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Prepared for Next Year's Time Change?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fall-back-falls-backwards dept.

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?"

7 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. I vote for no-DST and use GMT by Loconut1389 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT by Loconut1389 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT by MeanMF · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT by aduzik · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.)

      --
      If it's not one thing it's your mother.
  2. Y2K a joke?!?! by NaugaHunter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Go to hell. A lot of people put a lot of work into resolving a real problem. We'd sure as hell have heard about it if we hadn't.

    One of those damned if you do, damned if you don't things I guess.

    --
    R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
  3. Daylight savings changes isn't a big deal by zsau · · Score: 3, Informative

    Changes to daylight savings time start and end times are hardly a big deal. In Australia it happens all the time. Just this year, daylight savings time was extended by a week in March, and no planes fell out of the sky. About half the computers I used updated and showed the real time, and the other half (including some apparently independent clocks that were set by some remote mechanism) switched back early and were an hour slow. Everyone coped just fine.

    Most people know what hour it is anyway, so it's only important computer systems that matter. And if Microsoft can have a patch for two states and one territory in a relatively small country, then they can have a patch for the vast majority of their home country...

    Absolutely nothing to worry about. Just enjoy the extra daylight in the evening!

    --
    Look out!
  4. It affects some radio stations by Announcer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I work for one of the "dying breed" of Daytime ONLY AM radio stations. Because of the effects of the sun on the ionosphere, Medium Wave (AM Broadcast) signals bounce off of a layer the ionosphere at night, and are absorbed by a different layer which forms during daylight hours. As a result, a number of stations were allowed to operate only during daylight, when the dominating station on that frequency would not be affected.

    Case-in-point, WFIF where I work. WTOP (now WTWP) has operated on 1500Khz for many decades. They are the dominant station on that frequency for the entire Eastern half of the US. (At night, you can hear them from Maine to Florida. Been there, done it.) They are located in Washington, DC. WFIF was licensed to operate on that frequency in 1965, as a daylight-only station. Thus, every day at the FCC-established "legal sunset", we must sign off. We cannot return to the air until the FCC-defined "legal sunrise". (The FCC defines the sunrise/set times for each month, based on an average, so the actual sign-on/off times remain the same through each month.)

    Now we throw the DST/Standard time curveball into this. Because the sun doesn't change, only our clocks do, this affects when we can sign-on and off, and it affects our program schedule.

    Example- under the present system, in October, during DST, we sign-on at 7am and off at 6:30pm. When we change to Standard time on that last Sunday, we get to sign-on at 6am and off at 5:30pm until we hit November. In November, we sign-on at 6:45, and off at 5pm.

    Now throw this new monkey wrench into the works...

    We will no longer have *any* Standard time operation in October, because it won't kick-in until November... so, that means we won't be able to sign-on until 7:45am! (Right now, our latest sign-on is 7:15am in December & January.) That's pretty darned late in the morning to be signing-on! Once Standard time takes effect, we'd be back to where we are, now: 6:45am to 5pm.

    In March of '07, we're going to have another curveball to throw at our audience... we will have been signing-on at 6am for the first few weeks of March. Then the clocks will be changed. Now, we won't be able to sign-on until 7am! Programming that had already re-established itself with our audience will go on yet another hiatus, before returning in April. (The early morning music program already goes away in October & Dec/Jan due to the later sign-on.)

    So, as you can see, there are some radio stations and listeners that are going to be ***VERY*** inconvenienced by this mess.

    We won't even go into the issue of how many computers are out there still running Windows 98SE, which won't be getting any help from Papa Bill to patch it's internal time-shifting routines. I am hoping for a 3'rd party solution... but won't hold my breath. Since we still have a fair number of perfectly functional Win98SE boxes running, we'll just have to disable the automatic time-shift routines, and do it manually.

    --
    Willie...