to exit 6. Better pull
off to the right and send them behind a tree. No fun.

You can put distances in km on the road signs as long as you put km markers along
the road to go with the mile markers. You better make the km markers a different color too, so they don't blend in with the mile markers.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Gr8Apes]

Naah, why don't we just standardize on the world-standard signage of round signs with red circles for metric signs? Then there's no confusion, and they'd save cash by not printing "KPH" or "Speed Limit" everywhere.

It'd also make traveling from country to country easier.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[FacePlant]

Or Dad made a typo that he didn't catch in preview.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[jafac]

Ironically - MY customer wants all of their systems to uniformly display time in UTC (what they call "Zulu-time". - UTC is a good enough approximation for what it really is).

But over the years they've switched back and forth, because certain high level (military) officials still couldn't show up at certain events on time because they couldn't figure out Zulu. You'd think they taught this stuff at OCS. Yeah, working for the DoD sucks sometimes.

Eventually, we just installed dual-clock display software, that displays the time in both UTC and local. Unfortunately, that doesn't help with COTS software that's only designed to display one or the other. (And some with bugs that don't display it correctly).

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[drinkypoo]

The resistance in the US comes mostly from mechanics and carpenters - everyone else is just apathetic, except engineers and nerds and people who work on import cars who would rather see everything move to metric. Personally I far prefer metric but I can estimate sizes by eye in both english and metric, I actually spent literally days in a "tools" class required for any automotive certificate at Yuba College (Marysville, CA, USA) doing just this along with my classmates. Then we moved on to precision measurement.

Regardless, carpenters and such have programmed their brain to use our retarded system of measurement and they think in fractional inches. If they tried to go metric, most of them would be trying to work with metric equivalents and getting pissed off that they have to do math instead of just building to metric dimensions. Meanwhile the domestic car fans have always bitched and moaned when they came across a metric bolt, which makes sense; no vehicle should ever have a mix of SAE and SI except for those things which are always SAE: oil drain plug, and spark plugs. All common spark plugs have SAE wrench flats, and a metric thread. These people have been conditioned against metric...

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[drinkypoo]

I guess all of the US, China and Russia will be only too glad to switch to GMT, so 12 noon would be in the morning or evening depending on where you are.

First of all, "twelve noon" is a misnomer all but one day a year; "noon" is the time when the sun is at its zenith in your sky which is as always relative to your location.

Maybe then we could say "Okay, it's 9am here there and everywhere, but I understand that Mr Rostov on Vladivostok might not be out of bed at the same time as Mr Jones of London, so I'll ring him in 6 hours (or whatever) when he'll in the office."

Uh, what? When you want to call someone in another country you already have to look up their offset (if you don't already know it.) The offset is what is important in deciding when to call him, not what number that works out to where HE is. All you have to know is what time you have to call him based on the offset. This would change nothing.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[conigs]

You do realize that daylight savings time is now over, not starting, right?

As an example, without daylight saving's time, the sunrise in Chicago on July 2nd this year would have been 4:19am and sunset would have been 7:29pm (instead of 5:19/8:29 by applying DST). The piont of DST was to make better use of the daylight in the morning during the Summer months and give us more light in the evening.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[drinkypoo]

Hate to be redundant, but I'm glad to know that people who work in hospitals are too stupid to add 12 if the sun has passed the meridian. That really makes me feel good about health care. What hospital does she work in again?

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[drinkypoo]

If I want to book a flight to Ouagadougu, I want to arrive at a reasonable time (locally) so I want to see a flight arrival time in local time.

If you don't know the offset from GMT of the place where you live, then you shouldn't be traveling anywhere. If you don't know the offset from GMT of the place where you're going, then you shouldn't be going there as you clearly don't know what the fuck you're doing.

Under the current system you can take off from one place, fly three hours, and land only two hours after you left. This is just stupid and only makes things harder. The only reason you think it doesn't is that you've invested a lot of time and effort learning to understand the current system - or, you only think you understand it, and really you're just muddling along with a lot of external help, like most people. (What time is it in Tokyo right now? *looks up at the long row of clocks on the wall*)

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[brain159]

Except in the UK, where the limits are defined in MPH, signed with a plain number-in-a-red-circle, with no unit indicator.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Myopic]

i love your plan, but instead of GMT, please use my personal local time. i mean, right now i live in Juneau, Alaska, so please use that as your time, wherever you live. i'll let you know if i move, so you can change your clocks.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Kirmeo]

but start putting highway signs in both on every sign

This was the plan in the '70s. Canada was going along with the plan and spent the millions it took to switch all of the country over to metric. Then the US balked with a resounding "SIKE!"

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Anonymous Freak]

And do you work in an environment where the situation around you is quite literally "life and death"? Where split-second decisions are needed, and sometimes people just can't quite remember to add 12 to the time? (Not that they CAN'T do it, just that they don't remember to.) When they write down that a patient last had their medicine at 1:32, and the next nurse interprets that as AM, when it was really PM, and gives them a second dose immediately, that can cause problems.

Sometimes, it's just easier to be unambiguous. And when you have mere moments to write it down, it's easier to be unambiguous when you don't HAVE to think about it.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[winnabago]

I've heard this argument before - how nice it would be to be able to figure out how far the next exit is, and no renumbering when a new one is added. But what if you don't know the number of the next exit? You may as well list the distance if you are going to list the designation. "Exit 45 - 19 miles" Is just as simple as "Next Exit - 64" in my book.

I've always wondered why there is a push for changing, there is also the trade off of losing the ability to count exits as a reference, which is how many non-geeks tend to navigate (think of the subway, you don't keep checking your watch to find out when it's your stop, you subliminally mark each one off as they pass). On top of this, the mile-marker system breaks down when there are multiple exits in a short section of road.

Maine changed all the exits on 95 recently, and had to go back and put up a bunch of little "Old Exit ##" tags under the new ones, presumably because of complaints. So, it just creates confusion where there was none before.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[DudeTheMath]

No, the problem is that DST is too complicated for many people. I get so frustrated by people who use "EST" when they mean simply "ET" (that is, EST in the winter, EDT in the summer). Partly that comes from having lived in South Bend, IN, for seven years; most of IN just started observing DST this year. It's terribly confusing to arrange conference calls when one week you were on the same time as New York, and the next week you weren't, and the guys in NY said the call would be at "11am EST" in the email. No, sorry, that's at 10am EST, idiot.

Anybody remember when MacConnection offered $3 overnight shipping for all orders placed, according to the catalog, "by 11pm EST"? Well, I tried that once at 10:30pm EST (in June). No amount of arguing by me would get them to bring the truck back to the loading dock which it had left at 10:20pm EST (which was, after all, 11:20pm ET). But within about six months, the catalog said "by 11pm ET." And then within another six months, they'd dropped the $3 flat shipping rate anyway.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[wwphx]

Don't forget astronomy! They use both 24 hour time and GMT.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Ashtead]

They've been trying for ages to do that but they're going about it the wrong way. I can still remember that 1 Quart bottle was labeled as containing 0.945 Liters, and the sign on I-5 going southbound coming from Vancouver that read "Speed limit 88 km/h". Now, 1 Quart and 55 Miles are nice and round numbers, and if the metric system is forcing people to put up with things like 0.945 or signs posting the speed limit in weird increments like 88 km/h ... then they won't be having any of it. Heck, even I who came from Europe and having grown up with the metric system realized that this couldn't work. Make the bottles an even Liter and make the traditional Quarts come in increments of 1.0582, or make the speed limit 90 km/h even and post them as "56 MPH" to make the old units seem antiquated, tedious, and less useful, and then there might arise a desire for change.

As to daylight savings time, that is just daft no matter what. I'm running everything here on UTC anyways now and then just add the one or two hours to figure out the civil time, keeps me having to re-set the clocks twice a year.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[eugene ts wong]

Am I allowed to leave for work an hour later, have lunch an hour later, and leave work an hour later? I realize that some companies are very flexible, but not all. I was just a general labourer for a construction company, and because I did not watch the clock, the foreman took time out of his busy schedule to swear at me speak down at me. The reason for that is because he has bad people skills, and can't deal with stress, and because they want to keep us synchronized.

I know what you're saying, but just getting up and hour later or earlier won't change the tv schedules or work schedules. Life is weird that way.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Mattintosh]

Unless you happen to live in Greenwich, or maybe one or two time zones in either direction, using UTC would be nothing but a pain in the ass.

Or if you happen to be a sailor in the Navy. They use it too, but they call it "Zulu". Zulu = GMT = UTC. (With minor, cosmetic differences.)

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[honkycat]

Why exactly do you need to know the offset from GMT to qualify to travel somewhere? I fail to see how this supports the idea that it's easier to live in a GMT-only world.

Here's the bottom line. Some calculations are easier to do in GMT, some are easier to do in local time. Which is more convenient depends on which calculations you're doing. Neither is inherently superior -- they both have strengths and weaknesses. Reasonable people will differ on which they want to use, but it's evident which method most people prefer.

There's no need to get pissy about how the unwashed masses are using an intellectually inferior timekeeping system. I know it may seem that your superior knowledge of sums and differences places you in a unique position to dictate timekeeping conventions, but it's actually not hard to convert from one to the other. From time to time you'll need to do that either way you operate.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[meringuoid]

I'll take going to work while it's still dark over going home at dusk.

Seriously?

Either way you've got to drive in the dark, whether it's in the morning or in the evening. As it stands, I'm driving to work in the daylight, and driving home in the dark. Would I mind doing it the other way round? Not really. But I've no problem with the current arrangement either.

What I have a problem with is not the driving in the dark. It's getting up beforehand. I just can't get up before sunrise. It's not natural. For a few weeks around Christmas I have to force myself to do it, and I hate it hate it hate it. I'll gladly trade that hour of light in the evening for one in the morning, if it means I'm getting up with the sun the way a million years of evolution built me to do.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Better yet: Use TAI, and do away with leap seconds too!

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Your health care system must suck. In most developed countries, hospitals are enclosed, multi-floor buildings, where the sky isn't necessarily visible in every room.

It's simple process engineering; You design the process to require as little thought as possible, because it reduces the probability of error.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[jafuser]

What if they use the old system and want to add a new exit between exit 40 and 41?

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[FacePlant]

Maine changed all the exits on 95 recently, and had to go back and put up a bunch of little "Old Exit ##" tags under the new ones, presumably because of complaints. So, it just creates confusion where there was none before.

I think there was confusion, because whoever decided that the
exist should be marked by mile, also apparently decided that
they no longer needed the old numbers. That's a whole other
thread on poor gov't decision making.

But you make a good point nonetheless, and it has been my
experiance that the exits along most roads where the switch
has happened have dual numbering. The number have to work for
the drivers who drive the road every day, and those who drive
it once, or once in a while.

I like to keep an atlas in the car. I also like to have
my GPSr with me. Between the two, I can
usually tell where abouts I am, and how far to the next
exit or rest stop. But when I don't, It is nice for the
exit signs to tell me how far to the next exit. My personal
experience was driving across Penn. on 80. There are long
stretches where it is 30 or 40 miles between exits. Even with
an atlas, it is much easier for me with the exits numbered by
mile.

We can put all of that info on the great big exit signs,
and each of us can get the information in the way that we
like to receive it.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[Karthikkito]

40 becomes 40a, and then you get 40b as the new one.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[BoberFett]

Whatever you say, Cpt. Luddite. I suppose you think the metric system is silly compared to the genius that is the English measurement system.

When you can't even argue the topic and your only rebuttal is childish jabs at me, I think we can safely ignore your ignorant, anonymous opinion.

Re:fp

[Loconut1389]

Except that it'll get its time as GMT and it still has to make the decision about how much to offset it. A simple rules update for linux and windows should take care of a lot of the problem- but many custom apps will have to be altered or potentially produce incorrect times. I imagine .NET will help some of this in the windows world as it'll just use the underlying routines, which can be updated once by an MS update.

I imagine it'll be a headache, but things generally wont come to a screeching halt.

Time for a new alarm clock

[DaveM753]

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?

Re:Time for a new alarm clock

[networkBoy]

My current alarm clock (a sharper image model) shifted one hour in the wrong direction on the last time change :-(
Anyone else have that issue?
-nB

Re:Time for a new alarm clock

[DrData99]

Well I just got a watch that auto switches also. But rather than discard it I will just change the timezone for that month. As the other post stated, it is all formatting...

Re:Time for a new alarm clock

[EvanED]

Um, can't you just change the time yourself?

None of my clocks (except the computer) adjust the time at all when it's time to switch. I have to do it manually. You'd have to do it four times a year instead of two, but big deal? It takes what, 30 seconds to go all the way around? Even four times a year, that's a whopping 0.000095% of your time.

Re:Time for a new alarm clock

[jrmcferren]

I had a clock shift three hours instead of one, now is that odd or what?

Re:Time for a new alarm clock

[RuBLed]

lucky me, I only had to buy a few more jars to hold the additional daylight.

Re:Time for a new alarm clock

[ch-chuck]

Well, if it "sprung ahead" instead of "falling back" at the last time change, you would have showed up at work 2 hours ahead of everybody else. That's the "Sharper Image" part.

Re:Time for a new alarm clock

[Unknown_monkey]

So this will drive the economy! Spend Spend! Buy new clocks, and extra batteries for flashlights! And get a new OS that will autocorrect for the DST change!

Re:Time for a new alarm clock

[JagRoth]

Most atomic clocks don't have rules for when to switch to DST. They just use the code from the time from NIST, which includes a flag to indicate whether DST is in effect or not. As long as NIST changes when they include the DST flag, Atomic clocks should switch to DST on the correct day.

Re:Time for a new alarm clock

[Hillgiant]

My cell phone is off by 42 minutes. I have yet to figure out how that works. It makes calls just fine. Just can't tell time.

Re:Time for a new alarm clock

[lonesome phreak]

My alarm clock started screaming and yelling, then it set itself on fire in protest while playing the national anthem.

Damn that clock makes me proud!

Re:Time for a new alarm clock

[msslc3]

My alarm clock doesn't update for DST. In fact, my new bare-bones VCR solves this problem and the flashing clock problem very simply. It doesn't have a clock. How do you set it in advance to record a program? I don't have a clue because I can't find any programs worth recording. I use it to play movies I don't want to buy a second time.

Re:Time for a new alarm clock

[kchrist]

But the point is that he shouldn't have to. There is absolutely no benefit to this change and I can't for the life of me imagine what they were thinking when they made this decision.

That said, I think DST in stupid in general, but arbitrarily changing it for the US is even worse.

Re:Time for a new alarm clock

[EvanED]

Saying "this is a dumb decision and I wish they hadn't made it" is a far cry from "I'm gonna have to go buy a new clock because of it." The latter is at least as nonsensical as the former...

Over in the islands...

[snuf23]

We don't care about how you silly mainlanders play with your clocks.

Aloha!

Re:Over in the islands...

[PopeRatzo]

Yeah, but you have to import all your corn, soybeans and Macintosh computers.

Pfft.

[T-Ranger]

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.

Re:Pfft.

[SpaceLifeForm]

What is your solution to 03:14:07 January 19, 2038 UTC?

Re:Pfft.

[Marc_Hawke]

Wouldn't that be nice.

We store all our times in seconds from 1970, just like you suggest. However, the end users don't seem to like looking at them, so we convert it to their timezone. If we don't switch with the their watches, then even though we're storing the right time, it LOOKS wrong to them.

We've finally, (sheesh) switched to using OS calls for all our time conversion stuff. So...the answer to broken times is just 'patch your OS.' It's been a nice shift of responsibility.

For our clients (law enforcement) 1 hour means a big deal, "Where you you on the night of the 5th at what might have been 5:30...but maybe not?" and so this is a big deal. We would be SO HAPPY! if they just ditched the whole DST thing instead of screwing it up. They should just expand it another 2 months on each side, and we'd be good.

Re:Pfft.

[Threni]

> What is your solution to 03:14:07 January 19, 2038 UTC?

Presumably the same as his solution to 00:04:15 January 01, 1970 UTC - use a larger datatype.

Re:Pfft.

[Creepy Crawler]

Well, add a 32bit number that keeps track of how many epochs have passed.

03:14:07 Jan 19, 2038 UTC = 00:00:00:01 00:00:00:00

Or is 2^32 epochs not big enough? ;-D

Re:Pfft.

[Ant P.]

Easy; just type "long" twice in the code instead of once.

Re:Pfft.

[maxume]

If there's to be an arbitrary standard, god damn it, it'll be my arbitrary standard.

Re:Pfft.

[0racle]

Who cares, the world is going to end in 2012.

Re:Pfft.

[cortana]

You should be using time_t...

Re:Pfft.

[WilliamSChips]

64-bit computers. :)

Re:Pfft.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only time that matters is seconds since Jan 1, 1970.

Seconds since Jan 1, 1970 where?

Re:Pfft.

[Trogre]

03:14:08 January 19, 2038 UTC, shortly followed by 03:14:09 January 19, 2038 UTC.

Honestly, there's no good excuse for anyone not using at least 64-bit integers to represent unix time these days, yes even on 32-bit architectures.

Re:Pfft.

[chris_eineke]

signed long long

Re:Pfft.

[tepples]

Of course, Ant P. was making a recommendation to the authors of implementations of <time.h>.

Re:Pfft.

[pile0nades]

Here's an idea: every 30 years, make it change from counting from January 1st, 1970, to 30 years later, 2000. 30 years later 2030, and so on. Would that work?

Re:Pfft.

[knorthern knight]

> They should just expand it another 2 months on each side, and we'd be good.

If DST is so f***ing wonderfull, howsabout *PERMANENTLY* switching over to DST?

Re:Pfft.

[jZnat]

typedef int64_t time_t;

Hmm, that should work fine.

Re:Pfft.

[thatguy[tc]]

A 64 bit time_t. Your IRIX systems will keep chugging.

Re:Pfft.

[ebh]

It would be nice, except that the further north you go, the later the sun rises in the late fall and early winter. When they tried this in the late 1970s, kids waiting for the school bus in the dark started getting hit by cars.

Re:Pfft.

[ejdmoo]

Jan 1, 1970 isn't the only Epoch in common use.

Re:Pfft.

[wolrahnaes]

That doesn't seem right. If they're getting hit by cars while waiting for the bus, that means one of two things:

1. The kids are standing in the street. Stupid kids.
2. The car was being driven on the sidewalk. Drunk driver.

The time of day doesn't really come in to play when you have a stupid kid or drunk driver, the accident's going to happen eventually.

Re:fp

[__aaclcg7560]

A lot of electronic devices that can re-adjust the time are hard-coded to change time at the same dates year in and year out. If Daylight Savings Time is extended one way or another, these devices won't display time correctly. Seems like a great conspiracy to get people to upgrade their electronics when they really don't need to.

Y2K a joke?!?!

[NaugaHunter]

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.

Re:Y2K a joke?!?!

[QuantumG]

We're the Casandras of the modern age.

Re:Y2K a joke?!?!

[pla]

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.

I think you meant to phrase that as "A lot of obsolete geeks got to put in a hell of a lot of billable hours as a result of Y2K". Easy mistake, "resolving a problem" to "made a fuckload of cash for babysitting a mainframe". No harm done, eh? ;-)

Re:Y2K a joke?!?!

[mollymoo]

Easy mistake, "resolving a problem" to "made a fuckload of cash for babysitting a mainframe".

Right on dude! I don't even know why they bother babysitting those mainframes running ancient code. Just re-write it all in Ruby. I could have done it in a couple of days. It's not like those mainframes store any really important data, like your bank balance or... Hang on!

Re:Y2K a joke?!?!

[AC5398]

Jerk. A whole lot more went into fixing y2k than babysitting a goddamn mainframe.

But if you'd been someone who did any work for y2k, you'd know that.

Re:Y2K a joke?!?!

[honkycat]

Insightful? No. Troll? Probably not. Funny? Yeah.

Re:Y2K a joke?!?!

[mgblst]

Before Y2k, a lot of systems were worked on to bring them to Y2k compliance. But, there were a lot of systems that weren't, outside of the USA and the UK. These systems had no problem with the date change, so therefore most people think Y2k was not a problem.

I thought most people agree on this, that it was a waste?

Re:Y2K a joke?!?!

[pla]

But if you'd been someone who did any work for y2k, you'd know that.

Sadly, as a mere intern at the time, my employer wouldn't let me in on the cash-grab. But quite a few of my friends and coworkers did get in on it, and it went down almost exactly as I described - A few weeks of OT for reading code running on an ancient VAX, then one HELL of a nice bonus (in the thousands) for spending one single night watching midnight pass through the various timezones in which we did business.

And history already records just how much actually went wrong... Almost nothing.


Jerk. A whole lot more went into fixing y2k than babysitting a goddamn mainframe.

Whatever helps you sleep better on that pile of Y2K contracting cash. Not condemning you for it - Like I said, I would have loved in on that one. But don't get upset if I call a spade, a spade.

Re:Y2K a joke?!?!

[Richard Steiner]

Sadly, as a mere intern at the time, my employer wouldn't let me in on the cash-grab. But quite a few of my friends and coworkers did get in on it, and it went down almost exactly as I described - A few weeks of OT for reading code running on an ancient VAX, then one HELL of a nice bonus (in the thousands) for spending one single night watching midnight pass through the various timezones in which we did business.

OT? What's that? Most of the folks who were doing serious work for Y2K were salaried employees who were part of various IT departments -- some consultants did manage to milk the situation, but we were simply doing our jobs.

As salaried employees, OT doesn't exist. We got a little comp time, but that's not quite the same thing...

And history already records just how much actually went wrong... Almost nothing.

You bet, but that's because tens of thousands of programmers all around the world did a fairly good job of auditing and testing our internal applications before Y2K actually hit.

Ask folks working in IT for *any* complex operation, and I'll be they can come up with one of two examples of code which WOULD have failed had all of the pre-Y2K work not been done.

Re:Y2K a joke?!?!

[mbourgon]

Try again. The reason Y2K originally existed was a combination of several factors:
1) I won't be here in 30 years
2) Neither will this application, OS, CPU, architecture, etc

and that's all most non-technies every think of. However, the reality for a lot of this was
3) If I leave off the two bytes, that's a lot (relatively speaking) of space I'm saving.

I remember reading an article at one point that said that if the money saved on disk space, memory, tape, etc had been compounded at x% interest, the resulting money would've far outstripped the amount of money paid to fix the problem. However, companies didn't save the money, and so all the squawking when 1998 came about.

You make it seem as if this was deliberate. YES. It was deliberately done to save money on computer hardware. Now, there are exceptions that fall into #1 & #2 above, but you're talking about the old systems.

Re:Y2K a joke?!?!

[AC5398]

Computer Operator. Lowest of the low. Works rotating 12 hour shifts in a 24/7 environment - no OT available. But I find it very hard to disrespect support when every time I woke 'em at 2am to fix X Y or Z, they were cheerful when speaking with me, never took out their frustrations with management out on me, and got X Y or Z fixed by 4am (back in office for 8am).

And even from my lowly perch I could see the work going on behind the scenes to fix the computers - the vast majority of which were NOT mainframes. 2 years they worked - find the y2k flaws, fix the y2k flaws, test the y2k flaws, fail the testing, find the &^%$ y2k flaws, etc etc etc repeated for 2 years. No, I'm neither kidding nor exaggerating.

And I was on shift for that midnight - I got no y2k premium paid for working that night, and neither did any of our support. It would have been nice to see the sobs pay SOMEONE in the damn department handsomely for a frakking change, no matter what the reason why.

Why on earth do you tar and feather every IT department with the same brush? You make your IT department sound like it was frakking tiny, and your working experience limited.

No, we had no VAX on site. Get off the VAX-track fergawdsake.

Re:Y2K a joke?!?!

[HugeFatty]

You're right, it was a real problem. There were a few glitches, and it could have been much worse. But a lot of people got way too worked up about it, and that is why it was, at the same time, a joke: "Oh my God, the nuclear weapons are going to launch by themselves and we're going to lose power, so I better by 5 months of canned good, and I better get a gun so I can fight off my lazy neighbors who didn't stock up!"

Use GMT

[fdrebin]

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..
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...

/F

Re:Use GMT

[Iamthefallen]

Unfortunately most OSes or platforms only have one definition for when DST occurs. Meaning, if you need to convert a historical, or future date to GMT and back, you're going to have issues.

Try it now, see when your computer tells you DST occured in 1980, 1970, 1960. It'll most likely be wrong.

Re:Use GMT

[Marc_Hawke]

Indiana switched this year.

Indiana has historically had 2 timezones. Part of it was Eastern, and part of it didn't change. They changed this year to all be on Eastern time. (wrong choice) A lot of our customer read that news and changed the timezone on their servers to Eastern. All of their historical data got screwed up.

The REAL fix was to apply an OS patch and keep in the same Time-zone they've been in. The OS patch changed that TZ file to understand that previous to a certain date the timezone behaved differently. That's going to need to happend for all the timezone definition files with this new law.

Unfortunately...that means even if they DID get rid of daylight savings time, the whole history of how it has changed through the ages would need to be contained within those TZ definitions.

Incidentally, changing the timezone value on a server is actually one of the worst things you can do with for our particular software.

Re:Use GMT

[cortana]

s/most OSes/broken OSes/

Re:Use GMT

[heck]

Indiana has historically had 2 timezones. Part of it was Eastern, and part of it didn't change. They changed this year to all be on Eastern time.

Indiana had THREE time zones. Most of the state followed Eastern Standard (no Daylight Savings Time); parts of the state were Eastern but used DST (because they were near Cincinnati or other areas that followed DST); and parts of the state were Central following Daylight Savings Time (areas near Chicago or along the Illinois border)

And the state is still screwed up. The whole state now follows DST, but parts of the state are Central and parts are Eastern.

We love Mitch.

Re:Use GMT

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Your software is poorly written then. Dates should be stored in GMT and only converted to local time for display or interaction with other poorly written software. Of course, on Windows, that includes the OS, but failing to compensate for that is just cutting corners. Fix it!

Re:Use GMT

[Marc_Hawke]

You'd like to think that wouldn't you. ;)

It's actually not the software's fault, but rather the servers. We'll use Indiana as an example.
(although, from the other reply, I guess an incorrect example.)

Lets say you live in part of Indiana that used to not change Timezones (you stayed always in Central). You enter in a time 'June 7:00am'. That gets converted to GMT (-7 hours because of DST) and stored as 00:00. When you want to look at it, it adds the 7 back on and you see it as 7:00.

Now, change the timezone to ACTUALLY be Central that does observer DST. Ooops. The software sees the "June" figures it needs to account for DST, and only adds 6 hours and displays 6:00CDT.

Now, if you had actually changed time zones. (Like moved to New York or something) It would display 7:00EDT, and it would be correct. But you didn't. You are still in the same place, and the software has no way of knowing that entry was added while you were in a different Timezone.

Well..actually it does...but only if it's contained in the TimeZone definition file....So, you can change the definition of the Timezone you're in, but you can't change the Timezone you're in without screwing up the times in the database.

(There are other problems...like if they run the server in the wrong timezone for a while...then switch the zone and then adjust the clock so it seems right....but that's just user-err.)

Re:Use GMT

[Anthony]

POSIX systems shoud use the source ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2006n.tar.gz Zoneinfo files are your friend.

Re:Use GMT

[geisler]

Living in Indiana, I can say that the switch was a mess for a lot of clueless folk in our (Computing) department. One example was shared Outlook schedules. If one person had applied the patch to the time zone file and another had not, appointments would appear to be the wrong times. Instead of thinking, "Oh, my computer hasn't been fixed for the new DST rules," they would think, "Oh, Outlook is a piece of crap. I'll go and fix all the times." And chaos ensues. I can only imagine what the rest of the country will experience with people in homes and businesses with even less of a clue than the people I'm referring to above. I don't think things will come down in flames or anything, but there will be a TON of frustrated users trying to get their PCs/PDAs/thermostats/etc. to do the right thing.

Re:fp

[fdrebin]

Seems like a great conspiracy to get people to upgrade their electronics when they really don't need to.
I think it's more likely plain old cluelessness/thoughtlessness etc.

/F

Why bother?

[spaceyhackerlady]

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

Don't complain -- make him a foe!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

No problem

[overshoot]

I just set an alarm to remind me when people in various parts of the world play with their clocks.

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?

Re:No problem

[Kris_J]

I've never had to worry about Australia, though -- do they play with clocks down there or do they have better things to do?

As it happens we do, well most states do. Moreover, Western Australia is currently going insane. A bill is currently being debated as to whether or not a "trial" daylight savings thing is started on the 3rd of December this year . A month to go and we don't even know if it's going to happen yet. It's going to be a freaking nightmare.

Re:No problem

[ultracool]

Some parts of Australia don't have daylight savings due to too much interference with farming.

Re:No problem

[JuzzFunky]

Down here is chaos!
Tasmania changed on Sunday 1 October 2006,
Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Victoria & South Australia changed on Sunday 29 October 2006.
Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory don't change the time at all.

This in itself is fine, it's having to hang our clocks upside down for all you tourists that confuses the issue.

Re:No problem

[mi11house]

I was on the Queensland - NSW border over the weekend and it most certainly is _not_ fine there!

Every single appointment time etc has to be qualified with "Queensland Time" or "New South Wales Time" after it.
Stores are having to stay open an hour longer per day to handle people expecting them to be open.
VCR programming becomes even more challenging for some people (is my program on a NSW-based channel or Qld channel?)
Most people on the border are using two sets of clocks.

Apparently there are still lots of not-too-bright people who say no to daylight saving "because it fades the curtains"...
The sooner Qld joins civilisation the better...

A tip from Arizona

[overshoot]

Once upon a time, a bunch of clueless types from the East persuaded the Legislature to adopt summer time here. The popular response was so one-sided that the first thing they did when they reconvened in the fall was revoke it.

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.

my last employer

[stoolpigeon]

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 a real pain in the...

[Acer500]

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

My vote goes to.....

[bernywork]

It's only the US, who cares?

Re:My vote goes to.....

[bernywork]

Flame retardant suit.... Check!
Athletic Cup..... Check!

Alright... Bring it on!

Re:My vote goes to.....

[From A Far Away Land]

Unfortunately it affects any place doing business with the USA, and Ontario Canada decided to change with them.
What a big waste!

http://www.abandonedstuff.com/2006/10/29/bushs-mar tial-law-bill-signed-daylight-time-replay/ Here are the levels of oil saved, and my guess as to the cost of implementation. It's a boondoggle by Bush, to distract us from real oil saving measures.

Re:My vote goes to.....

[The Wicked Priest]

300 million people, according to the latest figures. Which makes it the third-largest country in the world.

Re:My vote goes to.....

[bernywork]

Given that this is a geek web site, I figure this is slightly relevant.

Most meeting requests and other stuff (Which affects the most amount of people) will be sent using GMT. Although some things like street lights and other stuff may not come on at the right time, in the grand scheme of things, I don't think this will affect people.

Re:My vote goes to.....

[Joe The Dragon]

A lot of traffic lights have different timing based on the time of day / day of week as well as loop detector in the road so they may be in rush hour mode at hour to late or early.

Halloween

[taniwha]

Sadly this will push the change back past halloween leaving the kids wandering the streets in the light and stealing a lot of the magic of the celebration

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

Re:Halloween

[Bastian]

A lot of municipalities have rules about trick-or-treating, and a common one is that it has to stop at sundown.

I have a feeling one of the industries that sent lobbyists for this is the candy industry, since it means they'll get an extra hour of trick-or-treating in the places that do have ordinances about it.

Re:Halloween

[Pulse_Instance]

How is that better for the parents? I would think it would be better for them to be back an hour earlier if anything.

Re:Halloween

[tverbeek]

Halloween is already dying around here. 10 years ago, I used to get 70 or more kids at my door over the course of the evening. The numbers took a big dive in 2001, when parents started imagining terrorists behind every shrub, and they've been dwindling ever since. These days the parents seem to be taking their kids to the freakin' mall or their church (depending on which is their place of worship) instead of letting them visit their neighbors. I always hand out pretty good treats (candy and a comicbook of their choice), but I had only 15 kids show up this year (all after dark). I can't help wondering if we've already passed the sustainability point: low kid-traffic levels lead to more people not bothering to buy treats, so the kids give up on it. I can't imagine that keeping the big outdoor light on for another hour will help.

Re:Halloween

[10scjed]

I'd think it was part of a plan from the religious right to do away with it...

Yeah, since Hallows Eve is a Christian Holiday.

Re:Halloween

[Guppy06]

"leaving the kids wandering the streets in the light and stealing a lot of the magic of the celebration"

Would that be the "kids in the dark getting run over by cars" kind of magic, or the "kids using cover of darkness to egg my front door" kind?

Re:Halloween

[catfood]

I had 441 trick-or-treaters. Not a typo.

Re:Halloween

[b0s0z0ku]

"kids using cover of darkness to egg my front door" kind?

Mischief Night aka Egg Night aka Devil's Night is traditionally the night *before* Halloween.

-b.

Re:fp

[JustOK]

Time doesn't change on the same dates year after year. See this short list.

Time change is embedded in millions of devices

[rbanzai]

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!

Re:Time change is embedded in millions of devices

[Waffle Iron]

All I can say is that the designers of those systems are incredibly stupid. The transition dates have been changed many times since DST was first introduced, and will undoubtedly be changed again. They also vary by state and region. Hard programming the dates is just silly.

Re:Time change is embedded in millions of devices

[RedWizzard]

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.

Or, you could just change the time on those systems twice a year. It's not that difficult a problem. I also think you're overestimating how many systems actually know about daylight saving time. Since the use of DST is not consistent between countries and even within countries, most devices with embedded clocks don't adjust for it at all.

Re:Time change is embedded in millions of devices

[tverbeek]

All I can say is that the designers of those systems are incredibly stupid. The transition dates have been changed many times since DST was first introduced, and will undoubtedly be changed again. They also vary by state and region. Hard programming the dates is just silly.

So is using 2-digit years when you have room for 4. Doesn't matter. They did it. Now, given that fact, do you have any productive suggestions for how to deal with all the VCRs out there that these stupid people shipped without firmware upgrade slots or consoles for reprogramming their DST logic?

Re:Time change is embedded in millions of devices

[Waffle Iron]

I don't have any productive suggestions to fix the mistakes that were already made by these people, other than maybe hassling them for repairs or refunds so that they can share in the pain. I can only hope that at least one of them reads my post and realizes that they should not hardcode something as volatile as DST dates into equipment next time around, and they should not just continue to stamp out products hardcoded with the new dates.

Re:Time change is embedded in millions of devices

[jafuser]

Or, you could just change the time on those systems twice a year.

Four times if the device follows the old DST formula.

Consumer annoyance.

[mophab]

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.

Other Nations Following Suit?

[AikonMGB]

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-

Re:Other Nations Following Suit?

[Jesus_666]

Over here in Germany the politicians are talking about getting rid of DST entirely as the amount of energy saved is so miniscule that the amount of work spent adjusting the time (and one's sleeping cycle) twice a year is hardly worth it. Interestingly, it's mostly the younger people who want to keep DST.

Looking forward to it

[Belgand]

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?

Re:Looking forward to it

[The Wicked Priest]

One reason we have a noon/midnight-based clock instead of sunrise/sunset-based is that sunset and sunrise times vary throughout the year, but midnight and noon are constants. And except for the latter-day deviations introduced by time zones and, yes, daylight saving time, local noon is easily determined by obversation, even with no instruments.

Re:Looking forward to it

[The Wicked Priest]

Um, that should say "observation".

Re:Looking forward to it

[Belgand]

I can acknowledge and respect that, but I've always disliked that midnight/noon are set as the beginning of their respective time segments rather than the middle. A more accurate idea would be to replace them with 6. Having 12 PM be the beginning of the PM cycle rather than the end has always been distressing to me.

In my ideal system 6 AM would be noon (and, as you stated, a constant) and 6 PM would be midnight (again, constant and finally fixing the idea that mid-night is the beginning of a new day) 1 AM would be roughly sunrise (and also would be beginning of a new day) while 1 PM would be close to sunset. Thus day and night cycles would be, more or less, analogous to AM/PM, would begin with 1, end with 12, and new days would begin roughly with the rising of the sun which is commonly acknowledged as the beginning of a new day rather than midnight which is, in common practice, still considered part of the previous day's night.

While this will, of course, never come to pass, I feel that it has several significant improvements over the current system reflecting both common practices as relate to time as well as making the clock more reflective of the solar cycle in an intuitive manner.

Daylight savings changes isn't a big deal

[zsau]

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!

Re:Daylight savings changes isn't a big deal

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

> 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...

I wouldn't bet on it, they screwed some people in Europe up since the move to "last week in October" from "fourth week in October":
http://www.support.microsoft.com/kb/910268

Still, I'm not aware of any planes falling out of the sky because someone turned up to a meeting an hour late...

Re:Daylight savings changes isn't a big deal

[zsau]

That's probably a retaliation for the EU's antitrust suit. Did they have any important meetings with them in October? :)

Re:Daylight savings changes isn't a big deal

[chrysrobyn]

...if Microsoft can have a patch for two states and one territory in a relatively small country...

"Small country"? Small country?! YOU don't have other people on your continent screaming at you to remember you're not the only country on the continent.

Re:Daylight savings changes isn't a big deal

[Evil Pete]

But it did cause headaches for programmers. We had some sites that needed manual fixes for the extension before and after. Some real time data requires local time which means it has to know about DST. It was a PITA.

My 2 cents.

Re:Daylight savings changes isn't a big deal

[zsau]

Small in terms of world power, not geography. (And we are the smallest continent, and the only populated one not connected to another continent, so it's a bit easier for us to have the entire continent in one country...)

Not a problem for Windows users.

[Kaenneth]

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.

Re:Not a problem for Windows users.

[surprise_audit]

Except for the millions of users who have perfectly good PCs and are simply unwilling to upgrade their hardware just to be able to pay the Windows tax all over again.

Re:Not a problem for Windows users.

[tverbeek]

I hope this was intended to be sarcastic, because there are large numbers of people out there still using Windows 2000, ME, and even 98. To say nothing of the huge installed base of XP (including pre-SP2 systems) that will still be in place a year from now. Granted, MS is certain to provide a patch for the versions that they're still supporting, but that's still going to depend on people installing it.

Re:fp

[mollymoo]

Time doesn't change on the same dates year after year.

The dates may change each year, but the rules used to pick the dates haven't changed for a long time. It's those rules which are hard-coded into devices and they're changing them. Specifically, they're changing 'first Sunday in April' to 'second Sunday in March' and 'last Sunday in October' to 'first Sunday in November'.

I'd like to see...

[Overzeetop]

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.

Re:I'd like to see...

[Uncle Rummy]

10 minute intervals? Pffft. Why not go whole hog and divide each time zone into 3600 longitudinal slices one second apart? Then we can equip the coming national ID cards with LCD clocks (updated according to GPS data) so you'll always know what time it is, wherever you may be.

DST is a Waste

[BishonenAngstMagnet]

Ohnos, I can't bare to get up at 6am, we must adjust the clock so I can get up at 7am instead....

Re:DST is a Waste

[mclipsco]

and I can't bear for you to be bare at 6am! (ducks)

two words

[cliveholloway]

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.

Re:two words

[Trogre]

I'm not making any assumptions. I'm just providing the fix, which is what was asked for.

If people don't want to implement it that's their funeral.

Change more often

[mollymoo]

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.

Re:Change more often

[JuzzFunky]

While we're at it can we swap 3 O'Clock and the 5 O'Clock every second day? Perhaps every third day we could get rid of 6 O'Clock all together and make 5 O'Clock go for two hours! (unless it falls on an even day, where 5 O'Clock will actually be 3 O'Clock).

Crikey! No worries

[dbIII]

Australia, though -- do they play with clocks down there or do they have better things to do?

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.

No one taking it seriously?

[ShaunC]

Java has had support for the new Daylight Saving changes since 1.4.2_11.

Re:No one taking it seriously?

[badfish99]

Which is yet another example of how broken and retarded Java is. Individual application programs like the Java interpreter should not need to contain their own unique version of the timezone support code.

The real issue here, along with my opinion

[Antony-Kyre]

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.

Re:The real issue here, along with my opinion

[wolrahnaes]

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.

Quoted for fuckin truth. Fortunately I'm out of high school now, but I never could figure out which genius decided that starting class at 7:30 or earlier was a smart idea. 90% of the class was either passed out or hypercaffeinated. Some (myself included) even built up enough of a tolerance to caffeine that they could drink two Red Bulls and then sleep through the entire class. Starting at a sane time like 9 makes a whole lot more sense, especially since it works alongside the standard "9 to 5" business schedule.

Re:The real issue here, along with my opinion

[Antony-Kyre]

I think it's adolescents who tend to get biologically tired at midnight. Whether this means "solar" midnight, opposite of noon, not sure.

Like I said, it'd be best to start class no earlier than 4 hours before solar noon. If noon comes at 1pm, then that's 9am. If it comes at 12pm, then 8am. 8:30am would probably be best for earliest start time for any school in the district.

At least with college, you can essentially pick your schedule, more or less. This can mean having class no sooner than 1pm on some days.

Central Stoopid Time...

[mkcmkc]

I want a patch for my operating system that will automatically let me know when Congress does something stupid...

Re:Central Stoopid Time...

[Dracos]

No you don't. You'd pull the patch out after a week of getting inundated with messages.

Re:Central Stoopid Time...

[topham]

Wouldn't that get annoying?

Wouldn't you prefer it notify you the moment they do something that isn't stupid? Much less likely to be annoying.

Re:Central Stoopid Time...

[Just Some Guy]

I have an entire command: /bin/true

Re:Central Stoopid Time...

[wolrahnaes]

Your TV already has such a patch. It's called CSPAN. Not only does it tell you what stupid thing Congresscritters are doing now, but it's also a great sleep aid in the spring when you have to get up an hour earlier.

Re:Central Stoopid Time...

[Uncle Rummy]

But how would you know it was running?

Re:Central Stoopid Time...

[booch]

It already exists. It's called cron. Your crontab should look something like this:

    * * * * * congress_did_something_stupid.sh

"No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session."

Why not make EDT the new EST

[cylcyl]

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?

Re:Why not make EDT the new EST

[WeblionX]

Because then the timezone that's UTC - 4 would be extra wide! And that'd be unfair, and we can't have timezones feeling inadequate, now can we?

Finally

[llZENll]

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.

It affects some radio stations

[Announcer]

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.

Re:It affects some radio stations

[Tech]

The original Win98, as I recall, came with a timezone editor on the original CD although it didn't install by default. I'm not sure whether it was included on the Win98SE CD, but if not the older one would probably still work. The program you're looking for is tzedit.exe and a quick search of the CD should show whether or not it is there.

Otherwise, Googling "timezone editor" came up with what looked like several alternatives and a link to a Microsoft KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317211 which doesn't address this specific problem but does talk about using the timezone editor for another purpose, implicitly stating that there is a timezone editor available for many versions of Windows, and presumable also Win98SE.

It should be pretty simple to make the appropriate changes. It should be pretty simple for someone to automate the process too. I might even have a go at it myself even though the change doesn't affect me at all (being in the UK).

Re:It affects some radio stations

[whoppers]

Can you not update your license somehow? I'm guessing the gov't is too strict on how licenses are doled out or does clear channel has them all? Thanks for hanging in there, I love my local AM talk radio shows, even that Savage guy in the evenings is a hoot.

Re:It affects some radio stations

[bergeron76]

still running Windows 98SE

Who do you think lobbied Congress to get this passed? Do you think it's any coincidence that it's happening in 2007 and during the end-of-life for almost all versions of Window$ except for Vista.

Thank your fellow pro-rich, pro-corporation Republican.

Re:It affects some radio stations

[Announcer]

Thank you! This was VERY useful information! I had no problem finding it on the W98 setup CD. I am quite relieved that making the change to my WIN98 machines is going to be this simple! :) I owe ya a coffee & donut. ;)

Now, the problem is the XP boxes... I've already searched the XP Pro setup disk, and this utility is not there. (Only a compressed HLP file, nothing else.) I'm a little nervous about trying this utility on XP, lest it "break" something. We ALL know how fragile WINDOWS can be!

Re:It affects some radio stations

[Tech]

I found this knowledgebase article that deals specifically with this problem. It refers to all operating systems from Win98 onwards and talks about using the tzedit.exe utility I mentioned. It says you can get the utility by obtaining the Resource Kit for your operating system, but the one for Windows XP is well and truly hidden on the MS website; I couldn't find it. Judging by the KB article though, I am fairly sure the tzedit utility for Win98 will also work for XP. All it is doing is making a few registry changes, which appear to be the same on 98 and XP.

I also noticed there was a downloadable patch to correct for a DST change in Australia earlier this year when they changed the dates for the benefit of the Commonwealth Games which they were hosting. I think it is entirely probable that Microsoft will release a patch for XP to set the new daylight saving times in the USA before it happens. So you probably won't need to do those XP boxes manually, just the 98 boxes.

Re:It affects some radio stations

[Announcer]

Someone else has confirmed that it does, indeed, work with XP, so we are all set. Thank you, all, for the information provided. You've made a lot of people's days. :)

A reason to vote Democratic?

[geognerd]

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.

Re:A reason to vote Democratic?

[geognerd]

It appears an "out" was left in this legislation. From Wikipedia:

"Under Section 110 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the U.S. Department of Energy is required to study the impact of the DST extension no later than nine months after the change takes effect. Congress has retained the right to revert to the DST schedule set in 1986 if it cannot be shown that there are significant energy savings from an extension of DST or if the extension may prove to be unpopular with the American public. One potential issue is that some northern regions on the western edge of time zones will for the first time since the 1974-75 "almost year round" DST experiment have sunrise times that occur after 8am."

So there's a chance we won't have to deal with this for long.

The obvious reason

[austad]

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!

What is it with people and daylight

[QuantumG]

Why would you want more of it? When are you fuckin' normals going to learn that the Sun is a killer?

Re:What is it with people and daylight

[zsau]

Apparently up in Queensland, the Australian equivalent of the American South, they don't have daylight savings because, amongst other things, it'd give their children cancer, or something. But I wouldn't exactly call Queenslanders 'normals'.

Re:What is it with people and daylight

[QuantumG]

Guess where I am.

Re:What is it with people and daylight

[zsau]

Ooh, a Queenslander who knows it's the sun that made them that way?

Re:What is it with people and daylight

[Evil Pete]

When I first moved to Qld I thought daylight saving would be a good idea, but now I've changed my mind.

Brisbane is so far east it should just about be in a diferent timezone not in Eastern Standard. Because of that the amount of daylight in the early mornings is amazing, there is actually time to do quite a bit if you get up early. And it is cool. Summer nights on the other hand in Brisbane can be very unpleasant, long protracted heat waves make doing stuff in the early morning very attractive.

As for cancer. Schools get out at 3pm. The recommended danger time for UV exposure is 10am - 2pm. But with DST schools are finishing with the sun at the 2pm position, and at this latitude there is less UV absorption ... it is pretty intense. So the kids are exposed to more UV for longer.

Japan

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

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.

Re:Japan

[John Hasler]

> 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.

Strange. In the US farmers have always opposed it.

99.99% of people don't need to care

[Slashdot Parent]

After all, you're not calculating DST by hand, are you? You're using zoneinfo like good little developers, aren't you?

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.

Hi Cliff....

[RetroGeek]

2006-08-17 14:21:13 Standard Time/Daylight Savings Time changes (Ask Slashdot,Enlightenment) (rejected)

Y2K was not a joke in the airline industry.

[Richard Steiner]

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).

Re:Y2K was not a joke in the airline industry.

[jafac]

Yes - there WERE some actual technical issues related to Y2K that needed fixing.

But by and large, the whole phenomenon was a media circus working off the rightwing-thinktank-generated meme of: "all this science and technology is scary, and these liberal academic elites have put us all at risk, because we've turned away from our traditions and conservative way of life, you know, when America was great, like in the 1950's. When everyone knew their place. And scientists didn't run everything."

You know the meme I'm talking about. The media hype is really just a lot of scaremongering.
Responsible folks recognized the problem, and took action to make sure civilization didn't collapse. End of story. There's no reason my grandma needed to worry about it. Unless my grandma was in charge of the budget for an IT department.

This is a March, April, October & November pro

[metoc]

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.

Re:Dropping DST would save lives

[Athanasius]

Careful, the DST zealots will see this as an argument to stay on DST year-round.

For myself I'd prefer the whole stupid DST thing be dropped. As others have said, if you need to get up earlier/later so as to have the daylight when you most find it useful then do just that, i.e. get up at 06:00 instead of 07:00, or at 08:00 if you want to shift things the other way.

Pragmatically I realise that it is actually easier to shift to a different offset from UTC, as expecting everyone to change their habits, incuding every workplace offering flexi-time along with service industries having longer opening hours, isn't very realistic. *sigh*

Give it 10 years and I'd not be surprised to see the UK shift to using Central European Time, and the whole of the EU stay on CEST instead of CET. There's been a debate about this already due to the BST -> GMT change last Sunday bringing out the "let's stay on DST year-round, it gives more daylight" idiots crawling out once more.

Re:fp

[smbarbour]

Exactly. Even with Windows machines, every computer will need to be updated with new DST rules. It's not just a matter of incorrect time being displayed. If the computers are not within a certain threshold, they won't authenticate to the servers (one of the features of Microsoft using Kerberos within Active Directory)

Re:fp

[drinkypoo]

Given that daylight savings time is cluelessness/thoughtlessness (who gives a fuck what time you get up? If you need the light, get up when it's light!) I'd say that's a pretty fair assessment.

There is a LAW for that ???

[Tensor]

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.

Re:There is a LAW for that ???

[skwang]

Individual cities, counties, and municipalities can pass laws restricting liquor/alcohol consumption. There is no universal Federal law, with perhaps the drinking age being an exception. All states must have a drinking age of 21 to received Federal Highway funds (a form of extortion really).

These laws are sometimes known as "blue laws." They exist because in the past people assosicated drinking with morality. Many people still make this assosiation. Thus, passing laws in order to curb drinking or public drunkendness are common throughout the US.

Many cities/counties/etc. have laws such as:

• Bars much close at midnight/1am/2am/3am, depending on the local government
• Liquor may not be sold Sunday mornings/all day sunday.
• No alcohol "on the public way," meaning you can't carry a beer/wine/booze in the open while standing on the street or sidewalk. Most jurisdictions make the "exception" that if you have the alcohol in a paperbag or something where people can't actually see what you are drinking.

There are many places in the US where alcohol is still 100% illegal, i.e. prohibition. One such place is Moore County, KY; the home of Jack Daniel's Distillery. The distillery has a special licence to produce alcohol in the dry county.

Where do I get zoneinfo files??

[stry_cat]

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?

Re:Where do I get zoneinfo files??

[dmeranda]

More general info on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoneinfo
zoneinfo homepage: http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm

The file formats haven't changed so no software needs recompiled.
You just need new data files. If you can't get an RPM, you can just
compile the zone files yourself. Do a man on the zic command.

y2k joke

[Koatdus]

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.