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Alternatives to Daylight Saving Time?
Wellington Grey writes "Daylight saving time almost upon us. The arguments about its possible benefits and drawbacks come up twice every year. Does it save energy or lives? Possibly, but it does definitely cause a great deal of inconvenience. My question is this: what do you think would be the best possible system to replace DST with? What is the best way for humans to deal with the inconsistent amount of light over the year and still foster coordination over disparate time zones?"
...and be done with it. Semper Fi! Oooh-rah! Gung-ho, Gung-ho, Gung-ho, sir!
Move everything 30 minutes, problem solved
We don't do DST in John McCain country.*
*Unless you're an Indian, in which case you might.
Why does it need replacement? Just get rid of it altogether...
Nightdark Wasting Time ?
Actually, isn't STANDARD time upon us?
"9-5" business hours is a convention because there's no easy way to do anything different in a pre-wired world.
Now that we have or are about to have ubiquitous Internet everywhere, companies should publish smbmeta files at domainname.foo/smbmeta.xml with their hours in it, and have every useful directory service (Google Local, Yellowpages.com, that iPhone thing, etc.) understand a linkage between a domain name and store (oh, and the phone thing too, which can usually be used as the 'foreign key'). Good VOIP phones could easily do the same. The cost is practically nil for everybody and we get past the need for conventions.
Of course there are clustering reasons to coordinate business hours on a geographical basis, but individual businesses can make those decisions and either profit or lose business by them.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Do away with DST. If people want/need to get up earlier or later to take advantage of the daylight then JUST GET UP EARLIER OR LATER! There is no good reason to change the clock backward and forward. Lots of places don't do it and they don't have any problems. STOP DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME!
See subject. Then make everyone talk in UTC. That should do it.
That is all.
> "What is the best way for humans to deal with the inconsistent amount of light over the year and still foster coordination over disparate time zones?"
Russia has a dozen time zones and fares just fine - as does China, with only one. This business of claiming that 'light' is a problem needing a solution is the only issue here...
Actually, DST is coming to an end. The summer is when the hours are artificially moved ahead. The winter time is the actual "accurate" earth time.
My ask slashdot question is this: what do you think would be the best possible system to replace DTS with?
A system just like the current DTS, but with a monetary fine for whiners.
Come on, how hard is it to set a damned clock? Just do it.
...move to Arizona. Problem solved.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
How about "Night-Light Savings Time"?...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
It's the closest thing to God's time this side of Silicon Heaven.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What is the best way for humans to deal with the inconsistent amount of light over the year and still foster coordination over disparate time zones?
Turn on a lamp.
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
Oh, I know! I know! Swatch time!
This guy's the limit!
It's very inconvenient for those of us who deal with people internationally on a daily basis, messing up sleep schedules. It's a pain, I'd like to see it go away.
Or Saskatchewan. We don't do DST either. Actually, a good solution is to just be on DST all-year long. Portions of Saskatchewan have done exactly that. Astronomically where I live should be MST/MDT. (The sun is at its zenith at 12:57 pm and it should be there at 12:00.) This way a person gets more sunlight later in the day in the summer, and the days in winter are short enough that it doesn't really matter anyway.
Except for all those 'daylight savings' days... lousy farmers!
Actually, we are in Daylight Savings Time right now. We are getting ready to go back to Standard Time.
Just shift business hours.
The issue with DST is not that it's inconvenient, it's that it's insufficiently precise! We should be changing the time every day (at least!) to make sure our time is as accurate as possible to the length of the day. Every day, 12 noon should be when the Sun is directly overhead, no matter where you are.
Sure, this means changing time zones almost continuously while travelling, and at least daily while remaining stationary, but at least we won't have to deal with the confusion that comes from discovering that the Sun is directly overhead at 12:00:34 instead of 12 noon sharp! How can we call ourselves intelligent beings when our time system is so woefully inaccurate most of the time?
So, scrap daylight savings time and replace it with a system of several thousand time zones, each updated daily based on the predicted "high noon" for that particular day at that particular location. If the prediction ends up being off by a few microseconds on a particular day, just change the time to correct it right then and there! Sure, wristwatches will become orders of magnitude more complex, but it's the only way to have a truly sane and accurate system of time measurement. And after all, isn't that what we all really want here?
Grab a cesium atom and slap it on your wrist.
You can't eliminate daylight savings and still have the power savings it brings. Setting the time forward permanently means people will be using lights at 7AM instead of PM. Moving to an equatorial region would eliminate the need for DST but it's more convenient to set your clocks back / forward every six months.
Sigger than your average
Shouldn't that be "Daylight savings time is about to end"?
DST becomes unnecessary.
You're a farmer, or construction worker, or anyone who does his business in daylight. During the months of short days, you are up and ready to work at sun up every day and need to work for 8 hours. In the summer, you can still get to the bank and do your business. But in the winter, without DST, you're stuck at work until 5:00pm and can't. DST isn't baseless. It caters to a small group of people that can't adjust their hours.
Whale
Clocks and watches cause stress. Let's abolish time zones altogether.
Not begin! you insensitive CLOD!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Here's my favorite anti-daylight savings time page:
End Day Light Savings Time
I don't like Daylight Saving Time, or as I call it "Pretend it's an hour later than it is," and will be glad when the clock in my car doesn't make me do addition to remember what time it is (I refuse to adjust it for this nonsense.) This silly dance we do every year twice.
My alarm clock is a self-adjusting atomic model (not internally of course, it readjusts itself via radio signal from the U.S. Atomic Clock in Colorado).
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
My ask slashdot question is this: what do you think would be the best possible system to replace DTS with?
The most commonly accepted alternatives to DTS are Dolby Digital and SDDS.
What is this daylight you speak of? I thought slashdotters just lived in their server farms?
Good idea. Actually scary timing on that comment (and this thread). Want to help me finish loading my pod as I return to the Valley of the Sun? I always like to point out that DST never does any favors to a state where the summer months need extra sunlight like John McCain needs extra sunlight.
As others have pointed out (http://irc.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/pubs/fulltext/nrcc49212/nrcc49212.pdf), Daylight Savings Time likely doesn't save us any energy. This, of course, makes sense as if people are getting up earlier to avoid it being dark when they get home, they're still using electricity in the morning which is now dark. In short, the only way that daylight savings time in the modern day is beneficial to anyone is people who want to play sports or do something else outdoors after work. Not only that, but studies have shown that Daylight Savings Time often actually costs companies money due to needing to change clocks, employees who show up late/early to work during time changes and computer errors resulting from time changes. The solution, is to abolish Daylight Savings Time and save us all some time, money and bother.
AKA Farm Time. Tell all time using GMT+5. Let people adjust to the fact that time is just a number and it shouldn't change the way they live and work.
The solution is that all world population live near Equator
Some sort of universal time. I mean who says we need to go to work at 8am. If should matter to me if I'm going into the office at 18:00 UMT.
Why not have everyone on UTC? If you in New York Open your store 0900 in the morning, why can't you just open the west coast store at 1200 in the morning in LA? Just becaue we are use to having things open 9 - 5 in a local time zone there is no reason why that hours can't shift? It'll probably happen after the US switches to metric, but thats my dream.
I replaced all my DTS with SSIS.
Here are a few real alternatives to daylight savings time:
-Daylight wasting time
-Nightlight saving time
-Dayheavy saving time
-Some permutation of the above terrible puns
Let's just all use 24 hour UTC. Who cares if sunrise is at 12:00? Or better yet use a decimal system. Why are we still using a base 60 system invented by the Sumerians?
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
I propose replacing DTS with DST.
Too much artificial light isn't good for you, as most of you would know.
It's attributed to to Seasonal Affective Disorder.
And also, pasty faced nerd syndrome.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
Why not make an 1/2h switch instead of a whole hour and keep it so all year long?
what do you think would be the best possible system to replace DTS with?
I think DTS disappeared with the release of SQL Server 2005. I'm pretty sure it's all .NET code now...
DST is the worst possible way to handle the daylight difference. Instead of changing the clocks, businesses should just say "Summer hours: 9am-5pm, winter hours: 8am-4pm. It's the same dang thing, except you don't have to be going "oh, they are in Arizona, and they don't observe DST" or "Wait, UK DST starts a week later, so they aren't in the office yet..." etc.
The way we do DST now is like saying that the centimeter is a little too small for measuring fence posts, so let's just add one centimeter to the measurement. So now 1cm=2cm, and 2cm=3cm. But then someone else says they should add .5cm, and someone else wants the rule to apply to gear boxes AND fence posts...
Yes how on Earth did we survive the 2 billion year evolution to the point where we could develope DST???
I this if we just plain scrapped it everything would go on as usual, most of us work in a building of some form and they come with lights these days. As for farmer I think the 5,000,000 candle power on a combine haverister just about does the trick.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
In this day and age, there is no reason we should even still be cut up into time-zones. There is no need for a leap year (or a leap anything...) and we should definitely not have "daylight savings". We should go to something like "internet time" where the day (currently 24 hours) is equally divided and the time is measured at the exact moment around the world. So instead of having 5 pm Mountain time be 6 pm central, it would simply be 17, or 85, or whatever the numeric representation is... 1 might be in the middle of the night, or in the mid morning, or in the evening...but it would always be 1 at that very instant/event every day, and it would be for everyone. Then there is no worry about daylight savings... companies can decide when they want to open, when they want to do business (we are open from 8 to 16 - which would be the same 8-16 all over the planet...) and if a company decides to be open an hour earlier or close an hour later...then that is their deal...everyone will still be working within 2 hours of eachother, really no different than things are right now...
--E--
Daylight Savings Time has enormous costs and very little value in return.
We should get read of it and say, "Good riddance..."
If there are issues with available daylight in a particular area, then the times of events should be adjusted accordingly. If it is to dark at 7 AM for kids to go out in order to reach school at 8 AM, then push back the start time of school, etc., to 9 AM.
In reality, this is what Daylight Savings Time does, but at much greater cost.
...although some will call me one. I couldn't care less, this arguement comes up twice a year, and twice a year I don't really care. I've heard all the arguements and everything, but truth be told, the switch doesn't bother me that much. The only day that really concerns me is the one where we turn time back, the extra hour is always nice. The winter time is just a pain because I like to leave work and still have some daylight - but that's just me.
In the interest of Getting Things Right, I'll point out that it's "Daylight Saving Time" not "Daylight Savings Time".
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Southern hemisphere will be coming into summer soon and lots of countries appear to use DST in our northern winter months.
http://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst2008b.html
Although it has been sudjested that this was ben franklin's idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
I say, just make sunrise 6am everywhere.
We did not have the technology to do this in pre-industrial times, but
we did do this in ancient times, and we can do it again.
It would maximize light saving, it would maximize night availability,
and only result in the fact that it is a different time in EVERY town in the world
just about.
So what, it would just require some websites where you could enter where you are, where they are,
and know the time and time-diff. If I'm in Michigan and you are in Alabama. Sometimes I ahead of
you, sometimes you are ahead of me. Sweet!
Perfect time for everyone.
And two chickens in every pot! :-()
and never missed DST. They seem to get business done very well without it.
we need to remedy that tilty-axis-syndrome that the earth has and straighten that crap up.
Alternately, a mission to Jupiter that will trigger the monolith's sun conversion program.
Ditch DST already
Adaptability is an amazing human trait. we will get use to the extra hour (OHH NOOO 60 munites) of adjusted light/dark.
Plenty of other developed countries have ditched DST with not too many humans dying off, i think we can manage it.
The new name is SSIS. SQL Server Integration Services.
Simple answer: abolish it. I lived in Japan for several years and they don't adjust their clocks. Guess what? I didn't notice! Well, except that I didn't have the hassle of changing all my clocks, and throwing off my sleeping rhythm twice a year.
Frankly, I don't see the point of DST anymore. So many people work in giant window-less buildings now, what does it matter? The lights are on the same amount of time regardless. And if you desperately need consistent daylight, move closer to the equator. Or you could invest in some full-spectrum light bulbs (they help me quite a bit).
Meh, just my $0.02.
That depends on the lights. If I stand under my roomful of 1000 watt grow lights that I use to grow my...um tomatoes...that light is actually quite good for you.
I say get rid of it entirely. I grew up in Saskatchewan and we don't subscribe to DST.
While most of North America is wringing hands and wasting time (oh the irony!) changing clocks and figuring out if it is ahead or back and fighting with children who now don't want to go to bed when it is light outside, the people of Saskatchewan simply go on; happily oblivious to the storm that engulfs its neighbours twice a year.
Of course the one funky thing that we DO have to deal with is tv broadcasts from out of province shifting time slots...but soon we'll all have the technology that will make that a problem of the past.
Move everyone up 30 minutes permanently. In the winter, things get dark a little early. In the summer, it stays dark a little more into the morning.
It's not that I'm asking the big questions, it's that I'm asking lots of small ones.
I like having that extra hour in the morning. We could have a DST jump every other weak. Then skip, I dunno, Dec. 25th to account for the day we lost.
The benefits are now the daylight is earlier in the morning (can be good or bad for some), should allow for less use of lighting since you can turn off earlier in the morning. Drawbacks, The time change messes with alot of people like myself. It takes a week to get used to the time change. Fall is ok but spring blows chunks with loosing an hour. For programs this is a pain in the ass as well. I wish they would just get rid of it and move the time a half hour back and leave it the hell alone. Split the difference so no changes should be needed.
Most places in the US either have to move forward or back an hour, and some places don't, right?
1 - Set a date for the LAST DST.
2 - On that date, instead of an HOUR, move a HALF AN HOUR in whatever direction your location traditionally goes at this time.
3 - Any location that doesn't traditionally move may either stay put or make a final decision to move with their neighbors.
4 - Lock in the time. Done. Time is now set.
5 - ...
6 - Profit.
Problem solved, next.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Lets just do only 1/2 hour this time and call it quits... ;)
So buy full-spectrum light bulbs. I did for my entire house, at first many people complain that the light is "cold" (it's much whiter than the sickly-yellow pall a standard incandescent light casts) but after a while you get used to it and realize how bad incandescent bulbs make everything look.
I live in Minnesota in the Northern latitudes (shut it, Canadians). I get up at five am and leave for work at 6:30 am. I work in a cube in a room without windows until 5 pm when I go home. It is ALWAYS dark.
From October until April, DST or not, it makes no difference to me.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
The time we move to in the winter *is* the right time.
We should just stay there all year. I used to live in Indiana, most of which, up until a few years ago, did exactly that. It works fine.
They only changed it so as not to be always confusing people from other places.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
DST causes screams of frustration twice a year as VCR clocks need to be reset.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Remember that timezones are a relatively modern invention - used to be every little town had it's own time - from the town hall clock - it wasn't until the coming of the railroad (and timetables) and the telegraph that anyone needed to care
KHAN: Admiral? Admiral?! Admiral Kirk! He never told you how Admiral Kirk sent seventy of us into exile on this barren sand heap with only the contents of these cargo bays to sustain us!?
CHEKOV: You lie! On Ceti Alpha Five there was life, a fair chance!
KHAN: *THIS* is Ceti Alpha Five! Ceti Alpha Six exploded six months after we were left here! The shock shifted the orbit of this planet and everything was laid waste. Admiral Kirk never bothered to check on our progress. It was only the fact of my genetically engineered intellect that enabled us to survive!
Time is just a way for us to keep track of things. Is there anything keeping us from all just using one time, except for the societal conditioning that it shouldn't be sunny at 2 am?
Just because you change the time, or even remove clocks from your house altogether, doesn't really change anything.
Does it make any difference if you work during the day for 8 hours and the "work day" in your part of the world is 2 am to 10 am universal time instead of 9 am to 5 pm?
When told the reason for Daylight Saving time the old Indian said... 'Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket.'
That's because we're way too conservative to implement any Progressive[tm] ideas like resetting a perfectly good clock or VCR twice a year. Besides, AZ has all the sunlight it needs already.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Oddly that is only 3,650,915 beats so far.
While I like having the extra daylight into the evening hours during the spring and summer, the rest of the year gets pretty screwed up for me because of it. Our sleep patterns are tied to periods of light and dark, and while I'm not going to speak for everyone else, the time change screws with my sleep patterns as well as my overall mood. If it were up to me, I'd abolish the practice completely. I understand the original reasons for it, but farmers use machines with lots of lights on them now and not mule-driven ploughs, so they really couldn't care less I think whether or not it's light or dark outside when they're working.
Moved here from Michigan 5 years ago. I don't miss DST at all. I just know that when I wake up at 5am, during the spring/summer, it's nearly broad daylight and in the colder months it's pitch black out. Right now, it's pitch black at 5am, at 5:30, I see some sunlight, by the time I get in my car at 6-615:am, it's daylight.
Right now, I see the idiodicy of DST. You don't actually get more daylight, we just fool you into thinking you do.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
This whole problem is caused by summer days being longer than winter days. Build some BIG rockets, chain them to the earth, and fix that tilt of the axis so we just have spring all year round with 12 hours of daylight every day.
That sounds like a great idea. Let's get together and start planning the transition, tomorrow at noon.
Are you adequate?
Do not mess with your computer's clocks twice a year. Set your computer's real time clock to UTC (world time), and forget about it. Your computer keeps time in UTC anyway. It only converts to local time when a program requests local time. If you set the real time clock to UTC, you can move your computer between timezones and never have to set a clock. Just tell the computer what zone you are in, so it can convert to local time correctly, but you have to do that anyway.
It may be somewhat more difficult to determine UTC to set your real time clock, but you only have to do it once!
Only inferior proprietary Operating Systems mess with the clock twice a year.
I have always found it a funny topic. The politician like to think they have so much power by implement DST or not. Has anyone ever told them they can control the real number of hours of sunlight through legislation? I remember one local politician saying DST would give farms an extra hour of day light! Wow I thought - how could they have such power over the cosmos.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
I'd love to get up at 5am every day, and work from 6am to 2 or 3pm.
That way I could have a ton of daylight when I come home, which is when I need it.
Do you think you could talk to my boss for me?
Most people work in cubes or offices, or at least inside. What use is daylight to most of us of before say.. lunchtime??
I say we spring forward 3 hours and just stay there all the time.
WTF do I need daylight for on my way to work, just so I can wander around my yard with a flashlight at 6pm? We're not farmers anymore.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Worldwide eradication of all humans should take care of this daylight savings time mess!
A year ago last spring I was working as a Unix Admin for a rather large dysfunctional company. They waited until January and then decided that a several thousand systems needed DST patching. I was part of a team that worked seven days a week on this. I think I got a $200 gift card for all my overtime. PLEASE don't mess with DST again.
This isn't an easy shift for me to make. I've lived with DST all my life, and am very much a traditionalist about stuff like this.
However, after dealing with the DST change a few years ago, I really started to think about it, and realised that I have no love for DST at all. Let's just dump it, and be done with it. Allowing kids the extra hour to stay out until midnight instead of 11pm isn't worth much. Economically, the only effect is that people might shop less in the evenings (the real reason for pushing DST out for another six weeks or whatever).
DST wasn't a great idea to start with, and it's too difficult to bother with in a connected world. Good riddance.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
One of my schoolteachers suggested this back when most clocks ran on 60Hz synchronous motors. Speed up time during the work day, slow it down at happy hour.
Why DST? During the summer, the sun rises early in the morning when most people are still asleep. Moving the clock ahead an hour lets us use that morning hour in the evening. We don't need to turn on the lights on for an hour.
We should use Ethiopian time. Hours from 1 to 12 span from sunrise to sunset, and 1 to 12 from sunset to sunrise.
Of course, they also use the Julian calendar and have thirteen months on leap year... so maybe they aren't the shining example.
I remember when I lived in Iowa as a graduate student in the '60s and the state was about to start DST for the first time. The Des Moines Register published letters from folks who complained about the switch. Many folks commented that the "extra hour of daylight" would reek all kinds of havoc: it would be bad for lawns, the corn and soy bean crops because it would damage them by burning them. If this is true, we ought to get rid of that extra hour of sunlight in the summer. STOP DST!
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
If you live in North America, you have already seen Daylight Savings Time creep over more and more of the calendar. It is now the time used for 8 months of the year. So why every go back to Standard Time?
If we drop standard time, we can get rid of the ridiculous rule that says that one day a year there will be no time between 2:00 AM and 3:00 AM. Something happened on the Second Sunday in March at 2:41 AM? Never happened.
We could also get rid of the even worse rule that on one day a year all times between 1:00 AM and 2:00 AM will occur twice! Something happened at 1:24 AM on the first Sunday in November? Which 1:24 AM? The first one or the second one?
Eventually perhaps we could go to UTC and just have a different set of local business hours in each municipality. But somehow, "Noon" and "Midnight" seem to be too ingrained to get there just yet.
For the US I suggest we do away with DST and merge our 4 timezones into 2. Since the Mountain and Central time zones are always forgotten they should be merged: Central into Eastern and Mountain into Pacific. Then since we don't want a 3 hour break at a border each timezone moves 1/2 hour closer to the other since a 2 hour break is OK. This would put the ET (notice not Standard or Daylight designation) as GMT-4:30 and PT as GMT-6:30.
The earth's rotational speed is decreasing! We are all doomed! Why even think about DST at such grave moments!?!?
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
Everyone can deal with the hour back (-1) in the fall stuff. The hour ahead (+1) in the spring is a bitch.
So, why not simply do -23 hours in the spring, instead of +1? Everyone get almost a day to piss away again, and the clocks still have the same time in the end.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
My wife hates DST. She looked into how a state could "get off" of the train, so to speak.
And, DST is simply a federal standard that sets the days, and it's up to the states to either do it on the federally-mandated days, or not.
It's voluntary.
So, if any state votes to not change the clocks in March (now?), that's it, they don't change.
...move to Arizona. Problem solved.
-B
Except that East Indiana used to be DST-free, too, but they finally caved in and adopted it... I wouldn't want to move somewhere just because they're rational about one particular thing, only to have them maybe change it in the future...
Bow-ties are cool.
Make points all over and anywhere the globe where you can make as relative starting point. You choose your designated time house. When sun peaks above the horizon at said location, it is sun rise starting point at that location. Develop a photonic time piece and mass produce. As sun rise starts in that location, all who decide to use that location's base time have their photonic time pieces automatically start tick tocking light bounces when sun has peaked. Every Sun rise at said location, the time piece begins again at tick tocking. Ticks are counted so you can say meet me at 400 Giga ticks in third day of Winter. Or how ever many ticks a light clock would make to be your decided amount of time after sun rise.)(TASR)
Or you could use the sun's highest point at your designated time house starting point. Ticks after noon (TAN)
Or Ticks After Sunset (TASS)
Or ticks after your favorite earth shattering event. Ex: Ticks after First Man on Mars(TAFMoM)
Four words:
One time for Earth.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
If we just move the time 30 minutes forward this year and be done with it then we will have a compromise between the two positions...
Didnt they try and get rid of DST many years back, only to find that children standing outside waiting for the bus were more likely to get kidnapped when it was dark out?
Maybe thats just an urban myth to keep us on DST, but it was something I had heard about before and didnt see any discussion on it yet.
If you have a job that requires you to wake up when the sun comes up then wake up when the sun comes up. If you can only work when you have available light then stop working when the sun starts to set. We live in a 24/7 world these days. We can do what we want to do when we want to do it. The whole idea of setting the clock back and forth has outlived its usefulness.
India has it right - just set the clocks 1/2 ahead of standard time and then forget Daylight savings time. Problem solved.
Finally, you see that the Time Cube isn't so crazy after all.
I live in Florida so I still have a very difficult time even understanding what DST was supposed to accomplish. Sundown at 6:00 instead of 7:00? or vice versa? what a stupid waste.
Just settle on when you want the hour to be and leaqve it there. You'll save tons of time, money and consternation... And, most importantly, reduce the number of things we bitch about by two.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
UTC is going to be phased out anyway. So why not use it's replacement TI. Does away with those pesky leap seconds as well. I mean who wants to know that 12:00 roughly corresponds to the sun being at its highest point in the sky anyway. I realise it's bucking conventional "/." wisdom, but most of the world doesn't revolve around the internet. People still need to make or sell actual stuff that other people buy. Children need to go to schools. The corner shop is still cateres to local needs and will open during peak business hours. People still think locally; we're hardwired that way. We used to ignore 9-5 before. That's was during the industrial revolution. Then they had workhouses and a small elite class oppressing the poor and uneducated. (Ohh! I think we've gone full circle on that one.) That's why unions were form to protect the rights of workers from exploitation, hence the 8 hour day.
Why is the government in charge of what time it is? Is there a law on the books? If the majority of people ignore DST - or even better, adopt UTC as their clock - it'd wind up becoming official eventually.
If we can get people to type with their thumbs, we can get them to adopt UTC.
But then again, when will we know when to check the batteries of our smoke detectors?
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
We will soon be switching back to standard time.
In the non-embedded world, people rely on the operating system to handle the time, DST and all.
Linux and MacOS systems are configured to use a second count from an epoch internally, which it converts to local time using a timezone database. The timezone database is designed to be updated, and updates are routinely sent out whenever a timezone (or DST rule) changes worldwide. The timezone db for Linux changed within days of the law being changed. The DB is historical, so it'll properly report times in the past, even though the rules have changed since then.
The main problem with Linux embedded applications is updating the DB when the rules change.
Windows... I dunno how Windows handles it.
The idea of an 8-hour day (and the 40-hour week) has only been around since about the beginning of the 20th century. It's mainly originated from workers' demands in response to conditions in which many factory owners required people to work 12 or more hours a day. Later, it was reinforced by legislation requiring overtime for hours in excess of 40 in an attempt to reduce unemployment. Before industrialization, there was little concept of a "standard" workday. Farmers worked however many hours were necessary to maintain their crops and livestock, even if it meant working from sunrise to after sunset. Shopkeepers in town set their hours according to their needs.
If DST weren't an issue, wouldn't it have been more natural to set an 8-hour workday to run from 8 AM to 4 PM rather than one hour later? In the northern tier of the contiguous U.S., it's common for the sun to set between 4 and 5 PM in the winter. And the sun is almost always up before 8, except for some places close to the Canadian border or near the western edge of a time zone. A workday ending at 5 instead of 4 would have made things somewhat more complicated in a society where electric lighting hadn't yet become ubiquitous. Does anyone know how the hours 9-5 got chosen rather than some other 8-hour span?
.
Farm Time was local solar time.
You adjusted your watch about every 25 miles or so - once a day.
The railroad and the telegraph demanded standard time: 25 miles a day becomes 25 miles an hour as early as 1840.
There is - or soon will be - "instant messaging" on a continental scale.
That changes the way you think about markets, shipping, the entire structure of trade, banking and industry.
The problem with daylight savings time is that it's arbitrary; astronomical noon isn't really at 12:00 noon anywhere, but if a group schedules their meetings for 9am every day year round, they want them to always be in daylight. What we should do is make the relationship between clock time and daylight explicit, by expressing times relative to sunrise: "S+1:23" would be "1 hour 23 minutes after local sunrise". Clocks would show both sunrise-time and GMT. To keep things simple, assume that the sun rises at the same time every day of a month, and at the same time everywhere in a state/time zone. That way, the same time would always mean the same thing everywhere. And rather than having one day with an extra hour and one day missing an hour every year, the last day of each month would be slightly longer or shorter, but not enough to mess up sleep schedules.
Daylight Murder Time
Daylight Wasting Time
Daylight Nightdark Time
Daylight Sometimes Time
You can call anyone, anywhere - meetings are scheduled at 1500z, and everyone knows what that means, no matter where they are.
People who want to shift their business or school schedules can, at the time when they feel it's appropriate - like maybe the first week of October, you shift the office hours from 1400z - 0300z to 1300z - 0200z.
Daylight Saving Time really only works (if it works at all) for a narrow range of latitudes.
Too far south and the sun sets at the same time all year anyway. Too far north and the sun sets ridiculously late in the summer, and sets very early in the winter. Few of our southern hemisphere friends live far enough south for this to be an issue. Anybody here from Ushuaia?
Even here, in southern Canada (49 degrees north), the sun sets at 1600 in the winter. If we didn't mess with time zones the sun would set at 2000 in the summer, and it isn't really dark until nearly 2200. How much later do you want it to set?
...laura
I can't believe how many people here call it "Daylight Savings Time"? It's called "Daylight Saving Time"!
From Wikipedia: In the normative form, daylight saving time uses the present participle...
From the same article: It's like "labour saving device".
When 1person suffers from a delusion,it is called insanity.When many people suffer from a delusion,it is called religion
In a sufficiently large city, can you tell the difference anymore?
Being a largely word-at-my-pace programmer, I've always followed the sun (or lack thereof). The only reason to set my clock is because I meet with others and want to know when rush hour traffic would affect me. Since my primary clock is my cell phone, which adjusts automatically, I only have to worry about the clock above my bed and the one on the microwave -- the former I could solve with a clock that sets itself, and the latter I pretty much only use as a reference as I walk out the door. Friends have gotten used to my occasionally showing up exactly 1 hour late or early.
Ok my first post, Hello everyone! I have a idea, if people insist to keep DST. We could have this, and it all would be over in less then a week.. Lets say that the time is 12:00
Change the time like this:
Day1 - set the time to 12:10
Day2 - set the time to 12:20
Day3 - set the time to 12:30
day4 - set the time to 12:40
Day4 - set the time to 12:50
Day6 - set the time to 13:00
and vola! but on second thought it would be better with 4 or 2 days.
2Days DST
Day1 12:30
Day2 13:00
4Days DST
Day1 - set the time to 12:15
Day2 - set the time to 12:30
Day3 - set the time to 12:45
Day4 - set the time to 13:00
Shorter changes over a period of time, is way better, and you will not feel like the time is being stolen from you. On the other hand more simple with 1 day...
Henric
Of course, GWBush wants it set to 1750, when he can be a Unitary Executive...
But it did always strike me as ironic that the Native Americans in Arizona are forced to set their clocks to times that aren't closely connected to the sun, while the city folks are allowed to have high noon at 12:00 where it belongs.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I was one of the smart ones. I started saving daylight when I was young, and now I almost have enough to have perpetual sunshine until croak.
...move to Arizona. Problem solved.
I did, but problem not solved - now I can't remember everybody else's time.
Then middday is, y'know, the middle of the day.
Yeah we put our clocks forward a couple of weeks ago. For a week I'm tired in the mornings and feel a little out of whack, but then I adjust and forget about until it's time to change back. We use to start DSL later in the year, but a couple of years ago there is a big push to start it earlier and end it later. Apparently some people really dig it.
Yeah. DST is the government telling you to get up early and go to work, but change your clock to pretend you didn't do that. It didn't make much sense back when most city folks worked in factories, but it makes much less sense now when people who do work in offices ought to be keeping flextime to reduce commuting congestion.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
A different problem arises:
When I lived in Arizona, I was always confused about whether we were on California time or New Mexico time.
Then we won't need to deal with DST at all. Computers can be programmed/engineered to track time by geographic position. And they can always use UTC for an absolute time.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The best thing that we can do is to forget the DST completely and continue to live the way we do. Just the sole fact that we leave it up to governments to determine what is DST should scare you. Don't believe me? Ask Sun how much effort it took to re-compile all the Java crap in order to respect the new DST rules.
Here is the way I see it. If you live close to equator, then you probably do not care about DST. It is so darn hot in many countries that people are accustomed to get up early in the morning and work while the sun is not hot. In many countries people take a break during afternoon because it is so darn hot to be outside. Then they keep on working during late afternoon.
If for some darn reason you chose to live in a place far away from the Equator, then you just deal with it. I mean you deal with cold weather and other stuff already, why not add short days and long nights to the list of things that are pronounced in high latitudes?
As for the rest of the electronic world, switch every damn thing to UTC. If you need to display your computer clock in a local time, configure it to add the offset to UTC and you're done. That way software vendors have a clear standard and people don't have to spend time figuring out what is going on.
Twice a year, we can expand out small talk to the DST/ST debate. If you live in the US there isn't much point to DST. However, the further North you live the more convenient DST becomes. Here in WPG, in summer we get 16.5 hours of sunlight at our peak. It is more convenient to have the sun go down at 10pm instead of rise at 4am. Perhaps originally, it saved some energy as people used less incandescent lighting. With the information age (cable TV, internet, etc..), I image that less energy, as a percent of total consumption, is used for lighting. Any thoughts?
There is way too much thought being put into this. Clearly the solution is to correct the earth's axis angle. Who needs seasons anyway?
the original clock was when the sun actually rose and set on the horizon of the earth.
but we wanted to know exactly how far through that period we were.
so when clocks were invented - we very linearly divided the day up into 24 parts,
and then (based on ancient sumerian base 60) -- divided the 24 hours into 60 smaller parts.
we still linearly divide our day (despite the fact that every day changes sunrise / sunset times), and we still use ancient sumerian base 60 in our measurement of time (minutes) today -- omg, its amazing we don't still use Cubits & Fathoms to measure things...!
so, we can carry on with using base 60 for minutes, and medieval linear ideas of time, or we can take advantage of our understandings of science to create something more rational. so here are two proposals to take time measurement out of the medieval dark ages:
1) 0:00 HOURS = SUNRISE. everything has a chip in it nowadays - you can't find a watch that doesn't have a chip in it. and if you have a chip in it -- computation is easy. we no longer have to use the medieval linear way of dividing up the day -- finally, we are able to have clocks that dynamically adjust for sunrise and sunset -- like SOL. the length of a day continually gets longer & shorter -- so should our watches. since all our watches have a chip in them already -- the sunrise/sunset computation should not be an obstacle. we propose the elimination of the terms of 'noon' and 'midnight' -- and always start counting 0:00 hours at sunrise.
2) DECIMAL TIME. we no longer want to use 24 hours (why 24!?!?) and 60 minutes (base 60!!) -- instead, we use decimal time -- 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes per hour. the resulting 'minute' will be 1.44 of our existing old-style minutes.
so there you have it -- no half-way medieval measures -- sunrise = 0:00 hours, there are 10 hours in a day, and 100 minutes in an hour. businesses always start at 2pm (2 hours after sunrise) -- ALWAYS, and people go home when it gets dark ALWAYS -- the business day will grow and shrink with the seasons, and all will be much more sensible, and in acccord with the natural rhythms of nature, while being easier to measure, because its all measured in decimal.
2cents from toronto
j
The traditional slashdot whining about this subject is upon us... Daylight savings is just fine. In some countries, including my own, this is not even a subject for an elevator chat.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
I never understood how DST saved anything anyhow. However, I do know that it causes a lot of intricate bugs, especially when programs contain time based loops. In most of the SDKs and Frameworks the default DateTime.Now returns the local time. A lot of software applications fail during DST switching because of loops in the code that compares two different times returns wild and unexpected results. I even had to mandate using DateTime.UtcNow in the code all the time.
"What is the best way for humans to deal with the inconsistent amount of light over the year and still foster coordination over disparate time zones?"
Daylight savings doesn't help deal with the inconsistent amount of light over the year. If anything it amplifies the effect. The days are longer in the summer. Then DST gives the perception that there is another hour of daylight on top of the already longer day. So if it would get dark at 9:00 pm under standard time it now gets dark at 10:00 pm with DST.
If the goal was to make things more consistent. The shift would be done at the opposite time, so it occurred during the winter. Then when it is getting dark at 5:00 on standard time, the shifted time would cause it to be 6:00 when it got dark. This would be more consistent with the longer summer days.
Second, it certainly doesn't facilitate coordination across different time zones. It hiders it if anything. This is coming from someone who drove to a wedding in Arizona and showed up an hour late.
The idea for DST originated in the desire to sleep later in the summer without wasting the day, and being able to have more sunlight at night for recreation. DST is sham and should be done away with. It is way more trouble than it is worth.
IMHO all businesses should be open 24/7. It just seems wasteful to let the infrastructure go unused for many hours each day and on the weekends. Opening all businesses around the clock would remove the need for coordinated business hours, which would in turn make rush hours less of a problem. Oh, it would make DST obsolete, too.
How you can manage to get the sun up for more than 8 hours a day in the scottish wintertime, then.
Because DST doesn't save shit.
Is to get you to buy stuff. The initial intent was good - to save on candles and kerosene. These days DST simply doesn't make sense and the only reason it exists is because retail lobby wants it to exist. See, you're less likely to go out shopping when it's dark outside. So they make you adjust the clock, so you'd go shopping in the evening.
A color temp of 3500K and a CRI of 100 is a perfect light bulb for home use. Those "full spectrum" bulbs are 6200K with a CRI of maybe 60. Incandescent bulbs are usually around 3200 with a CRI VERY close to 100.
The only real solution is to network all clocks and have them auto adjust by say 10 min a few times during the year. Give it 5 or 10 years and it'll be fixed. Personally i don't have much of a problem with the way it is now, i just miss an hours sleep once a year to get an extra hour of daylight in the afternoon to sit on the veranda and drink beer, but to each their own i guess.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Better yet, Hawaii!
All clocks are wrong anyhow. :p http://timecube.org/
I think we should replace daylight saving with time cube.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
Metric Time.
Think about how round the numbers will be. Every 100 seconds we get a minute... Something like 20h days. Bliss.
Surely somebody has thought of this, but why wouldn't it work? Instead of "falling back" an hour one year, we just fall back 30 mins. And stay there forever. I'm sure it would wreak some havoc on clocks/computers that are expecting changes of 60 mins., and lots of people would get confused for a few weeks, but it would only be once, and you'd get some of the benefits of both worlds.
Calculate 12-noon for each day to be when the sun is highest. Program in variation for local municipal longitude. Bam. Good to go. For trains, computers, global schedule keeping, etc., use Zulu time.
I prefer a void in conversation to a vacuous one.
Here, in the midwest US, changing the clocks is completely obnoxious.
When we spring ahead I lose TWO hours. One with the clock change, and the other changing all the clocks here and there that don't automatically update. Sure, I could change them here and there, as I come across them (which is what I typically do) -- I've also done the motion of exercise to go around and change them all at the same time. It takes an hour (yes, I apparently have that many clocks). Either I lose the hour all at once changing them at the same time, or I lose the same hour here and there. Either way I end up losing two hours over time with each spring change. I have specifically stopped buying appliances with clocks on them for just this reason (one more clock to fix)...
When we fall back I gain nothing. I lose the hour that was gained... (see above :)
And I noticed that the older I get the more and more this screws up my sleep (particularly in the spring for some reason).
With or without the change there will always be a time when I get up to go to work and come home that it will be light out and completely dark. There is no point to changing the clocks.
We should just change the clocks 1/2 an hour and be done with it...
get up with dawn and go to sleep after dusk. Noon will be exactly when the sun is in mid sky. begin the month with a new moon. look outside ! and see\feel the weather changes. get back to nature !
It's nice in Minnesota this time of year so you don't have to drive to work in the dark. It really helps you wake up.
As a solution, companies could just move their start time forward. Wouldn't be any different, and it would be voluntary instead of mandatory.
Move time forward on Jan 1st, Move it back on December 31.
Since it is a holiday anyways you can leave your damned clock alone
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Why not move the clocks 1/2 hour and be done with it? I have wondered this for years.
No, really -- I hate daylight savings, with a passion. And by passion, I mean "fucking passion".
....
Twice a year, my sleep cycle is systematically deranged. It's a goddamn kick to the head, and I don't mean that in a good way -- it's like the entire country gets a massive injection of jet lag extract.
Maybe society wants to keep its members from operating at peak efficiency, so let's pull the rug from under everyone's circadian rhythms twice a year, keep 'em off balance
-kgj
I'm sure someone else has thought of this, so why wouldn't it work? Next time instead of "falling back" 60 mins, we just fall back 30 mins. And stay there forever. Sure it would be hard on clocks and computers expecting 60 min changes, and people would be confused for a few weeks. But it would just happen once, and you'd get some of the benefits of both times that way.
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/187608/
Help fight global warming
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
Deal with it by remembering that it exists, and accepting it. Faking the time of day is just a way of pretending that it isn't happening, virtualizing the seasons away. Ignoring or virtualizing-away nature isn't always necessarily bad, but in this case it comes with cost and dubious gain.
The best system to replace it? Doing nothing is better than doing anything.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I don't know what you are talking about - Daylight Savings is for one thing and one thing only - so I can go to the beach after work.
it does definitely cause a great deal of inconvenience
It does? How? Whom does it inconvenience?
Morning suck anyway. Let's go on DST permanently.
and be done with it. No more DST. So, if it were decided that next spring, would be the year, everyone would adjust their clocks by 1/2 hour forward, and then never adjust them (for DST) again. If you're a state that doesn't do DST, tough, adjust your clock to match everyone else in the time zone, you won't be doing it again, anyways.
Do you see the FNORDS? I refuse to post anonymously, as I am fireproof!
Get rid of this nonsense! Last year there was a horrific school bus crash that killed a little girl and severely injured some other passengers. The driver clipped a gravel truck that was parked on the shoulder of the road. I have always believed that had the school bus driver been driving the the daylight, this never would have happened. I hate it now that I'm stumbling around in the dark while waiting for the bus and then going to work. The only 'savings time' that would make sense up here in Canada is between June 20 and September 20. It certainly makes no sense the further south you go. The differences between your longest day and shortest day don't warrant messing with the clocks.
An area of Indiana around Lafayette (and Purdue University) doesn't observe DST. They stay the same all year while the areas around them switch back and forth. They suffer no ill effects from not changing their clocks twice a year. The further suffer no ill effects due to different amounts of light and darkness compared to their stable time system. Like the rest of the planet, those that need to resort to a world-wide time standard use Greenwich/Zulu. Once again, no ill effects of keeping the same time difference between their time standard and Greenwich/Zulu have been observed.
I mention no ill effects because my ex-wife, who ran a substance abuse treatment center in Lafayette, and I, running one in Virginia, compared daily intake numbers for three years. Every fall, the weekend after time changed in Virginia, we had a 250% increase in admissions. She saw no such change. As to whether a sudden smack to the diurnal rhythm forcing one into crisis and so into treatment is an ill effect or a beneficial effect remains open for discussion. The vast majority of the people in the Lafayette area will continue to not care.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
pixelpusher220, you have it just right. DST is energy-saving theater. It makes folks feeeeel good by fiddling with their clocks. But evidence for energy savings is unconvincing. And in states like Arizona and Florida, you want people coming home in the later evening when it's not so hot.
Computers obey me.
Hammer time?
Say, like simply freedom and the stimuli of letting electrical rates change and be variable so utilities try to flatten their demand?
and sacrifice the blood of the Elite to appease Huitzilopochtli so he/she will make the sun return to it's zenith every winter. Makes about as much sense as playing with your clock.
Let's start with the bankers.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
The whole idea behind DST is it gives you time to do things after work that are more enjoyable to do in the daylight hours.. walk the dog, do the gardening, get a suntan. None of these activities would apply to the ./ reader so I am not surprised to read all the hatred.
I, for one, am not an advocate as all this extra daylight is fading my curtains.
.... and change what time you go to work/school
If you look at the map of where DST is used, you'll notice that it's used more the closer you get to the poles (where there's a larger swing in the length of the day between the seasons). Now, when you realize that, then it dawns on you that there's no particular reason why there should just be a 1-hour shift for everyone in the US regardless of latitude.
Why doesn't California have a 1-hour shift and Washington have, say, a 2-hour shift... and Alaska have an 8-hour shift? Seems asinine, right? Well, then why even have a 1-hour shift, then? It's a slippery-slope argument, but it's difficult to argue that, as sub-optimal as a "1 hour fits all" approach is, that it's any less optimal to scrap the whole thing completely.
So, I'd can it. However, if you *really* still want it... how about this? With so many devices (computers, phones, etc.) syncing their clocks to servers, lets just have a national conversion to server-sync'd house clocks (kinda like the upcoming switch to digital TV) and then, if you really want DST, just have the servers gradually slew it in, day by day, as the sun moves toward solstice.
I always thought that since we have to do without an hour all summer, and then get it back as winter comes on, it would be fairer if we got it back with interest. You don't want to actually make any of the hours longer or shorter, but some hours are more valuable than others:
Take the hour at 2AM on a Sunday morning, same as now, but return the hour at, say, 4PM on a Friday afternoon, so that we get into the weekend a bit sooner than expected...
-- Andrew
I don't understand your argument. If we abandon DST then time in the winter would be unchanged. Everyone that can go to the bank now will still be able to do so. The change (if we abandon DST) would only affect time in the summer.
If we eliminated time zones and the globe were all on the same time.
I gotta have more cowbell.
If you were a proper wizard, these problems would not apply to you.
I call it the light bulb.......
I live in New Zealand -- we are at GMT+12 "normally" (the date-line bends around us) and GMT+13 in summer time. We don't seem to get the big arguments about DST that other countries do, but some people (probably particularly farmers) don't like it.
Me: I think we should scrap it -- and move to GMT+13 all year round. It's not the time we "should" have, based on the sun, but who cares? The standard daily routine here is that your free time is after work. Daylight in the evening is useful; we should maximise it all year round. Daylight in the morning is mostly wasted. People who rely on daylight to work? Well, they're at the mercy of the sun anyway. At least this way, they don't have to get up so early :-)
People who want to get rid of DST: I'm sympathetic to the idea that changing time-zones is a pain. But please don't take away my evening daylight!
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
In Indiana, where we just switched to DST this year, it screwed up my daily schedule all summer. Getting up early in the morning now meant it was dark in the middle of the summer! It used to be my favorite time of day when the sun was out and it was still quiet outside. We switched just because we had to associate with one time zone or the other, not because it helps us.
IU did a study and said it cost the state 3 million more in energy costs or something like that.
My Grandpa used to work for the railroad when they had a timezone map for every minute. Each station was set separately - but that was when Union Station had the official time...
Most of the time, the questions are like this:
"I need to do X, and everyone else does it with Google, but I don't want to use Google so what else should I try? Also, I am a cheapskate who knows nothing about the issue."
But THIS guy... This guy has much bigger plans.
"What is the best way for humans to deal with the inconsistent amount of light over the year and still foster coordination over disparate time zones?"
He's not just buying an oscilloscope, or trying to find a way to do something without Google. He's solving one of humanity's problems.
Oonce we arrive at a solution, implementation will probably be trivial. I can hardly wait! (If there are any snags another Ask Slashdot should do the trick.)
Stardates
JUST WAKE UP AN HOUR EARLIER! Ok, people! Let's shift hour work hours so we can all get here earlier and go home while it's still bright. If everyone saves one hour of electricity every for the whole summer, that's a very super savings for the whole country! Horray! But wait... everyone's lazy to do that... so let's force the whole country to change their clocks ahead one hour. Better yet... we'll chose a different day to start doing this every year. I'll bet the IT guys will love the idea. Very easy to implement! That's all DST was made for. Wake up earlier, go home earlier, and save on electricity bills everywhere. If people would just quit being lazy, we wouldn't have to keep doing this every damn year. Another, sensible alternative is to fix a freaking start/finish date for this thing and ONLY change it when we notice the planet's axis just moved a few degrees.
Julio Henrique Morimoto juliohm@gmail.com
I always found the 28 hour day to be a great idea.
only 6 days in the week though.
http://www.dbeat.com/28/
You must be new here ...
Not to stereotype Slashdot readers or anything, but I notice nobody sees any difference between sunlight and electric light. If you go outdoors during the day, you may be surprised to find daylight has many ambient properties not provided by your basement's fluorescent bulb (warmth, happy feelings, etc).
I should buy some cement.
Go into Daylight Savings Time one year, and never come out. No more changing during the year. Many countries don't bother, so it's obviously possible.
That's a great idea!
However, if every business decided on its own when summer and winter hours started, then during spring and fall, there would be serious confusion about whether any one given establishment you deal with was on summer or winter hours. Therefore, we need to take your idea one step further, and set national standard dates for when everybody should switch between summer and winter hours (except for states that don't want to do it, like Arizona, of course).
Also, many localities have laws or regulations that refer to specific times. Things like "no parking from 9am-5pm," or "drinking establishments must close by 2am." We just need to change all those laws, regulations and signs so that they use different summer and winter hours for the official summer hours and winter hours periods of the year.
We should really work to make this happen. I propose a recurring meeting on the first Saturday of every month, at noon during summer hours and 11am in winter hours. (Oh, oops, sorry, I forgot to add: I'm provisionally assuming that summer hours start when that awful DST contraption starts, and end when DST ends.)
Are you adequate?
Dude, don't underestimate the power of exponential growth. If they keep doing that for a while, this is so gonna be the Swatch century.
Are you adequate?
No big deal. When you need to move the clocks back, pull the main breaker at midnight, wait an hour, and turn the juice back on. When you need to move them forward, pull the breaker at 10:59, wait a minute, and put it back on. All your digital clocks now way 12:00. 12:00 12:00. What could go wrong ... go wrong ... go wrong ...
Split the difference, set it to 30 minutes between standard and DST then leave it there. Everyone is equally happy and unhappy. Maybe this is too much common sense for the goverments around the world.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
DST truly is just a dumb idea now. Sure it may benefit a few, but at the cost of numerous others. Consider the lost productivity from people being late, along with the costs of having to inform people of what day to set clocks forward or backwards.
And on top of that, there still being daylight when the average person gets home means more cooling costs, or it being dark when you wake up means more heating, along with general sluggishness.
And then there is the immense joy of for part of the year having the sun blaring in your face the whole time you drive home. I so love winter if I get off work at 5pm. Almost my entire drive home is in a western direction which means sun in my face. How does that not cause accidents? People in my town drive like crazy folks no matter what the conditions.
Just get rid of it, we don't need all the hassle and problems just for the few DST benefits.
Between caffeine and fluorescent lighting, we don't need it anymore and it only causes confusion and sleep deprivation.
We should keep it exactly the same but call it something different to make it better. Instead of Dayling savings Time it should be called:
Freedom Saving Time!
Everybody will love it and the govt can get more votes.
Saskatchewan is a prairie province in Canada. Biggest industry is farming, so if anyone is affected by daylight it would be them. And they do not practice DST. Biggest argument I've heard against it yet...
> What is the best way for humans to deal with the inconsistent amount of light over the year ... ?
Maybe, just maybe, 10 fsck*g million years weren't enough to make us well prepared for this "inconsistent amount of light over the year"... what if we wait another million to see how things settle up?
Frankly, this is what I really dislike about engineering thinking: trying to adapt humans to inventions and not the other way around.
Please explain to me how is an astronomer going to profit from this daylight bullshit?
I guess I must be grateful they haven't the means to make constant daylight... yet... >:-/
Is Microsoft Outlook going to screw me over once again during this time change? How many meetings will I be an hour late/early for this time?
Shift by 30 minutes..once, and be done with it.
Nuff said.
My answer is simple. Just change schedules rather than the clock during the seasons.
We live in a post-industrial society. The majority of people have the personal flexibility to change their work start and end times through the year. For workplaces which still run on an industrial model and for schools I suggest they simply have a summer start time and winter start time.
Changing the clock is simply bizarre.
I'd much rather drive to work in the dark, I do it now anyway, than drive home in the dark.
Without the 2nd Amendment, the others are just suggestions.
Oh excellent, not only are the trains now running on time, they're running on metric time.
Remember this time people, 80 past 2 on April 47th, it's the dawn of a new enlightenment!
None of this makes any sense in this 24h, online world. Why not just abandon the whole timezone illusion altogether.
For the purpose of timekeeping and keeping everyone in sync, have everyone use Universal Time (UT) or GMT which is more or less the same thing. The military have done this for years calling it Zulu time.
For working days, everyone adopt flexy-time dependant on who and where you have to report with is. Go in at a time that suites you and work your agreed hours.
For media, release programming, world wide at a specific time (we are going to timeshift anyway) so why not take advantage and shortcut the cross border pirates grabbing media early.
Advantages:-
No rush hours = fuel savings + less accidents + lower stress levels.
International Trade improved by knowing when a meeting starts and being there.
Education, once taught in schools that the position of the sun related to the clock depends on where you are then every child will now have an accurate mental image of our rotating world. Thus being able to see us a one world, one people, clinging to a thin veneer of habitability on a fragile world.
That way at least if they survive our mistake, the next generation will not repeat them.
Indeed -- it is nearly time to celebrate "National Pointless Mess with Everyone's Circadian Rhythm Day" -- I'm for abolishing it. Timezones too, while we're at it.
UTC FOR ALL!
Aside from all the dreadful inconvenience of dealing with people in areas whose clocks have changed when ours haven't(I live in Perth Australia and dealing with the east with a 3 hour time difference is a PITA, everyone over there already wants to ignore the west and three hour time differences just make it easier), it's nice to get home to some daylight.
I'm not a morning person, I've never been a morning person, and I sort of reckon that, given that dawn in summer here without DST is something like 4:30 AM, that the early risers can give up an hour of their daylight to give me an hour to something done in the evening. I quite like actually getting home before it's too dark to anything much outside, and I see an awful lot of families out during DST that you don't see without it.
The basic thing of DST is that some places need it, and if some people are going to do it, then it becomes terribly inconvenient for people who don't do it to deal with people who do. Given that remembering to change your clocks twice a year(on a sunday, with, in every place I've ever lived constant reminders in every form of media) isn't all that much work, and that unless you're trying to milk it to prove how horrible the time shift is most halfway normal people shouldn't even be noticing the time shift in their sleep patterns for more than a week at most, everyone may as well do it.
We can bitch..moan..and complain on slashdot.com but it's not getting anywhere.
WRITE TO CONGRESS AND BITCH AT THEM!!
Democracy at work!
If you ask Congress, you'll get all sorts of arguments about why going onto Daylight Savings Time is so wonderful - it's so good that they extended the dates.
Um, if it's so good, how about just staying on it full time? We wouldn't ever have to change clocks then. Don't abolish DST, abolish standard time!
Why can't we all just set our clocks 30 minutes ahead or behind one time and leave it at that?!
Aha!! Finally, a voice that echos my own feeling on DST: the only good thing about it is that day we "get an extra hour of sleep"
Well, years ago, I decided if I ever ran for public office the chief plank of my platform would be the eradication of DST, but instead of replacing it with "do nothing", I decided it'd be better to replace it with "Do more (LOTS more) of just the good part" -- specifically, that "fall back" part (the part where the benefits really do outweigh the inconvenience.) I'd propose that we not just turn the clocks back one hour once a year, but that we turn the clocks back one hour on the 1st and 15th of the month. Every month. We'd just dispense with the "spring forward" part (the part everybody hates anyway; the all inconvenience and no payback part.)
With 24 hours in a day, and 12 months in a year, at the end of one full year we'd be right back where we started on the clock, but we'd have gained an entire day over the course of the past year (though since it was spread evenly across the year instead of given to us in one day, like a "leap day", we'd get the true benefit of it in extra rest instead of being tempted to blow it partying. Plus, if we timed the starting point right, you could easily have all the wintertime after-work daylight you wanted!!) Imagine all that boosted productivity the Monday after the time change, twenty-four times each and every year!!
Hey, I figure if we're gonna screw with the clocks we might as well maximize our returns (and it's really no crazier than what we do now. That or it's 24 times crazier.)
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DST should be eliminated. We're in a global economy and out of sync 1/2 the year with most of the planet. DST does not "Save" a single minute nor does it add a single minute to the amount of daylight on any day of the year. For those worried about outside activities during the dark hours, they should adjust their own schedules. Kids should not walk to school in the dark. There are carpools and buses for many. while schools could easily adjust their starting hours. There is nothing more Socialist than forcing the entire American society to conform to the fears of some parents and the inflexibility of many school administrators.
Fuck it...let's just let everybody set their clocks to whatever they like and make the changing as random as possible. Oh wait...
I'm sick of the sun getting up when it freakin wants to. There should be 2^5 hours in a day, 2^6 minutes in an hour and 2^7 seconds in a minute. Every day the sun should rise at 2^4 and set at 2^0-1 oclock with the length of minutes varying according to the time of the year and day. This would reduce the amount of stupid people attending meetings and fix the economy.
Why not keep it simple?
If the problem is that we should go up earlier in summer, go up earlier?
If people can't go up earlier on their own, change work and school hours to match the sunlight. It can't be that hard.
And leave the poor time alone!
DST doesn't solve the problem we're after. It solves the problem that workplaces don't want to change the time people start work. Which solves the problem that people don't want to wake up earlier. (Which, as far as I've seen, solves the problem that people are in traffic earlier, so less traffic accidents due to ... wait? less sunlight? I'm confused here.)
(And I agree with UTC. There isn't any real need for local timezones; but that step might be too early for now. China has one beautiful single six hours wide timezone, iirc, but they can do what they want without anyone protesting.)
The suckiest idea since the invention of the mechanical clock. And the digital ones.
Sun goes up - day begins. Sun goes down - day ends. Simple.
Or... as in my case: I code manically 'til about 7.00 in the morning, then sleep 'til about 15.00 in the afternoon. Unless someone calls me and wakes me up earlier.
That gives me: no daylight.
You can see how much in need of DST I am!
On the other hand, today I'm up early (because I went to bed 20.00 yesterday after a two day coding maraton. Yeah, I think I might have some kind of disorder, but I squeezed in some skate boarding for health...)
i abstained from DST one year,
and got to be dickish about it,
eg when she said "so let's meet at 7",
i could put on my best geek-snob voice and say "oh, do you mean 6 ? because i don't participate in DST".
needless to say, i got so much action that year that it began to impinge on my nethack time, so i had to develop a whole new radical playing style which turned out to finally be the key to ascending as a pacifist caveman.
but seriously, i did abstain one year, and had to give it up because the social overhead was just too high.
Flexitime! (If augmented by telecommuting, even better.)
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
It makes life for software engineers more difficult, systems more complicated and less reliable.
What is really bad is that countries begin and end DST almost randomly without any standard.
People do not use approaches which could really save energy, like: drying clothing on the sun, instead ineffective expensive solar panels, energy saving lamps, instead DST, light aluminum cars, instead heavy electric cars with toxic batteries, etc.
Everyone should just get up, send their kids to school, go to work, take lunch, clock off, pick up the kids from soccer, grab dinner and go to bed an hour later/earlier depending on the time of year and the preferred amount of daylight.
Now if there were just some universally recognised way we could coordinate everyone in the northern hemisphere to do it at the same time then it'd be a smooth transition.
Can anyone think of one? Or how about we all agree to set our clocks +/- one hour and then just do everything by-the-clock like we normally do.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
I wonder which dim-witted moron every thought up the concept of DST.
I work with people from different time zones and just use UTC for scheduling any event. Almost everyone knows the diff between their time and UTC and so this keeps thing clear.
Perhaps adopt a more real-world cyclical calendar (think lunar phases), rather than the mental hang-ups of a Pope.
How about not doing it?
FAQs are evil.
I just discovered New Earth Time (which is UTC times 15 to get to a 360 degrees clock). http://www.newearthtime.net/ By far the best suggestion I have ever seen.
they ran the empire on moscow time...
Day Light Savings time ISN'T about to be upon us. We are CURRENTLY IN DST!! We are about to change back to Standard time though.
9-5 was a 20th century thing...before that, really before unions had gained much sway, people were working 10-12 hr days...
in particular, miners never saw the sun:-(
i knew a descendant of h.c. frick, of homestead strike-busting fame...a family story had h.c. delaying the time whistle to weasel more work out of his peons, and when they complained, banned pocket watches.
when the workers reverted to telling time by the sun, he had the windows painted black...
Two variants of binary time here:
1) The JBC binary clock under linux was always fun... "Whats the time?" "1001 10011 PM"
2) Basic - 1 or 0. Either it is or it isnt ;-)
Everyone start using ZULU or GMT. Then your employer or state or country or whatever tells you what hours you work, go to school, or whatever. No changing clocks, when a business partner, customer, or anyone says call me at 1700, it's the same time no matter where you live no need to figure out what timezone they're in compared to you.
A good solution would be to just have businesses and schools decide when they want to open. The TZ stays the same all year round. If a business or school wants to open early, or late, it's their decision, and their responsibility to advertise the timings.
Can't see Hindi?
I feel genuinely sorry for people who live in even colder, darker, miserable places than us, during winter.
I don't want to start the debate with the non DST people, they are welcome to their opinion and good for them.
I for one am a very very strong believer in DST and feel it gives me more sunlight during hours I can actually make use of it.
I also believe in this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder
Winter is genuinely depressing, as someone who is frequently depressed, to be honest I'd be entirely happy to have PERMENANT DST of about 90 minutes in Melbourne, just so the sun goes down that bit later in winter for us to enjoy it, even if it's not warm.
I can honestly say since we switched this past few weeks, I already honestly feel happier, quite seriously, it's warmer, it's brighter and I'm happier.
DST 4 all.
Here in Brazil, half the country (the south most part - where there's the largest population) has DST for 5 months. We've been struggling with energy supply shortage for a number of years now.
Whitout the DST we would have two things happening at the same time: public lights been turned on and people getting home from work at 6PM (we usually work from 8AM-6PM with a 2 hour lunch break) and turning on their home equipments.
With the DST, sunset is postponed to 7PM and the impact on the energy consumption is reduced.
That's why, for "security reasons", we have been adopting DST since the 30's.
(Oh, and a funny thing: DST means STD in portuguese =D)
It's called Universal Time Coordinated.
Zulu and GMT are depreciated.
DST should vanish, along with time zones. One world time should be implemented. If it is Noon in NYC it is Noon in LA, London, Tokyo, etc.
It may take some time getting the dark/light issues, but after a generation passes, nobody will notice.
Can't we just fall back 30 minutes and never mess with the clocks again?
First off, 1 hour is not jet lag. When I go from GMT+8 to GMT-8, that's jet lag. One hour isn't even noticable.
You're right, I exaggerated.
I should have said, "subclinical dosage of jet lag extract."
-kgj
never understood the change to DST every spring, just as the days are getting longer anyway, we screw with the clocks??
but it's standard time we're changing to soon, not DST..(maybe the southern hemisphere does it backwards)
it's simple... instead of moving it an hour forward, or an hour backward... adjust the time by 1/2 hour and leave it alone.
The entire country of China is one time zone. There is no daylight savings time in China.
Is it possible that having just one time zone that doesn't change is one of the reasons why China's economy is growing at 10% per year while Americans have to make do with 3% growth at the most (and currently, very likely negative growth)?
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
Daylight saving time is not almost upon us, it is almost over.
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert
duh.
if businesses want to change their hours to take advantage of light differences, fine, but there's no practical reason to change the damned time.
Just remember to fall forward and spring back. How hard is this?
And of course - Hammer Time.
Man, can you imagine if the US government declared that from now on, from April through November, was non-stop Hammer Time? TV stations would remind you it was coming up, and then when it finally happened they'd say "STOP! Hammer Time!"and everybody would wear parachute pants and dance sideways for the next seven months...
I'm sure lots of people would question the practical benefits of having Hammer Time for more than half the year - but then somebody would spout off misinformation about how it's good for farmers, or saves energy (everybody Hammer-dancing to and from work, etc.), or some other BS like that...
Bow-ties are cool.
We were a subcontractor to a larger company on a government project. The project office was in a county that didn't do DST, while the prime's office was in a county that did. Serious confusion during the summer, especially since I'm on the east coast, and don't normally have to deal with that sort of thing. :-)
"Only a white man would think that cutting off the top foot of a blanket and sewing onto the bottom would result in a longer blanket."
The cows don't care whether it's daylight or not when you milk them. They just care how warm are your hands.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
Then we shall ignore you, and your latest episode of the "WickedStupid show" airing here, at slashdot.
Why not just put the time 30 minutes in the middle everywhere? This would make everyone happy... a one time change
How about we split the difference and "fall back half an hour and leave it there. Most of the world is operating 24/7 nowadays. OK the banks close, but you can still get money at an ATM or make a transfer online. Stores are open later than 5pm, the stock market closes but there is still trading through overseas exchanges. If you look at states or cities that did not change time they have survived and the savings is negligible as far as energy. What you save in the morning you invariably use in the evening. DST had its purpose once but the world has changed, we need to catch-up.
The color temp of sunlight is over 5500K. I guess you consider the world too blue!
Can we get rid before weekend please?
I am on night shift Saturday and what should be a twelve hour shift becomes a thirteen hour shift.
Joy.
Course in past years I have worked the Spring clock change and you didn't hear me complain then about only having to work an eleven shift.
No thanks. I don't want to live in a racist shithole.
Just time alone. Winter days are shorter than summer, big deal. Live with it and leave the clocks alone...
Under a rock in Sugar Land ;)
ps - Linux rules!
Inconsistent light over the course of a year, eh? Quit bitching. Earth has had seasons since time immemorial. If you can't deal with it, I suggest that you move to the Equator, where each and every day lasts 12 hours almost exactly. Some variation in day length is no reason to change our clocks twice a year.
As a bit of an amateur astronomer, I find daylight savings especially irritating, because in the summer, while it is in effect, the sun is up longer _anyhow_, so it gets dark later in the first place. If the DST people had given it any thought at all, they would save daylight in the winter.
Anyhow, I'm off to Saskatchewan. Farewell.