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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.
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
... that two college students think they're smarter than a bunch of politicians?
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
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.
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.
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. Historically, these dates have been changed about once per decade in the US alone. Assuming that they'll never change again is plain stupid. This shift will help train the current generation of developers to just not do that.
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.
It shifts all the time. It's even slowly moved westward as cities on an eastern time zone border have pushed to get lumped into the next time zone. Why? Because the vast majority of businesses aren't flexible in their staffing hours and people can't choose to simply go in when they wake up.
My wife says that she wishes DST was all the time, as she has no problems waking up in the dark but tends to work long hours and we regularly stay up until 11 or 12.
And yeah, as a reminder to programmers it's great, but it's also great for all people to realize that time is abstract and can pretty much be whenever. I don't think I've ever heard an elderly person lament the time when we were all standard time.
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.
Is DST WORTH IT? Boy, Let me tell you a story about the place I come from.
I live in Indiana (a midwestern US state). Up until last year, we'd never done DST before at all (with a few exceptions in towns whose economies were linked to cities across the border in other, DST-observing states).
Before we had DST, it was HELL. All year, it got dark at like 2:00pm. There was no Little League Baseball, no football (american or otherwise) for the kids. Most of our youth joined gangs, who roamed the incessant darkness in large, heavily fortified bad-mpg SUVs, kicking puppies and beating up old ladies just for fun. There was no Christmas and no birthdays, and if we saw the Easter bunny we ATE HIM.
Though many people had the misconception that we were "America's Breadbasket", in fact the darkness prevented us from raising any sort of sustenance crops and most of us resorted to cannibalism to survive. Most Hoosiers (that's what we're called, it means "land of eternal darkness" in a Native American tongue) eventually starved to death, which was viewed as a welcome respite from the hellish, unstoppable night. Dogs and cats, living together, you get the picture.
Then, we elected a new Governor who brought us into the light (literally). With the introduction of DST, and the seemingly random (almost whimsical, really) distribution of our Counties between two time zones, our lives were changed forever. Now, it's light outside pretty much twenty-four-fucking-seven. Our kids are all on at least six sports teams and never shoot each other anymore. They call you "sir" or "ma'am" (these words were not used before, as it was difficult to discern gender in the darkness), shine your shoes for you, and present you with ice-cold lemonade from stands with amusingly misspelled signs. We discovered oil everywhere, we grow more crops than the world could ever possibly use (which has ended hunger globally) and we're all filthy, stinking RICH. All the women have big perky boobs, all the men are RIPPED, and everybody has an IQ of at least 160.
Yes Sir, I don't know what we'd do if it weren't for good ol' DST. I have to assume that with the new DST-extending rule from our good friends in the US Congress, we'll probably just evolve to a higher state of being and shed these silly, out-dated husks to become super-intelligent beings composed of pure energy.
Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. Congratulations on being (so far) the only reply that mentions distance from the equator.
:-) don't generally use DST.
Your distance from the equator and the season are the two critical factors. If you live far from the equator and it is closer to the summer solstice than the winter solstice then you have 'daylight to spend'. Where should we spend it? In the evening, or in the morning? Most people don't have any interest in getting up earlier than 6:00 AM, so shifting those wasted hours of sunlight to the evening makes sense. It also makes it easier to sleep in to a decent hour.
Trying to apply a study in Victoria, Australia to North America seems silly (disclaimer: the ABC news story didn't list full details of the study). Melbourne, Victoria is only 37.7 degrees from the equator, and most of the state is even closer. So, they don't get much change in day length, compared to the probably 60% of the continental US that is farther from the equator than Melbourne. Don't get me started on Alaska.
The problem with the DST change is that it now starts when we are still in a sunshine deficit. In the Southern states the days are still about half sunshine, as always, and in the Northern states the days are still noticeably less than half sunshine, so we're spending our excess sunshine hours when we don't have them.
I like DST because I'd rather have daylight in the evening than in the morning--I rarely get up before 7:00 AM. And, I like having DST earlier because I like to bike to and from work and since I ride in around 9:00 AM and return around 5:00 AM it works better for me if the sun is at its peak halfway between--around 1:00 AM--which is what DST does.
However, it seems unlikely that there would be much if any power savings for the next three weeks of DST where we are robbing Peter to pay Paul, and Peter doesn't have much to start with.
Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that discussing the usefulness of DST without specifying a distance from the equator is pointless. There's a reason that tropical countries (including New Mexico
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!
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.
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.
Wow. My coffee-starved brain read that and believed it for a whole three paragraphs. I'm shocked at my own gullibility.
That said, funny shit.
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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
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
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.
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Even if the DST dates are not hard-coded there is still the problem of upgrading all the units out in the field.
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.
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.]
They're not built in random directions, the roads are. The house simply faces the road.
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.
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?
Right! We don't need no daylight saving in our mother's basements!
"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.
Time zone specific calculations are on the client end, as all NTP sources give time in UST. So even if your embedded device is time syncing, if the software says "DST starts in april in timezone X" it is going to be wrong (even if it is very close to being wrong by an hour). The GP ignores the fact that no amount of "flexibility" in the DST implementation is going to make it economically feasible to support a $50 device for longer than production run. The thing to fix is setting up a public system that stores time offsets for all localities and make it a standard part of all OSes, like NTP.
I too am from Indiana, and I can vouch for everything the poster states. Myself was actually an hour late to work this morning because I was way to busy saving daylight and admiring my new ripped abs. Kudos.
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?
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.
Fortunately, WWV includes a DST flag so that at least those so-called "atomic clocks" (actually radio clocks) automatically changed at the right time.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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
The thing to fix is, getting rid of the DST change completely, either way, and stop changing clock twice a year. THAT'S the waste here.
Nothing to say here... move along
I honestly do not get what the big stink is with the DST thing. This change was announced MORE THAN A FREAKIN' YEAR AGO! Any company that did not make preparations long ago DESERVES whatever problems they get. Really, this did not sneak up on us. My company prepared for it, made the appropriate changes to systems from DOS through XP. The DST change came and went. Guess what? No problems. Did it cost us any money? Um...no. When you give yourself plenty of time, you don't have to stop doing your existing job to fix the problem.
Bearded Dragon
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.
IQ isn't about how 'smart' you are, but more about how you can deductively solve a problem. A person can be smarter that a person with a higher IQ cause they spend more time actively using there lower IQ. Its like the pipe problem. If you have a 1" pipe and a 2" pipe, the 2 inch pipe will fill a bucket twice as fast. Right? Well, what if the 2" pipe only gets a quarter the flow of water the 1" pipe gets? What you are saying is, I'm a fairly bright person, with an IQ I could do great things with, but alas, I'm fairly lazy and stick to what I already know.
In the US, it was changed federally in 1918, 1920, 1942, 1945, 1966, 1974, 1975, 1985, 1986 and 2007. That averages out to about once per decade. Up until 1966, many individual states also fiddled with the times. Even today, states are allowed to opt in and out of DST altogether, and Indiana just recently changed its rules.
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!
As part of the learning process, when we experience unpleasant events, we gain the wisdom to avoid them in the future. The lesson here is: DST has changed many times in the past, and it will certainly change again in the future. Failure to anticipate this causes a lot of extra work for people. Training always has a cost, and we have just seen the cost of this lesson.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Now if only they used it. I've got an analog radio clock that doesn't even display the date, but for some reason they decided to read the date bits and do some calendar calculations (or hard code the next X years of DST dates) to calculate DST rather than reading the flag.
I don't understand why you wouldn't use the flag -- it seems easier to just read the flag than to calculate the start/stop dates. There's even a countdown so you can miss several days of syncing before the switch and still know when it should happen. Apparently not all clock designers share my hatred for calendar calculations.
FYI: Common radio clocks use the 60kHz WWVB signal not the 2.5-20 MHz WWV signals. They both contain the digital timecode information, but WWV and WWVH also include frequency information (440 Hz, 500 Hz, 600 Hz, 1000 Hz and 1500 Hz beeps) and vocal timestamps, and reports about the weather, GPS health, and solar/radio conditions. In general WWV/WWVH are intended for manual use (all the time information is available in a format useful to human ears) and use outside the WWVB range, but WWVB is more accurate where available (better straight-line propagation) and less complicated to decode electronically due to the extremely low bit rate (a standard serial port can decode directly from an AM amp).
There are many kinds of smart.
Some of them are cultural.
Some of them are inherent physically.
People who have the currently popular versions of smart are treated as smart by society.
In the french court, calculus counted for nothing- but you could basically kill a person with the right witty saying.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Or at the very least, the acronym DST should change. Since the so-called "standard" time lasts from the first Sunday of November to the second Sunday of March which is 19 weeks, and the "daylight saving time" lasts the remaining 34 weeks, the one which lasts longer (summer time) should be called "standard time", while the winter time, opposite of DST, should really be called "daylight wasting time".
Really, if we're so save daylight, why not save it all year long? Otherwise, we're just wasting it.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
To me all that daylight at 4am (ok, a bit of an exageration) in the summertime is wasted. But light at 9pm? Not wasted . . . that means outdoor activity like bike rides after work, especially earlier in the spring when it would be getting dark at 6:30 instead of 7:30. I think that it is this sense that keeps it alive, rather than the Big Brother type of control you imply.
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.
1% Energy Savings
2 Billion spent in software/device updates
3 Weeks until the next set of issues
Forlorn It Techs everywhere
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Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.