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Is Daylight Saving Shift Really Worth It?
Krishna Dagli writes "Two Ph.D. students at the University of California at Berkeley say that Daylight Saving Shift will not do any good or create any energy savings. We are already spending money for software upgrades in the name of saving energy and after reading following article I wonder has congress really studied the impact of DST shift? " I also read some back story on the concept; OTOH, I found TiVo's suggestions that I manually change everything on my Series 1 device to be somewhat...insulting.
Dude, DST happened 2 days ago. I hope you've already SPENT the money, like, 2 months ago, in order to accomodate this.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
NO!
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Energy savings or not, I like the extra hour of daylight in the evening. It's extra time to play ball, take the dog for a walk or just let my kid play outside.
I'd go for double daylight savings if I could.
Maybe the PhD guys should get out of their classroom and enjoy the day.
Quick, someone add the tags please.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
The rest of the world is: forcing adoption of energy saving lightbulbs, committing to Kyoto, taking steps to shift to nuclear and clean energy, but George Bush's idea of helping the environment is extending daylight savings time!!
GO GEORGE GO!!
... that two college students think they're smarter than a bunch of politicians?
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Clearly they didn't even know there was going to be a technical problem...
I'd say that odds are they didn't even think that research was necessary.
So what if an early DST doesn't really have huge enery savings? Of course, this is a research paper by 2 students at the People's Republic of Berkeley, who no doubt must be the most completely objective sources on the planet. (sarcasm off) There are benefits such as being able to actually go outside and get some exercise after work or do yard work because it's not too dark, being able to drive home after work in daylight and so on. I love DST and I wish the government had moved it up years ago, but I'm glad it's already started.
I want my daylight savings time for one reason - so I'm not woken at an ungodly (Ungodly? unGodly?) hour when the sun rises at its earliest, and I know I would be - if the sun didn't, my husband, who is very reactive to sunlight, would be awake and that would do it.
I live in Indiana, and I'm thrilled that we're finally doing DST.
I agree. I live near NYC and it does WONDERS for my morale. The days of going to work in the dark and leaving in the dark weigh heavy on the soul/psyche. DST is a big boost, IMO.
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
According to the SANS Incident Handler's Diary, various issues have been reported in Cisco VOIP phones, Blackberrys, Veritas aka Symantec BackupExec, and Watchguard firewalls.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
I wonder has congress really studied the impact of DST shift?
It is already well-established that the US Congress doesn't bother to read the laws before they pass them.
If they don't even read the law, I doubt they would do any studies.
Does ntpd just get the time from the server and set your system clock to that, or does it run what gets returned through some rules based on DST? It must offset the time based on your zone, but does it take into account the date as well?
You know, except for all the TV shows on cable shifting by an hour, I really didn't miss having to run around the house changing the clocks twice a year when I lived in Saskatchewan. But, now that I'm outside of Saskatchewan, I'm also bombarded by those idiot^H^H^H^H^Hpeople who say "You lose an hour of sleep tonight"...well...no I don't ...and I also won't "be well rested tonight because I'll get an extra hour of sleep" ...guess what: I don't use an alarm clock. I get up when I get up. I don't gain or lose any sleep and all I ever get is annoyed when I have to run around changing clocks.
Being in Canada, the time shift means that I use more electricity because when I get up...It's now darker again, so I gotta turn the lights on.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
I want to strangle both the inventor or daylight savings time and the genius who decided to move this dates this year. Thanks to these jackasses, I get up in the dark now. And my favorite clock which autosets its time when the power goes out is now broken. I had to lie to it and change my timezone to get the time to display correctly. This is completely retarded. I didn't see a single correct clock in the way in to work today.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
(Not to mention it's hot enough that the airconditioning will be on wherever I am, daylight savings or no, so I doubt there's much of an energy saving there either)
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
The obvious answer is that congress needed an easy way to put something down on paper that they care about energy policy.
Was there any in depth hearings on it, any experts called in to testify on the change, any representatives from industries affected by this change, actual debate on the subject? As far as i can remember, it was no on all accounts.
Congress passes a law without knowing the full consequences, simply so they would have something to show in the 06 elections.
Anyone who voted on this is/was a god damn moron.
If you like the extra hour of light at night its worth it. It would be nice if people adjusted themselves without being forced to but that just isnt going to happen.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
According to CNN.com, a gas price bump is expected now because people are expected to drive more with the expanded daylight hours.
So wait, Washington passed a law to change DST early...the early DST change is now being used to justify gas price increases? Coincidence? Happenstance?
Sorry all, maybe my TFH is a little tight this morning.
Ok, I am going to argue the other side of this.
From TFA:
But Ryan Kellogg and Hendrik Wolff, who are working on their doctorates in economics, say the reduced need for light in the evening will likely be negated by the increased need in the early morning.
That sounds logical, but it is not (IMHO). In the morning when I get up for work, I turn on maybe two lights (bedroom and bathroom). I am focused on getting ready for work, so there is not any entertainment (TV), stereo, really nothing except an electric razor. I brew my tea, and I am off to work (I don't think my headlights count as extra energy).
When I come home from work, well, all the lights in the kitchen, the halls, very soon the livingroom, the plasma TV, the surround sound, the computer. Lot's more things. Now, most of these don't change from summer to winter, except the lights. If it is light out, I do not turn them on (shocking). That is a savings of energy by not turning on the lights.
I really don't think this article took into account the different energy needs from the morning to night times. It is short sighted.
Spack
(ok, the gate is open for you to disagree, but really think about the way you do things different in the mornings and how most people do it different first)
Clearly this legislations was thought up by a "morning person." You douchebag "morning people" and your silly daylight requirement may suck my left nut.
Your TiVo Series 1 will work just fine as long as you're using the guide data to record everything. Sure, the time it displays will be wrong for three weeks, but it will record everything just like it did. All of the guide data is in GMT so your season passes don't need to be updated. Did you even RTFA?
When this bill was originally being talked about, various people said the study it was based on, done back in the 1970s was worthless. However they quickly got labeled as working for "big oil". Others mentioned that even using newer numbers the saving would not be great were also labeled as working for "big oil".
However all you "man is the prime source of global warming" can take heart, I have already seen a few articles where they are ignoring the claim that the change will save energy to focus on saying that it will save lives on the road, it is better for outdoor recreation, and it just makes people feel good because of the extra hour of sunlight at the end of the day.
The conspiracy theorist within me says that some portions of the IT industry wanted a mini-Y2K to make their services more critically required for a bit -- both so they could bill more for a bit and to remind everyone how necessary they are. In short, that some portions of the IT industry urged Congress to pass this stupid bit of legislation.
The same conspiracy theorist within me says that the stupid bits of Sarbannes Oxley legislating specific and no-value-add security policies were instigated by consulting firms in IT who knew they could churn out milliions in SOX pre-audits and SOX related services (by saying that everything needs changing in the pre-audits).
In the case of daylight savings time, I suppose that the old adage about not explaining with malice what could easier/better be explained by stupidity applies. I'm not so sure about SOX, though.
The days of going to work in the dark and leaving in the dark weigh heavy on the soul/psyche. DST is a big boost, IMO.
But that has nothing to do with DST, that has to do with 1) what time you come and go to work and how long you stay there, and 2) the days are simply shorter in the winter because the Earth's axis. In extreme Northern and Southern climates (think North and South polar regions), its daylight and dark 24 hours a day depending on the season, and changing the clock will not change that.
I heard on NPR the other day, that the _real_ reason for DST is not to save energy, but rather to appease the retail sector. They have data that people are more willing to go out and spend money after work if its not dark. So people go motoring around in their fuel efficient SUVs, blow money, and thus energy is saved!
Personally, I don't understand why humans are so clock oriented vs sun oriented. It kills me that houses in the US are built in random directions (unless there is a nice view) instead of oriented around the Sun.
Sometimes I think humans are the silliest of all animals.
Here is what TiVo sent me. The Thursday (Mar 8) before DST. Thanks for the warning!
Dear TiVo Subscriber,
As Daylight Saving Time commences three weeks early this year, we
thought we'd beat the clock to let you know how this unusual schedule might
affect recordings on your TiVo(r) Series1 DVR. (Hint: Chances are
slim.)
While the TiVo service will continue to automatically record your
Season Pass(tm) programs and WishList(r) searches at the correct airtimes
without incident, there are two things to note:
1) For the three weeks that follow the new Daylight Saving Time start
date (March 11), your Series1 TiVo(r) DVR may display the incorrect
time.
Again, to be clear, this is only a cosmetic issue and should not affect
your Season Pass(tm) and WishList(r) recordings.
2) If you have any MANUAL recordings scheduled between March 11 and
April 1, you
will need to adjust those recordings as appropriate. Here's how:
- From TiVo Central, select Pick Programs to Record, then To Do List.
- Locate your Manual Recording (by channel, date, time) and adjust
accordingly. For example, if you have a daily manual recording from 8:00 am
- 9:00 am, you will need to change it to 7:00 am - 8:00 am on March 11.
(Quick Tip: If there are no recordings in this list preceded by the
word "Manual", there's nothing further you need to do.)
- On April 1 be sure to change it back to its actual time, i.e., 8:00
am - 9:00 am.
For more details, please visit www.tivo.com/dst
Thanks for being a TiVo subscriber and here's to a beautiful spring!
- Your friends at TiVo
TiVo, Season Pass(TM), and WishList® are trademarks or registered
trademarks of TiVo Inc's subsidiaries. ©2007 TiVo Inc. 2160 Gold Street Alviso,
CA 95002-2160. All rights reserved. Please feel free to review our
Privacy Policy.
the clock skipped ahead an hour. So the whole weekend at work was one hour less.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I see your point, and I like it when you are a happy camper, but daylight savings does NOT change how many hours of daylight we have at our disposal.
I repeat DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME DOES NOT GIVE US MORE DAYLIGHT. It does not change the planets tilt, rotation speed, or smell.
Sorry, but it just bugs me when everyone claims it gives us more daylight. DST should be abolished altogether. Any companies that want to change their business hours for the seasons should do so on their own. Factories in the Midwest, like mine, start their employees 2-3 hours earlier in the summer so they can avoid the heat of the day. DST just means now we have to start our employees 3-4 hours earlier to avoid the heat.
DST is my new mortal enemy.
1. Light outside when we leave work
2. And no, most of us posting here can't/won't get up at 6 AM - it's a guy thing
3. We don't have to listen to clueless politicians talking about moving DST as "low hanging fruit" in reducing energy consumption
4. We found a bunch of old code that was fragile and needed to be replaced
5. We all got a little drill on pumping out patches - "that which doesn't kill us" etc
6. Most of those clocks I have at home were drifting anyway. Now they have correct time.
7. Long weekend days in March.
8. DST article on Slashdot gives everyone something they can post about.
9. If Congress wasn't working on this, they'd be fiddling with the tax code. Which means Mr. Big and his corporation pays less, you and I pay more.
The whole idea of time being different around the world is stupid. The entire reason for DST is so "save energy"? What energy? So we now get up an hour earlier. Why can't we get up an hour earlier without an act of Congress? Are we so pathetic and weak that it takes a politician to motivate us? Seriously we are becoming subservient to others' ideas (by definition) when we cannot act of our own volition.
So here's what I propose. First, daylight savings time is stupid. Either turn it on or turn it off and don't change it back.
Second, to get to the heart of the problem, get rid of time zones. How often do we hassle with the dumb things? When flying on planes does it really take ten minutes to go from New York to CA and six hours to go back? No, it's all time zones. Should we need to figure in that difference?
When getting up in the morning why not just wake up when you're ready or when your daily requirements force you to get up? We have this insane notion that work hours can only be from 8 to 5 or 9 to 6 by the numbers. The fact of the matter is that you're going to go work (generalization alert) an eight-hour day no matter when that day starts (figuring in lunch, 9 hours). It so happens that I work from 1500-0000 GMT and that's fine with me. Why not tell everybody that? Customers call me from all over the world and I get to tell them, "I will be in the office from 8-5 MST which is 10-7 EST which is 3-12 GMT." Why do all that work? If the world unites on real time (GMT) we can take out these conversions. Half of the greatness of PHP's date() function may be eliminated (since it makes time conversions so nice) but the requirement for all of us to do these conversions will be eliminated. Business can post their hours based on whatever they want and those hours can be understood worldwide without going to timeanddate.com to figure out what it really means. The world is moving to 24x7 anyway thanks to our beloved Internet so time zones mean less each day anyway.
Also, the sooner we (USA) get to metric the better. This whole other system is crap and I envy our metric-using overlords.
Just imagine how much easier it would be if the world just switched to UTC. No more trying to calculate what time it is where the other person is.
Why on earth would you think that every piece of equipment must be DST / timezone aware? Time zone aware microwaves, time zone aware $3 radio clocks, time zone aware VCR, time zone aware wall clock? Yeah, sure... that would be a nightmare... For those used with DST it's no problem manually changing the date on each household equipment... And I suppose it will be more than a nightmare to explain to your 60yr old pops: "No, you shouldn't change the time on the fridge clock. You'll need to PATCH it. Yeah, is simple... just overwrite the PROM or whatever... ah and NO, you don't have to change time on the VCR too because it's DST aware... What? You left it on the default Japan time zone? No, you'll need to change that...". And so on
Wouldn't that create more and more issues? Is a $100,000 mechanical watch timezone/DST aware?
Obviously, the closer you are to the equator, the smaller the difference between daylight hours in summer and winter.
However, for those North/South of about 30 degrees, the difference is significant. Not to mention the (measured, reference unavailable) reduction in traffic accidents due to fewer people driving home from work in the dark.
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
Just one example -- I used to work for energy trading company (think gas, power, oil, etc).
We had a datastructure for storing actual gas flow hour by hour. Guess what, it is an array with 24 entries, except for DST change days, when it can be 23 or 25. Thanks god we didn't operate in those backward off by hour and a half timezones.
The article did not mention if the the PhDs took into account the extra use of energy related to the Olympics which could have accounted for the increase in energy use.
Why don't we just set the clocks back 9 hours? Since Daylight Savings Time adds an hour of light, doing this will make it daytime all twenty-four hours. It's a win-win scenario!
...if you sell BBQs and golf games.
I was listening to a radio Show and the DST was the topic.
It turns out that the makers of BBQs and the Golf lobby told Congress that DST was worth hundreds of millions of dollars for them and to continue the DST practice.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
While you're at it, why not this one too?
Anyone who thinks the decision to keep the US on DST, or increase the time it is on DST, has anything at all to do with energy savings is woefully naive at best. The US increased DST because of commercial interests involved in outdoor entertainment and business. And those commercial interests bought congresscritters to do their bidding.
Any other government explanation is a lie. No exceptions.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I get up in the dark and go to bed in the dark. Daylight Saving Time is bullshit.
Noon is supposedly the time when the sun is at its highest point, meaning half the daylight is gone. Schedules vary but for most of us noon is not actually the middle of the day. Personally I wake around 7 most days and go to bed around 10-11. I don't dictate this, the companies I work with/for determine the hours of operation. For those keeping score that is ~5 hours before noon and ~10 after noon. (and no getting up earlier isn't really an option for me) It's just a lot nicer to have as many daylight hours as possible in the evening for exercise, errands, socializing, whatever... Cost savings are nice but I really am more interested in the quality of life. YMMV but I'm quite sure I'm not the only one judging by other comments. Daylight Saving Time just recognizes the reality that our schedules differ from the arbitrarily chosen noon time.
Figure out what the total cost of their BS idea would be. Then buy that many compact flourescent bulbs and hand them out for free to every household. I fucking HATE DST!
DST isn't about saving energy because it doesn't. It's about adding an hour of sunlight at the end of the day so that people can go out and shop - thus using more energy, not less.
There's a reason that American Chamber of Commerce has strongly support DST since it's inception.
DST is kind of dumb, yes, but what's even dumber is how twice a year around the clock shift date, a bunch of cocky little dorks write the same uncreative garbage about the evils of DST. Next year they might throw in a twist and say "DST causes homosexuality" or some southern retarded puke.
In the world, there are three driving forces: money, control, and religion. DST is driven by money. By having "more" sunny time, we have more spending time. Drive around, or drop by a terrace for a drink... things people are much less likely to do after darkness falls.
I personally wish we could leave our clocks alone and just have people get up one hour earlier if they need to. It's easier to have a billion people show up to work one hour early (with a few tardy folks), than to spend ages reprogramming every single electronic device on the planet to hopefully copy with this artificial rift in time. Linux does a semi-decent job by trying to keep everything in UTC, then cooking the timezone for display, but it's still a pain in the ass.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
In a 24 hour society, daylight savings is an absolute farce outside of the May->August period when it's possible to have 16 hours of daylight. If there's, say, 14 hours of daylight, then you have 2 hours of darkness in most peoples' days wherever you shift the timezones, and that's only the optimum outcome because millions wake up before daylight and millions stay up after it.
If the government was really interested in "saving energy", it'd clamp down on emissions and fuel efficiency, and promote more effective techniques. Banning incandescent lighting and enforcing energy-saving bulb usage would strip several percent off of electricity demands year round and would cause a whole lot less annoyance than timezone changes. The EU and Australia have already figured this one out.
Ack! It's not worth it? All that extra time spent working to update our programs through the night and for no benefit?? And to make matters worse, those of us who spent time updating Java for DST might have been installing broken timezone data. See http://www.javasanity.org/article/7/thanks-for-the -time-sun
I mean, the Ph.D. students haven't exactly produced any meaningful thing, have they? They have pointed out a flaw in DST that has been observed since...well...since I can remember!
Blar.
Whether or not this is true I have no idea but here is a link from ABC from back in 2005 which says the exact same thing.
Conspiracy? You decide.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
If you have flex time, daylight savings time doesn't change anything. I can get up at the same equivalent time the Monday after, as the Friday before. However, for people that do have fixed schedules, that require them to be at work between 9:00 and 5:30, it does shift some daytime that would have been before work (when it probably wouldn't have been that useful) to afterwork where one is more likely to spend some time outdoors.
My girlfriend's after a house with a south-facing yard, so as to catch all the sun it can (she's a garden enthusiast). It's amazing how many estate agents don't actually know which direction a given house faces.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Why should I have my already delicate sleep schedule fucked up to
accomodate a lazy shitbag like you?
You like the extra daylight? Fine, make it for youself - get up early.
Another case of the americans trying to the accepted ideas of time... :b
Biomech
DST is definitely not about saving energy. Obviously, the real reason is for giving consumers and retailers an extra hour of sunlight, because it increases shopping. Have there been any definitive studies that show energy is conserved? I don't know, to be honest, but probably not. It would be very hard to do. Anyway, we probably use just as much energy in the morning for the extra hour of darkness in our car headlights and indoor lighting.
Your mom's the silliest of all animals...
It shouldn't be a law.. It should be up to the individual, weather or not, to follow DST.. like religious or political view. Also, It should be upto the individual, when to fall back or spring forward. [I would fall back while in bed and spring forward while at work, perhaps on a Monday morning, just like this.]
You are aware that the Tivo issue in Series 1 units is Manual Scheduled Items only?
I have very good friends that have my old lifetime subbed Tivo Series 1, and they do everything with Season Passes, and other then the display time being wrong, their Tivo won't miss any of their more then a dozen Season Passes.
They knew about the issue, and flat out don't care, since as they put it "we have a Tivo so we don't ever *have* to watch TV live anymore.
for some folks the Tivo Series 1 issue is a non-issue.
Diane
They're not built in random directions, the roads are. The house simply faces the road.
In Latvia during midsummer it's dark between 11pm and 4:30am. Without DST that would be 10pm and 3:30am. Why would anyone want that when normal working hours are between 9am and 6pm?
Screw energy savings. I need the extra hour of light so I can plant my garden after work and maybe even wash the car or something else constructive. I'm going to play basketball with my kid tonight. Yay!!!!
I wish we could stay on DST all year. I hate coming home at 6 p.m. and all I can do is sit on my ass because it's too dark to work or play outside.
... Change the clocks by half an hour then leave them alone.
God Be Gone
I have a Cingular 8125 phone/PC. I got one voice mail and one text message telling me I needed to upgrade. I downloaded and installed the latest ActiveSync and the patch and installed both as per the instructions. Lo and behold, Sunday morning, the time on my phone jumped ahead 2 (two!) hours!
I think the Sunday http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070311 Userfriendly's cartoon got it right.
Since this is Slashdot and coming from an IT perspective, I would have to argue that while i enjoy more daylight this time of year... The last two weeks in our IT department have been nothing short of miserable. Partly because of our aging hybrid, underfunded network and partly because of poor planning... I'll admit that. I guess IMHO, I don't know all the pros and cons for DST. It's probably worth it but all I know is that switching the dates around isn't all that kind for people stuck working with older technology.
If it is light out when people go home, they tend to go shopping or do outdoor activities like bbq.
These industrys and the candy industry have lobbied intensly for the DST changes.
There are no apparent energy savings, it is a red herring to distract people.
My understanding is that this would only be true if it were year round. Accidents increase on both the days that we spring forward (less sleep) and the days that we fall back (interruption in our "circadian rhythms").
Of course, it turns out that it might not even save lives if year round (search for "school bus accidents").
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Why not four 30 minutes shifts (4 times a year) ? Two one-hour shifts are not good enough !
It will save more (shifts will better follow the daylight changes, so more energy savings). It will be easier for our internal clock (less painful for eating/sleeping/etc). It will have less total impact on our lives. So it can be better.
-- Rastignac was here.
Right! We don't need no daylight saving in our mother's basements!
DST is the winning result of a bet between two congressmen to see which of them could get people to do the stupidest thing. Fortunately for us, the legislation requiring each of us to hop on one foot while singing "Everything's Coming Up Roses" like Ethel Merman never made it out committee.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Only sometimes?
Why not do it yourself? Wake up an hour earlier and go home from work an hour earlier! You seem to be one of those people who consider 'liberal' to be a slur, judging by your name-calling. Should a strong, rugged individualist want the right to choose for yourself? Or is an intrusive nany-state big-brother European-style government just fine when it is doing things YOU PERSONALLY like? I mean, you smell like the kind of person who screams that guns are too heavily regulated...while you desire a ban on abortions. Hypocritical and provincial!
Blar.
"... and if we saw the Easter bunny we ATE HIM."
HAH! That's one of the funniest things I've read in weeks. Major props!
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
When all the "smart" devices (that cannot be patched or updated) shift their clocks on April 8th, not knowing of the 2007 DST changes. Makes me wish all devices that had such functionality had some sort of "ignore DST" setting.
The state government here, ignoring the last three referendum results, decided to foist D.S.T. ("just a trial!") upon us since Christmas(-ish) whether we wanted it or not, in the misguided hope we'd all go for it when they ask us (again) at the next state election.
One of the effects they overlooked is that, now everyone is getting home an hour earlier, the power generation companies are finding demand surging in the late afternoon to even higher levels (almost unsustainable) as we all turn on our air-con when we get home... 'cos it's an hour hotter!
Given that we've had multiple 45C (113F) days this year, I think the trial is going to be a dead loss and may even be canned early - one can only hope.
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
So you are suggesting that the EASIER solution than changing the clocks is to get 300 million people to all switch to your new "government standard hours," adjust to every business being open different hours, etc., as opposed to everyone doing a "spring forward, fall back?"
Sorry, I'm one of those people that loves DST... I make my own hours, but I'm someone limited in how far I can separate from the norm, clients, etc., need to be able to reach me, I need to be able to reach vendors, and banks need to be open.
DST is a wonderful thing, there is time to grill when one gets home, one can do outdoor things afterwork, etc. The real energy savings is from people who go for a walk in the park, or kids playing outside instead of watching television or playing video games. The light usage is pretty minor compared to the others.
I probably use more gas because I'm more likely to run errands when it is light out, but that's much better than saving them up for the weekend.
For you, it's not a big enough change to be worth bothering (with shifting clocks?!?!?!?), but I get the impression that you are not married and have no family, so all that matters is your schedule. The rest of us have to coordinate with other people, making clock changes MUCH easier.
This one actually worked I think. I'm coaching soccer again this spring and I notice that I'm not going to have to adjust the practice schedule, which starts this week, this time to account for DST coming part way into the season. I don't like DST because when I'm really busy I often don't hear about it or remember it and end up being late to church, or early as I was last fall. But the adjustment in the start time works for me for soccer practice.s -selling-solar.html
--
"Let the Sun shine" http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
"This change in DST was definitely worth it, if only for the benefit of forcing embedded systems designers to remember to not hard-code DST dates into their code."
I'd buy into that if there was any evidence that programmers ever learned from their mistakes. But in my experience, the opposite is true: We keep making the same damn mistakes, over and over.
Hell, look at buffer overflows. Still the #1 cause of security bugs. It's not like bounds checking is a radically new idea.
If you're of a historical mind, read The Mythical Man-Month, by Fred Brooks. It's illuminating to discover that we are still struggling with the same problems today that they were dealing with in 1960.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I'm sitting at home, half-dressed, on a high severity problem call because the telephony system has a hard time with any time change.
/. .
I'm listening to someone from India dial into the system so he can reboot the appropriate piece...so of course, I decided to post to
This problem has the potential of happening twice a year. So no, I don't think it's worth it.
From the article:
"In the 2005 energy bill, Congress calls on the department to report whether energy consumption drops, as hoped, after the early start of DST. If not, the bill has a provision for the country to return to the old daylight savings calendar. Under the previous law, standardized in 1986, DST began on the first Sunday in April."
Wow. We can spin our wheels again on this, again, if it doesn't work? That's incredibly shortsighted.
On a personal note, I think daylight saving time starting earlier is better - at least for me. I don't usually get up until after 7:30 AM on weekdays and I live in the New York area (which is in the far East part of the timezone). All of this means that even today, I didn't get up to darkness. Works for me!
Frankly, shouldn't we extend DST to be year round? Don't you want 100% of people up during the daylight? Considering the small percentage of people that get up after 10 AM, they're always getting up after dawn. Also, there's basically no one that goes asleep before 4-5 PM when it gets dark in the winter*. Assuming we only have 8 hours of daylight a day in the winter, shouldn't it be the 8 hours that the highest percentage of people are awake? I don't know when that is, but I'm assuming it's not 7AM-4PM like we currently have it in the winter.
*Obviously we need to exclude the people that intentionally sleep during the day because they work the "night shift"
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
As a hoosier let me apologize that our DST battles affected you...
Scott Jones (yeah, he of Gracenote/CDDB fame) who paid the legislators because if he couldn't get the state of Indiana to switch to DST, he was going to enact a federal law to force Indiana to switch. Part of his DST propoganda blitz was that it "saved" energy...
Scott Jones
He created/paid for/ran hoosierdaylight.com which has been shut down but can be seen at wayback
Scott spearheaded the campaign because FedEx promised to turn Indianapolis' airport into their new hub, moving from Tennessee. (the airport of which, Scott was an investor) That plan fell through.
...if only the rest of the world used it. I mean, if you're going to screw with something like time, it would be nice to be in congress with the rest of the planet.
--
Franklin
no, but it'd be even worse to switch back now.
I read this as "Is Daylight Savings Shit Really Worth It?".
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Try asking this in a couple weeks...
Chris
"You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but It always comes roaring back again." - Tom Waits
Right, you would just have to figure out if it was a good time to contact them, without the benefit of having a standard 'start of day' time index.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Things meaning the earth. If we could make the earth to be shaped kind of oblong so that the damn edges wouldn't block out sunlight (at least for America) then we could really save sunlight. I mean, if we can land a man on the moon, why can't we change the shape of the earth?
I there were any savings, the stock prices of energy companies would have dropped...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Humans are clock oriented because society is clock oriented.
It's popularly difficult to interact, consume, create, foo unless you've got little deadlines controlling your movement. I blame grade school bells.
--- Do you believe in the day?
I believe that daylight saving is not done primarily to save energy but instead as a public health measure since it seems to cause a significant reduction in the number of road traffic accidents. Look up daylight time saving public health on pubmed.gov or google scholar to check.
Instead of a government mandate to change the clocks, why not use the same mandate to make it so that the 8-5 be changed to 7-4? I don't really see the difference except that no one has to fuck with all their clocks.
- Disclaimer: Information in this post deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
Well, I agree with you the extra daylight hours are nice.
However, here in Southern Ontario, we need these extra daylight hours during the winter months, when the days are short. Sunset is 4:40 or so.
So, why not make DST year round, so that in winter, when we need it most, we have an extra hour of daylight after work.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Whenever I hear someone talk about how awesome it is to have extra hours of daylight, I ask them why wouldn't it be better to just "recalibrate" the time zones so that "daylight savings time" is the new standard time, then just stop all this switching nonsense.
But time zones are another total pain in the ass, even if there's no switching back and forth. I recently found out the China has a single time zone, whereas the country would encompass about eight zones if they used our style of time zones. And have you seen the time zone map of the US? It makes no sense at all. Alabama is completely on central time, but if you go due north, Michigan is in . . . eastern time? WTF?
I personally advocate the abolition of time zones altogether. Let's all use Greenwich Mean Time, no time changes, and deal with it. Businesses and schools can just change their hours of operation, rather than messing with time itself. Sure, it would be weird to have sunrise at 6 pm and sunset at 6 am, but would it be any more complicated than the current system?
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
DST will not save one bit of pocket lint in terms of energy savings. But it will provide more light for consumers to drive around and shop. The more light there is later in the day, the more likely people will be out shopping and not realize the time.
It was nearly impossible for me to get up with morning without the sunlight.
Actually, I would have been happy if it didn't get changed so early.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Personally, I don't understand why humans are so clock oriented vs sun oriented. It kills me that houses in the US are built in random directions (unless there is a nice view) instead of oriented around the Sun.
;)
Because we aren't supposed to worship the sun any more cause that's something pagans do.
It's amazing how many estate agents don't actually know which direction a given house faces.
If you're talking about price, they all know that most houses are facing downward at this point.
Now that its light after dinner, I'm more likely to go for a walk or bike ride in the evening. I'm more likely to play catch with my son in the yard. Those are the wonderful reasons for DST. For me, it offers opportunity for a more balanced life. Things seem more mellow.
It's an emotional thing, and none of your crass arm chair smart guy arguments will persuade me.
As it also turns out, major cell phone carrier T-Mobile managed to not update their servers for the time change. As I woke up on Sunday morning, I found that my cell phone hadn't update. So I manually update it, and the phone (of course) asks me if I really want to overwrite the network time.
Geeks strike again 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I went to download and install the DST patch for my BlackBerry a couple of weeks ago. And, wouldn't you know it, the patch broke it. Wouldn't recover from a hard reboot.
Good news, I'd backed up everything just before patching. Better news, it was still under warranty. Best news, the model was no longer being sold, so I got a free upgrade to a much nicer BB.
So, worth it? To me, getting a free upgrade, hey, why not! But to my cell phone provider? Not so much, I imagine.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Psychologically, I feel a hell of a lot better when it's lighter out later. I know there are millions of people who have some sort of seasonal depression thing that are equally as delighted. I don't know if it saves any energy, but driving home from work when it's nice and bright out and being able to go for a nice walk or something in sunlight makes me happy.
Just go over to your local sport gear store and get her a compass... you know those little doo-hickeys which tell you which way is north, find north then turn 180 degrees... that's south. Never trust an agent anyways...
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
And that's turn the lights on all the time, and crank up the heat. I might drive an extra hundred miles a week just for good measure.
Why? Because there's supposed to be a followup study. If enough of us use more energy and show that this change was a farce, maybe - just maybe - they'll stop fucking with the clocks. Sure it might cost me extra money this month, but what's an extra $40 if that money ends up as a report telling the meddling congress/senate to go stick it where the sun doesn't shine (no matter what time it is).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Forgive me, but please explain how the U.S. houses are randomly built (in direction)? Do you mean that not all houses 'face' the east, that some face the west because they're on the other side of the road? I would have though that house directions where anything but random, given they all face toward the direction of the road and pretty much all roads run N/S or E/W.
It's only been recently that sub-divisions have been trying to make randomly curvy roads to give a more authentic and 'natural' feel (see European streets) as oppose to the grid based design seen around most of the U.S.
So, I'm just curious. What do you mean by 'random' in this case?
True enough, the only problem is, not all of us set the time we can start/end work at. Thus, we cannot just show up at work 1-2 hours early, and leave 1-2 hours early. Often it's from X time to Y time. So, for a large number of people, this is a good thing. =) Though, this does give weight to the fact that DST is more for commercial reasons than anything else, as you've already pointed out that days just get shortly naturally as the season changes (depending on your Lat./Long.)
As for the "Saves Energy" theory. Does is save energy? Yes/No. The energy it does save is probably relatively nothing and decreasing, due to the fact that the only 'energy' source it would mostly save from are lights and there's already a huge push to use energy efficent lights. So, there still 'some' savings but it's less and might not cover the extra energy that people might use since they have more light to do things.
Cheers,
Fozzy
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Dude, I'm so glad you brought this story to light. I've been telling my friends this story for years, and they look at me like I'm crazy. Truth be told, they look at me like that no matter WHAT I'm talking about, but even more so when I get started on "The Indiana Thing." I drove, naively, into Indiana in 1983, searching for the woman in the L'eggs (panty hose) advertisement in my Mom's Redbook magazine. I was operating under the mistaken premise that Indiana was - rather than the breadbasket of America - the "Pantyhose and Nylons Capital of the World, due to an unfortunate misspelling of "hoosiers" in the budget encyclopedia set that my Mom purchased from someone at her office. Driving around vainly searching for the L'eggs headquarters, the headlights in my '73 Chrysler Newport burned out halfway through my second day there, and I couldn't find my way back to the border. With a horde of cannibals closing in around my car (which only went about 10 miles between fillups - of gas, oil, or coolant) I thought the end was near. Quick thinking saved my life that day, and my penchant for popcorn. I ducked into the back seat and quickly fashioned a mask out of a box of Orville Redenbacher popcorn, and the cannibals began to bow and chant all around the Newport. You didn't TELL your readers that Orville Redenbacher was a God to the denizens of once-dark Indiana, friend. Did you forget? Not likely. Were you, perhaps, brainwashed into secrecy? Possibly. Or, more sinister still, are you STILL a member of Redenbacher's scattered army of darkness? Just waiting for a new Governor to come in and repeal the DST proclamation?? State your motives, Sir!
What was shocking to me was not that my company dumped the DST thing on me with about 60 days to go when I asked "Who is working on this? It's going to be a problem". I know we should have started working on it right after the prior DST change in november.
What's shocking to me is that we were getting VENDOR patches as late as friday of last week. All of our vendors should have been ready a week after the last DST change in november. Even Microsoft (who I dislike philosophically but who did an awesome job supporting us in this area) was delivering new patches a week before go time.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
My household uses time-of-use metering from PG&E (our local energy company). This means that between noon and 6pm our energy rates are dramatically higher, but moderately lower at all other times. We have a solid-state digital electric meter that knows the time and date, and it accumulates the two periods (peak and non-peak) separately. It's programmed to adjust automatically for DST.
A few weeks ago we received a letter from PG&E explaining that they weren't planning to reprogram our meter for the new DST, and thus for the overlapping 3-week period, our peak period would be shifted by one hour, from 1pm to 7pm, because basically the meter will still think we're on standard time.
I've heard numerous explanations that the government changed the DST period to determine conclusively whether DST actually provides any net energy savings. But if energy companies can't be bothered to change their own metering schedule, then there's no incentive to shift use to the new schedule, and thus I don't think any results garnered about energy savings will be meaningful.
Lots of inland cities build roads NS/EW. This makes a lot of sense to me. It doesn't align with the sun perfectly, but at least it is easier to navigate. You can tell from the address what direction the house faces, since odd/even indicates which side of the street you're on.
I've noticed that near the coast you'll have things grid aligned with the coast or something. Many newer developments (ugly McMansions mainly) have stupid curving streets, all named the same thing. Meadowbridge Lane, park, court, drive, street, avenue. All meeting multiple times.
I don't know if you thought of this, but the location of sunise and sunset changes over the course of the year. How exactly would it be possible to build a house to align with something that changes?
Man, you really need that seminar!
Here's the real loss:
If you live in the northern US and are doing the responsible thing and turning your central heating down overnight, then getting up an hour earlier means you're turning the heat back up earlier. Why is this wasteful? Because on sunny days in March there's significant solar gain once the sun's up. In my house that can be enough that the heat doesn't even need to be turned on in the morning - unless we get up too early.
In the evening, both the house and the outside environment lose their heat relatively slowly. The darkest hour isn't literally just before the dawn, but the coldest hour is. It's much better to spend the coldest hour under the covers - from an energy use point of view - than to get up during it or right on its tail and turn the furnace up to compensate.
Of course, if the government just looks at electrical use, this may not show in areas that don't primarily use electric heat. The increase in oil and natural gas use though, from this idiocy, will be real and significant.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
My wife and I took advantage of the additional daylight to leave the house and go for a long walk (it helps, of course, that the weather finally broke).
That did require leaving the internet for two hours...
No statement is true, not even this one.
I love DST! I think we should be on it all year 'round.
On a normal work schedule, DST gives me more sunlight when it matters most: in the evening when I'm home. It also preserves a bit more afternoon sunlight in the short, dark winter days.
As for morning sunlight, I don't care. I'm getting up before sunrise much of the year anyway. I might as well suffer a bit there to have a better evening.
ShoutingMan.com
Ideally, the agent could tell you so you wouldn't have to go there with a compass if it wasn't what you wanted....
Google maps, however, can tell you from the comfort of your desk. No overpaid estate agent required.
I have a toddler. Toddlers don't spring forward very well. Put them to bed an hour early and they'll spend two hours fighting it. Then get them up an hour early and see how happy they are to see you.
Please, please, either ditch it completely or use it all year long. I really like having an extra hour of daylight to spend outside with the boy, the dog, and the missus.
This is not my sandwich.
http://www.zetatalk.com/index/zeta359.htm
I came from Indianapolis. It's on the far west end of the Eastern time zone. Maybe it should be on Central time, but its not. Result, on EST in the Winter, I went to school in the dark. In the summer, even without dst the sun was up 'til around 8:15. I'm surprised at Indiana going to EDT. That means it won't even be close to getting dark in June until 9:30 PM. Who the hell voted for this?
There's one thing that's always driven me nuts. The fact that daylight savings has little to do with energy savings and more to do with making it light on winter mornings. That's right, winter
Think about it... The equinoxes are (roughly) on September 21 and March 21. So with the new daylight savigns plan, this year sees us enter DST 10 days before the equinox and leave it 44 days after the equinox! (We now end DST ont he first Sunday in November)
People have to get the seasons out of their heads and actually think about the daylight.
The idea of "daylight saving time" is laughable.
On Yule, we get the minimum amount of daylight available at our own latitude. On Midsummer, we get the maximum. On Ostara and Mabon, we get exactly 12 hours of daylight. The amount of daylight received never changes by more that 7'53" per day, and is distributed more or less evenly about a moment we call Midday.
"Daylight saving time" is nothing more than artificially re-numbering the clock face, so Midday falls at 13:00 instead of 12:00. It would make more sense to keep Midday at 12:00 all year round, and have business hours from 09:00 to 17:00 in Winter and from 08:00 to 16:00 in Summer. (Or, as some are suggesting, 08:00 to 16:00 in Winter and 07:00 to 15:00 in Summer.) This would not really be any more confusing than what already happens at present, when almost everyone turns up for work an hour late or early on the first Monday after the changeover anyway. An additional benefit would be that different businesses probably would change hours on different days; so for the times (sometime around Ostara and Mabon) when half a city was working 9-5 and the rest 8-4, traffic would be less dense.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
When Benjamin Franklin was talking about getting up an hour earlier for French shopkeepers to save money on candles, no one took his suggestion up. That's because he was joking.
But hey, don't let actual facts stand in the way of your clueless ranting.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Oh the irony of calling somebody else lazy because you can no longer sleep in. Classic.....
Ask not for whom the corn pops, it pops for thee.
Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
Its funny that this semi-drastic move was approved to save energy.
Everyone knew it would cause lots of extra work by sysadmins and some problems.
But it was deemed to be worth it to save energy.
So have about some more drastic moves:
- Ban or highly tax SUVs
- Increase parking costs in urban areas where transit exists
- Add a transit tax on gas
- etc
I'd be in favor of all this kind of stuff.
It's not about saving energy. It's about stimulating the economy, which is basically the opposite. More usable daylight means more consumer spending.
Personally, I don't understand why humans are so clock oriented vs sun oriented. It kills me that houses in the US are built in random directions (unless there is a nice view) instead of oriented around the Sun.
Random directions? Most of the homes in Orange County California are built facing either North or South. Irvine might be a little different (all their roads twist and turn to much), but I'm willing to bet they're built the same way. The houses on the beach are probably the only ones built facing East/West.
Technically, I said that the agent was overpaid, and not that you paid the agent, but...
You pay the agent if you buy through the agent. You write a big check, and some percentage or flat fee comes out of that money and goes to the agent. I don't care how they word it in the agreement (they can word it either way, depending on locality, whether they are a buyer's agent or seller's agent, or whatever) the fact of the matter is that money goes from you to the agent. The seller knows how much the agent is getting paid, and factors that in to the price.
Statistically, there is an above average number of fatal car crashes the day after "Spring Forward."
Killing people is definitely worth saving some energy.
Ugh, how the hell did this comment get modded "insightful?" It gives no insight whatsoever into the pros/cons for DST.
From now on I'm just going to respond 42 to everything, can't get more insightful than that.
The real reason for DST is government greed, think about it.
They take an hour from us in the spring, keep it for about 8 months,
and then give it back in the fall. Do they pay any interest? We're
getting screwed. We should be getting back at least 62 minutes, maybe
more. Call your congressperson today and demand fair compensation!
Man, the things you learn on slashdot!
This will be the legacy of George W. Bush (George II the Lesser). Since he has basically blown everything else, he hopes that this stroke of brillance will somehow rise above his more challenged efforts at leadership.
Well in my opinion daylight savings is probably one of the most stupidest ideas in the world. Just think of it. Why should someone change the timezone on 2 arbitrarily chosen dates.
It disrupts many areas in public life like train-schedules.
In the next workday morning offices are occupied for minutes setting their clocks to the new time.
You also get a night which is one hour shorter. Getting enought sleep is rather important. And some people who already get to little sleep might get even less which is definitely not healthy.
And what about the alleged point of daylight savings? There has not yet been any significant proof of saved energy. Even the most positive studies suggest that the savings are, at most, hardly significant.
heres a little story....RIM put out a DST patch that is supposed to be applied wirelessly to all our government clients. Low and behold it works just fine..for some...
...you have to physically take the blackberry and wipe it and reloaded the OS (application reload) using an app that is specific to each model/provider.
Certain models and providers (we have telus for the ones that are dying) and the error is Data Error -Abort reset
This happenned with my boss in another country and he is convinced the blackberry is no good even though it just needs a reset and reload. He has demanded a new one and will not accept that it just needs a reload, he says it is faulty and garbage and wants a new one (same model and specs and everything just refuses to use the old one).
Thanks RIM! thanks USA!
Then we got clocks, which came in handy for things like train schedules. The railroads had a problem. When an Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe train left the former at noon, it was still 11:57:46 in the second city, and 11:16:41 in the latter. The difference caused all sorts of problems. So the AT&SF might decide to standardize on Topeka Time, while the Union Pacific would choose Omaha, which would be a minute and 36 seconds behind Topeka, complicating matters where passengers or cargo had to change trains from one line to another.
So one of the railroad men came up with the bright idea of a standard time system for the whole country, where just the hour would differ between 'zones' approximiately 15 degrees of longitude in width. Since astronomers used the meridian of the Greenwich Observatory as '0', that would put Atchison, Topeka, and Omaha all well within 7.5 degrees of 90W (just east of St. Louis), while Santa Fe was just west of the 105W meridian, and would have its clocks set to an hour earlier.
In practice, the actual boundaries have tended to skew westward, so that even in the Winter, astronomical noon is after 12:00 Standard Time, leaving more daylight after people get off work in the afternoon. The boundary between the Central (90W) and Mountain (105W) time zones actually touches the 105W meridian in TX, and Saskatchewan effectively pushes it further west by declaring that it's on permanent DST (which is a contradiction in terms, and is therefore rendered on maps as being inside the CTZ rather than permanent MDT)!
Of course, a lot of Slashdotters rarely the light of day, so to them it's all a pointless exercise.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
in the winter, we're told to expect high oil prices because more people are heating their homes.
...due to an unfortunate misspelling of "hoosiers" in the budget encyclopedia...
I think you would have found hosers up a little farther north.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I can't believe so little has been in the press/media about the horrible job Microsoft did on fixing the DST issue for Exchange server!!
Where I work, we luckily only have one server (no clusters or anything fancy), and our employees don't have it tied into mobile devices like Blackberrys.
But nonetheless, I got a nasty surprise when applying the "hotfix" for the DST issue in Exchange. My message store refused to mount when the service came back up! Turns out, MS had to release a hotfix for the hotfix, to address this problem! Then, most of our users were only able to receive internet email, not send it out! Turns out MS rolled out a series of hotfixes as part of the DST hotfix (supposedly to ensure there weren't a bunch of Exchange servers out there running at different patch levels), and one of those undocumented changes they rolled in altered the security model! (Users now have to be granted "Send As" privileges, even if they already had "full control" to their mailbox, or else they can't send email outside the company!)
After all this is done, you *still* have to tackle issues of calendar entries in Outlook being off by an hour if they were entered before the patch was applied. There's *another* tool for that, but you need each user to run it - or jump through hoops to get something set up that can run it on all the mailboxes for them.
For something as critical as the corporate mail and scheduling system, I thought this patch was incredibly poorly implemented!
It's like I said to my parents this weekend. The US use to be an 8-to-5 society, with a few companies (in the minority) running 24/7 and at that time DST probably made a bit of sense. However, the US is now a 24/7 society, with a few companies (in the minority) still running 8-to-5 like, and DST no longer makes senses.
Sure, DST made sense in WW-I/II when it came out to support the War effort - it was an 8-to-5 society that needed that extra time to do more mass producing for the war. It even made sense somewhat to keep it after WW-II as it was an 8-to-5 society and that hour could be used to produce more.
DST has never been about energy savings, nor will it ever be. While in the old 8-to-5 societies, it meant that the heat could be turned off (lower) earlier in the evenings; today we don't do anything - we run either the heat or the A/C nearly 24/7 regardless.
I can understand the morale POV (as some have said, going to-and-from work in the light is nice). But there's an alternative - work different hours. Don't commute 2 or 3 hours one way to work. (You'd be amazed at how much extra light in your day that would bring you.)
All-in-all, DST does not do us any good. It needs to be abolished. Crops don't grow on DST, and manufacturing does not work on any kind of 8-to-5 schedule any more either.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
It's amazing how many estate agents don't actually know which direction a given house faces.
I work in the online real estate biz for a couple years, and I was constantly amazed at how little information about listings the agents actually had or were willing to share.
People! Give the buyer as much data as you can, and THEY WILL DO YOUR WORK FOR YOU. Spend an hour upfront sketching out the floorplan of the house, and you'll save ten hours wasted doing in-person showings for people who don't want the place because they couldn't tell from the one grainy photo you posted that the living room is only 8'x10'.
the government does not care what your personal schedule is, this is about 90% of the population.
the point is that there is more "usable daylight". the thinking is that the average citizen has to be at work at 08:00 or 09:00 no matter what. they will get up and go. the trick is that they will finish their work day and have that extra hour of daylight. the hope is that they will use that light to leave the house.
other people have pointed it out, and i also heard it on NPR. a major motivational factor is the economy. *somebody* out there determined that people are just more likely to go out if it's light out. i don't mean for essential trips, but that post-winter "i just need to get out of the house". the extra daylight boosts the motivation. basically this is an attempt to give a little kick to the economy. will it also save power in the long run? maybe? sure?
whatever the reasons i am enjoying it. it's nice to go running after work and have that extra bit of light.
No, not sleep in.
I've had lifelong insomnia and difficulty falling asleep. Changes to my sleep schedule really
fuck me up. Having to move earlier is a particular pain in the ass, becaue it's harder to
fall asleep earlier than later.
It's not for sleeping in; it's for sleeping adequqately.
I'm betting that Starbucks and friends are also making an early killing in the coffee market. I stopped by Tim Horton's (hey, I'm a Canuck, it's tradition) for my cuppa joe this morning and the lineup was hell. Starbucks usually has similar lineups but more locations in the area, so I'm guessing that with all the people needing that extra caffeinated "perk" in the morning that they're going to be making a tidy extra profit with the early-risers.
Read this.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I even power cycled the box, and it is STILL an hour behind. But you know what? I figured Comcast wouldn't get it right. Predicted that one easily.
Huh? By "artificial lighting", I assume you mean "electricity" as opposed to "fire" (:-), though in fact there's a bit of overlap for oil lamps and gas lamps.
What makes sense is using daylight when you've got it, i.e. getting up around dawn and going to bed earlier. Farmers already do that... The reason for "Daylight Savings Time" is that having factories that all start at the same time means that workers are getting up for the day all at the same time, and Daylight Savings Time is a way for the government to tell everybody to get up earlier in the morning and go to bed earlier at night without having to be explicit about what they're doing. It makes much more sense for businesses that can use flex-time to do so, and for businesses that can't to open at some seasonally appropriate time of day, and now that commuting traffic probably burns more power than the electricity, it makes sense for businesses to stagger their hours a bit so that everybody isn't commuting at rush hour.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Now he is one hour less. FXXXing politicians always mess up with CTU's plan!
I've seen some reports of glitches and bugs with radio clocks that synchronize to WWVB.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I'm truely astounded by your wisdom. How was I to know that we didn't use candles anymore? Or that getting up earlier to avoid using candles is entirely different from getting up earlier to avoid turning on lightbulbs? Now I understand that Franklin lived before the electric bulb, and that his joke about a Daylight Savings Time-like policy has no relevance to this new, modern, era!
Expect your "+5, Insightful" moderations to come any day now.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I live in Arizona, you insensitive clod!
Irvine might be a little different (all their roads twist and turn to much),
Which, thankfully, puts an upper-limit to the size of their SUV's.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
It's done, move on already. You can discuss whether it was worth it or not, but it won't prove anything beyond the fact that people love to argue about things over which they have little control. We're not going to move back to the old date.
This discussion would've been a lot more productive back when the bill was passed, instead of after the change.
There's something I don't understand.
I understand completely that laws can't create or conserve daylight so the name is a misnomer.
I understand completely that energy savings caused by coming home in the daytime are at least partially offset by increased costs of waking up in cold darkness.
I understand compeltely that any alleged energy costs are completely obliterated by increasesed accidents and loss of productivitity due to grogginess and the equivalent of jet-lag.
What I don't understand is why so many people are acting like this is the first stupid thing congress has ever done.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this hasn't been widely reported — the mainstream media actually reading the text of a bill would be revolutionary.
Congress is using this bill to study the impact. The bill calls for a study in 9 months to see if the DST change actually had any impact, and consider changing it back if it didn't. So programmers who didn't design for maintenance might get another chance sooner than they thought.
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sounds like your problem, not mine....
In the early 80's I worked at an HVAC company. We had a program to do sizing estimates. You put in lat/long, ORIENTATION, window area, overhangs, heat sources (stoves, computers), humidity sources (coffee pots), ocupancy (heat + humidity there too), insulation R values in walls, roof, basement, etc.
It would take that information and tell you what size AC you needed to cool it. With these measurements & no college degree (yet) I would come up with the same answer the boss did with his 20 years of experience.
There was another module for the software that would let you rotate the building and see the difference. Making as much of the windows directly south facing and as few north made a *big* difference. It could be a 20-40% savings in cooling cost vs lining it up with the road like most developers do.
Of course most houses are build to parallel the road, not the sun.
I will now turn my lights/electronics on an hour earlier instead of leaving them on an hour later. I fail to see how this will curb my energy consumption.
I normally wake up to the light but thanks to DST I am now waking up in the dark... And I work 8:30-5:30 so that's pretty standard.
"I wonder has congress really studied the impact of DST shift?"
Hah, i would be surprised as hell if any congresscritters even read the bill, or wouldve understood it if they had. When it comes to DST they just have their maid set all the clocks before they get up & never think another thing of it.
Remember, these people have one of the only jobs in the world where coming to work and being productive is entirely optional... To them the "real world" is some abstract place where all the unimportant people live.
Meh... This sucks! I don't mind having to get up one hour earlier...
But, I do mind Outlook crashing, appointments being due when they aren't, and the clock changing back 1 hour!
This computer must be possessed! OUT YOU TIME DEMONS! =[
-x3lite
BTW, buildings account for 50% of energy usage in the US, most of that being in the maintenance associated with HVAC&R, check out the following for more detail: http://www.architecture2030.org/open_letter/index. html
> I wonder has congress really studied the impact of DST shift?
The sad fact of the matter is that Congress never studies anything but opinion polls and the wants and needs of those people who helped elect them. The reason is quite simple: the predominant life-form in Congress is "lawyers",
none of whom has even the tiniest glimmer of intellect to devote to actual study of the issues. Existence proof? Virtually every bill passed by Congress leaves behind it a contrail of smaller bills amending, or even reversing, the first bill. If they studied issues, they would not need so many course corrections.
Frankly, lawyers should not be permitted to hold any elective office. It's a conflict of interest, pure and simple. Lawyers get elected to offices and they appear to operate as if their primary purpose is to create more need for, and opportunities for, more lawyers. Congress has never, ever, passed a bill that would in any way limit the continuing metastasis of lawyers except in one, count 'em, one, issue: as more and more people are yanked off Death Row due to the work of the Innocence Project, Congress, in it's infinite wisdom, has limited Death Row appeals more and more, leaving less room for the Innocence Project to continue to demonstrate how corrupted and failure prone is the system that so blythely sends people to be killed in the name of "Justice".
In point of fact, the one trade that ought to be predominant in Congress is software engineers. Realize that our so-called "legal," so-called "system" is really a large program of inferential rules. Who better to debug such a thing? =)
your wife doesn't minde the missus being around?
*rimshot*
I remember the subtle and shallow reporting when the DST change was announced. There were no public debates on this that I was aware of (and I'm a CSPAN geek) or at least not enough to garner my attention. That's proof enough that this is another handout to Corporate America to get us mindless consumers consuming more after work in the summer. Especially when you consider the specious or negligible arguments FOR daylight savings. I bet if you polled citizens we'd all say axe it altogether or make it a year-round adjustment.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Some businesses may be running on a 24/7 basis, like WalMart and card driven gas stations, but that is more of an exception. I've found that many businesses operate on a 1000 to 2100 basis, while others seem to function with a 0800 to 1800 schedule. And when it comes to manufacturing, while some firms run 24/7, others run two shifts and some run only one.
If you happen to work for a 24/7 organization that allows flex time, then changing your schedule negates the need for DST. The rest of us, unfortunately, have to be available during so called peak business hours. That is where DST is useful, especially if you have something close to an 0800 to 1700 job and want to do something outdoors after work.
I do find it interesting that you assume that people are running the heat or the air conditioning almost 24/7. With a properly designed house, and auxiliary control mechanisms (sweaters for winter and blinds for summer) you can greatly cut back on heating and air conditioning. A lot of people use that technique, especially when they want to have money available for things other than utility bills.
I also find the comment about crops and DST to be a little bit strange. The biggest impact that DST would have would be on the farmers that have day jobs that are not in farming. If they had the flex time you speak about, then DST would not be useful. But I suspect that most of them don't, so having DST might give them more daylight at the end of the non-farm work day.
I have a number of relatives who are farmers that also work on non-farm jobs. Depending upon the hours of their non-farm job, they don't necessarily work in synch with the sunlight. For some of them, DST is a boon because it makes the light 'available' when they are not at their non-farm job. For others, especially when dealing with dairy cows, it can be a pain for the farmer and workers, because you may not want to change the milking schedule to accomodate changes in time.
Because we aren't supposed to worship the son any more cause that's something christians do. ;)
I respectably disagree. I present exhibit A: Felis silvestris.
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
For what it's worth, the Kellogg and Wolff study can be found here They frankly speak to the shortcomings of their methodology and the limits that introduces. Still, the upshot the Aussies burned more energy and spent more money to boot seems sound.
A little green man from space only Homer can see.
So, I'm just curious. What do you mean by 'random' in this case?
In the new subdivisions, the roads are curvy. They claim to do this so that it has a nicer feel, but I think that "feel" is so that you wouldn't see the long lines of identical houses. There are 4 floorplans or so for every subdivision. Those will be placed in locations based off lot size and expected sale rates. The window placement on the homes is not determined by the direction of the house. There is absolutely no consideration to the sun when placing the home. All are "facing" the road, whatever direction that is, and the design of the house is rectangular, right angles only. If there is any lining up with the sun for any reason, it is purely by chance (which could be called "random").
Learn to love Alaska
I might be reading this wrong, but the PhD students used the Australian Olympics as a comparison.
They said - in Australia, certain parts hosting the Olympics shifted the time 2 hours. When comparing their electricity use vs. those who didn't shift their time (presumably they weren't directly affected by the Olympics), there no decrease in electricity use. In fact there was a slight increase.
They use this to confirm that DST doesn't conserver electricity.
-Lewis Black mode
BUT THEY WERE HOSTING A FREAKIN' OLYMPICS! IF THERE'S ANYTHING THAT WILL SKYROCKET YOUR ELECTRICITY USE, IT'S THE OLYMPICS!!!
Move to Alaska ... we used to have 5 time zones, now we have 2. They were compressed back in the 80s so we wouldn't be so far away, timewise, from the rest of the country. Best case scenario ... you effectively get triple DST. Unfortunately, you have to live in the Aleutian Islands for that benefit.
Personally, I don't see how the country benefits from DST. The use of air conditioning has grown quite a bit since the DOT study (which showed an energy savings of 1%). Now, when you're not at home you can turn off, or limit the use of, your air conditioner. When you're home, you're more likely to have it on to stay comfortable. Now, the hottest part of the day usually happens sometime late in the afternoon, and it starts to get more comfortable in the evening. All DST does is move the hottest part of the day so it overlaps more with the time when people normally get home from work and pushes the cooling stage of the day later in to the night. So, DST may be helping me out by keeping me from running my energy-efficient 15w bulbs, but my air conditioner (not so energy efficient) will be working a lot more in the evening.
Also, if there was an energy savings - why would we ever get off DST? We turn back the clocks in the winter when there's quite a bit less daylight in the evening...but move the clocks forward in the summer when there's already an abundance of light? Seems we have this backwards - why aren't we also trying to save energy in the winter?
Your mind looks a little cramped. Why don't you stretch it a little?
These guys, as always happens when you put an economist on a technical problem, missed the point.
The main value in DST at all is not a reduction in energy consumption (in fact as anyone notes that's relatively minimal at best, and non existant at worst) is to reduce the PEAK of the power consumption curve. Politicians will jump up and down and dance around about reducing energy consumption but that's just a game, and shouldn't be taken seriously, it is easy for the general public to understand and is close enough to the truth for their purposes (assuming they understand the real issues, which is doubtful). The problem with electricity production is that you need capacity to produce power for 100% of your peak load during the year. If you reduce the peak consumption by 1% you reduce the required capacity in electricity generation by 1%. That doesn't mean you'll save 1%, in fact quite the contrary if you could use 1% more power overall, but still reduce peak by 1% that is a good tradeoff (at least at the moment), you need less plants operating essentially (say close 4 nuclear plants for example), since for parts of the year a good chunck of capacity remains idle (normally we use hydroelectric for this since hydroelectric plants can be turned off and on quickly, remotely and cheaply, usually adapting to new load within about 15 minutes, whereas nuclear is on 24/7, and coal etc... take a few hours to fire up). Ideally we want to use more hydroelectric power on baseload and less on chasing after peak capacity, since it's well the best choice, and at best that is where the 'energy' savings comes from. If you can close one fossil fuel plant but keep 4 (or 10 or whatever number it is) hydroelectric stations running 24/7, that's good for everyone except the guys working at the fossil fuels side of things.
For people to whom that doesn't make a lot of sense, traffic planning is the same issue. You want to do everything you can to reduce the peak number of cars on the road, and roads have to designed for the peak number of users, or else you have gridlock. If everyone left for work at 8am, and came home at 5pm, commutes would be a disaster, by staggering some consumption of that road by up to an hour in each direction (between 7 and 9 am, and between 4 and 6pm) you can reduce the peak road useage. Obviously with roads you can (and do) accept some gridlock, but, being one of those poor buggers in canada, I'll tell you right off I don't want to be without power for an hour a day in the middle of winter.
I'm not convinced the percieved savings will materialize with this shift however. I've been out of the actual power production business long enough I'm not sure I can speak intelligently about what effect it actually will have, but I'm reasonably confident in the desired effect. If I have to guess (and this is more rambling thinking than any sort of informed mathematical formalism), businesses are now 24/7 entities, at least the ones that use a lot of power (manufacturing, chemicals that sort of thing), and since those factories are largely enclosed the lights are on either way. People get to work in the morning, which is now (partly as a result of the aforementioned traffic situation) in a somewhat staggered way so computers don't all light up at exactly 8:15. When the stove was the highest power consumption appliance used daily that was the deciding factor for peak power (people got home from work and turned on the stove sort of thing) but I suspect computers operating 8 hours a day or more now are a much bigger impact than stoves, I dunno though. So when does that make peak power? When air conditioners and office computers are running full bore at noonish? In the evening, people come home, turn on their computer, TV, entertainment set, and then start to cook? How about a quick e-mail check in the morning while cooking breakfast on the stove? What about microwaves? I'm sure there are figures availalbe for this, but I'm too lazy to hunt for them. I would have thought peak power is now at the
Along about the 1960s or 70s the traffic on the road got dangerous enough that the owners of the building "swapped sides" - the former front porch, which touches the road, is now the back porch.
The building was oriented to minimize north-facing surface area, which has no windows (the south side has plenty).
Building houses without regard to the sun and weather is a modern phenomenon. There's no real reason a house needs to face the road, it's just architectural laziness combined with growing public ignorance of natural law.
...but then I live in Arizona.
Then they've got it wrong, too. Thing about being a night person is that you really, really, don't want to wake up an hour earlier because the government claims that we should all screw with our clocks.
Back off, man, he might be a scientist.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Here's the problem with that. Unles you live up near the arctic circle, you were already leaving work in the light last week, or if you werent then you were not going to work in the dark, or if you were doing both, you were working like a 14 hour day, and this change really shouldnt concern you one way or the other.
If you really want sunlight after work, then we should have DST in the winter, you know, when you go to and leave work in the dark, not the summer, when its light all the time anyways.
Why dont we just move to permanent DST? that way at least some of the arguments in favor of DST might actually become true.
Come read my stupid blagablog. Rants and Giggles
Let's imagine a house in the northern hemisphere with a wall facing north, a wall facing south, a wall facing east and a wall facing west. Sunrise is going to shine primarily through windows on the east side. Sunset is going to shine through the windows on the west side. During most of the day, the most direct sunlight will shine through the windows on the south side. This will remain so even as the seasons shift -- the sunrise/sunset locations don't move that much. Nobody is saying that sunrise has to be centered in one big window and sunset centered in another big window.
Daylight savings is to trick people into thinking they aren't working their life away 12 months a year... only 8 or 9 months a year. Look at all the posts about "going to work in the dark, coming home in the dark"... daylight savings is great. Well duh, you are just getting shafted! Sort of like the 2 day weekend... sure, you can't live during the week, but wow, just think you can do all your chores on the weekend and have enough time to sleep 10 hours a night to catch up from the hell workweek. LIVING it UP!
Benjamin Franklin is credited with the invention of "daylight savings time", but it he was only making a joke. Unfortunately, politicians aren't too bright, and someone took Dr. Franklin seriously. It's all been downhill from there.
Read Time Out of Mind for more info.
1% Energy Savings 2 Billion spent in software/device updates 3 Weeks until the next set of issues Forlorn It Techs everywhere
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
This is all about the W.A.S.P.'s imposing their work eithics on us. Plain and simple - "get outta' bed and make my stock holders richer you damn workers!" Just look at the Wii - you have to get up and actually move to play the game - just another device to traing us to be good workers. And motels, don't get me started. You'll see.
When I was first in the Navy, I left a ship in Hong Kong to fly back to the US. We were on military transport planes, so multiple hops were involved, including Japan and Alaska. Crossing that many time zones over very long plane flights was very temporally disorienting - I got off the plane in Elmendorf, and the clock said 8:00 - but I absolutely couldn't figure out if it was 8 in the morning or 8 in the evening. The sky was no help, this was Alaska in the summertime. I had wanted to call home, but I couldn't even figure out what time it was locally, to say nothing of what time it would have been back there. I ended up not making the call!
All you had to do was:
up2date glibc; up2date tzdata
Gee, that took about a minute, and was part of the normal maintenance window. Everybody patches routinely anyway, right?
All my systems had ZERO problems. The windows systems picked the changes up from samba, nothing to worry about.
Oh, wait, you've built systems where it costs you money to do a routine DST change? I don't think DST is what's costing you, bubba!
like bush would want to keep this
The number of you people talking about how you enjoy the "extra" daylight, how it makes you happier, how you feel safer, etc, is somewhat disturbing, in the sense that so many of these comments seem like the poster is unable to look beyond their own personal preferences and see that perhaps not everyone feels that way.
There are huge numbers of people, myself included, who have an intense dislike for daylight hours. Bright light hurts my eyes, glares into windows, makes everything look pale and washed out. In the summer, when temperatures around here can get into the 100s, and all I want is for the sun to go down and give a little respite from the heat, and the days are already naturally longer than in winter, you suckers think it's a great idea to artificially tack on even more daylight so the sun is still up at, I shit you not, 9pm. Think about how unnatural that is when you're talking about your "psychological benefits".
And let's not forget how everyone seems to want to talk about how helpful and great it is that people drive home in daylight instead of in the dark, and surely that's safer. Safer until you can't see what the hell is going on because the sun is glaring off everything and making the windshield a white halo, I guess.
Give it a rest. Fine, you personally enjoy sunlight; I'm happy for you. But don't act like there's some definitive psychological or other benefit to daylight savings. What you personally enjoy is precisely what many of us despise. I see no reason to legislate arbitrary changes to our timekeeping which will appease some and piss off others. Just let nature deal with it as it has been doing for eons, and I promise I won't try to legislate that we knock the clocks back to get more darkness in our lives, since that's what makes me happy.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
This has got to be the most assenine idea I ever heard. They even tried that back in 74 during the first "energy crisis". Only to discover their children going to school in pitch darkness... Sheesh - when will they ever learn?
less shadows and flat light = more time out and probably less accidents too.
Surprisingly, Florida has the latest summer sunrise in the entire Eastern Time Zone (US & Canada). For a discussion of just how silly DST is in Florida, and other points south, please see:
http://web.mac.com/jamiecox/iWeb/Florida%20Daylig
Daylight Saving Time is very likely wasting energy in the state of Florida.
Computers obey me.
Perhaps when it first was thought up it *might* have made a little bit of sense, but today, lots of the arguments just disappear: Such as: Lights at the office: They are on all day anyway, natural light is a thing of the past.. Streetlights: Well you still have the same amount of light/dark so that does nothing for you either. Easier to do business: unless we have ONE timezone for the entire world, that is just a silly argument.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
My three-year-old son is smarter than a bunch of politicians. ...the more politicians in the bunch, the greater the advantage your three-year-old son has.
paintball
Personally, I don't understand why humans are so clock oriented vs sun oriented. It kills me that houses in the US are built in random directions (unless there is a nice view) instead of oriented around the Sun.
Here in Arizona, the direction a house faces is actually fairly important, and is frequently part of the listing information when a house is for sale. North-south orientations are more desired, and probably valued a little higher than other orientations.
With all the roads running directly N-S or E-W, it's also pretty easy to tell which direction any house faces.
My house faces north, BTW. The west side has no windows at all, and the east side only has two windows on the first floor, and they're heavily shaded by trees, walls, and the neighboring house. It makes a big difference with solar heating here.
Now-a-days it's simply no longer needed. Let's kill off this overbearing monstrosity from a thankfully bygone era. The disadvantages are legion: Kids can't get to sleep, and create mayhem until their poor demented parents drop into bed at dusk, totally exhausted and fit for nothing but sleep; Said parents, now deprived of sleep for an hour or more, cease to be productive in any way until they have been at work for an hour or more; The Dairy sector of the Farming Community always has to get up in the dark; It takes a week or more at each time change for the community as a whole to become fully functional again.
To the best of my knowledge this never been put to the test of a referendum anywhere in the World. Why on earth, in these democratic times, do we put up with this impost? That's what it is, an impost on the general population by a war-time autocracy.
If populations of whatever size actively want to start their working day an hour or two earlier during the Summer, well that's their right as Free Peoples, but for governments to impose it by a fiat and subterfuge, well that's just an abomination!
An interesting point here is power usage distribution. If you need to turn the lights on earlier in the morning, but don't have the AC on, is that not an improvement over evening lights with AC on, after the roof of your home has been blasted by the Sun all day? Personally, I'd rather have it lighter out later. People use lights in the bathroom to prep anyway, whether it is light out or not.
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
It's simply a move to draw attention away from the fact that our winter is shrinking/disappearing. If we all say it's springtime then I guess it must be so.
Believe it.
We're back on standard time now, but if you're a farmer or your industry would benefit from the DST schedule, you can implement it your damned selves! :D
There has been talk off and on about making daylight saving time permanent and as I remember it has always come down to a class issue. So that some manager can drive his little Buffy to tennis while it is still light in the evening how many groundskeepers, security, IT, air and boiler people, janitors, transit workers, cooks, etc have to get up that much earlier in the night?
I do believe you pretty well contradict yourself in those two opening sentences.
Yes, but 1) is heavily affected by the 1) of everyone else in the area. What better way is there to switch everyone in a large area to a different schedule, all at once?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Oh, no. I trust my agent pretty well. Sweet old lady.
Besides, she's shown ridiculous trust in me; she asked me to fix her Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop. Had a busted HD. When I told her that, I asked what she wanted to do about it, told her her options were get a new HD and call me to install it, or get a new laptop. She opted for the latter, handed me her credit card, and told me to pick one out.
This was the first time I met the lady. That's a trusting human. And, like bored people are usually boring, trusting people, in my experience are very trustworthy.
I ended up with that laptop, too. Told her she could sell it for parts on eBay or have Dell recycle it. She told me, take it home and deal with the sale, consider it payment (I had, to that point, refused payment on the unspoken grounds that I want the lady to work hard for my girl and I). I got a new 160G drive and a TRENDNet wifi card (picked for being an atheros-based card) for it and have a shiny new Ubuntu laptop.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Trust me, you'll thank the government when you can still drive your SUVs after oil has run out!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The house simply faces the road.
How silly. You can have lots of large southern windows on one side and a front door on another. Or combine the two. Or move the house towards the back of the lot so that the yard is in the front and hence in the sun if the road is to the south. Or make a round house. Or simply realize that all sides of a house are the front. Architects being lazy about making the rear of a home unattractive are creating insincere structures. - Like an old LA trollup with a face-lift.
How many suburban houses have front doors that are never opened? I count them by the dozens while I'm driving along. Because the driveways are to the side and to go in the front would actually require taking a route almost 1 1/2 times longer than the backdoor. It's a relic from an era when people would approach the house from the street because they were WALKING. Now people insist on them because they think it would look silly without one. Of course, a moment of thought makes that notion much sillier than any results coming from thinking creatively about how one most often enters a building.
Anywho, replace north for south for you anti-northern hemisphere-ites.
What I don't get is why the fuck don't they stick to summer time all the year, at least in my country with my customs. Or I do get it. They waste energy and make consumers pay to favour corporations.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
My parents have a farm, and I usually help out in the morning before going to work. With the time change in april, it wasn't too bad, but now, I'm needing to get up before it's light out, and I'm still driving home from work in the dark so DST does nothing useful for me! I'd rather it be light out at 5:30 when I have to get up than at 6:00 pm when I'm making my last pot of coffee for the day.
what software? I wanna DIY my house :)