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UK Government Wants to Spring Ahead Two Hours
Anonymous Coward writes "In England it has been proposed that the clocks move forward by 2 hours this summer to give us more daylight time in the day, and hopefully in turn stimulate the economy. My question is what impact will this hold for computers that automatically adjust the time to British Summer Time? Could this cause another 'millennium Bug' fiasco?"
Could this cause another 'millennium Bug' fiasco?
Y2K was a much different situation, one which had absolutely nothing to do with such concepts as "daylight savings," "summer time," and the like. Y2K was caused by silly computer abbreviation of dates, and while DST can cause timekeeping bugs, it's unlikely to cause a worldwide meltdown.
I would also like to point out that these things are much more likely to break down the more frequently you change them..
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
I predict lots of people showing up to work 2 hours late if they us their cellphones or iDevice as an alarm clock.
Could this cause another 'millennium Bug' fiasco?"
If it happened tomorrow? It would cause a few problems. If it happens in March? Probably enough time to fix it. If it happens in October or later, no problem. There's usually somewhere in the rest of the world changes their DST policies on a yearly basis -- I believe parts of the U.S. changed in the last year or two.
It's an OS patch which you wouldn't even notice, a new tzdata file or similar.
Why dont we just skipp falling back one autum instead of springing forward two hours in the spring. It would make more sense as it always makes me tired in the mornings when we change the clocke in the spring and two hours seams like a nightmare come Monday morning when the whols country has jetlag.
... it's the whole of the UK. Otherwise, you'd have to adjust your clocks when you drive from one country to another.
I wouldn't expect you Mexicans to know that though.
Probably not a big deal. Time just isn't that important. For instance the iPhones have screwed up simple time shifts multiple times, and noone seems that concerned about it.
-Lod
I think the only economy this would stimulate would be the one involving IT Consultants.
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
From TFA:
Putting the clocks forward by an hour to British Summer Time +1 (equivalent to Greenwich Mean Time +2) would mean lighter evenings in the summer months, but darker mornings.
Am I the only one who feels utterly miserable going to work in the pitch dark, where the first light of the day I see is the fluorescent tubes above my cubicle?
Breakfast served all day!
If you think THAT will help the economy, we're gonna spring forward FIVE FUCKING HOURS. Just think of the unwarranted extrapolations!
Ice Cream has no bones.
England != UK. Can you lot in the United States of Florida PLEASE try to learn this.
With the DST changes that Congress mandated a few years ago, I think most commercial and Open Source OS's could adapt to this change easily.
Since we're no longer bound by Railroad timetables, especially in the UK, the concept of standard time and the time zones truly becomes much more localized. What I fear is one day cities will adopt their own time zones rather than regionally. Wouldn't that be fun? It would be like George Carlin's gag.
"In Baltimore it's 6:42, time for the 11 o'clock report."
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Between 27 October 1968 and 31 October 1971 we set our clocks to be GMT + 1 throughout the year. At first there was an increase in deaths in the morning, but there was also a marked decrease in deaths in the evening. It later turned out that the drink-driving laws were the major cause of the latter, and parliament decided to end the consistent GMT + 1 in a vote of 366 to 81.
The idea, while good, causes problems as well, and the way we are in the UK with relation to the rest of the EU, we'll possibly keep to BST/GMT as it is now rather than change it.
I think the bigger impact for some people will be being even further ahead of the US in terms of timezone. At the moment 5 hours is okay, I work with people in the Middle East, Europe, UK and the east coast, from the UK and this is manageable at the moment. I don't start work until about 9 and then work till about 7 or 8 if needed. This gives me a good amount of overlap with everyone. If this goes ahead then I'm going to be have to work later into the evenings sometimes, just negating the increase in outside drinking time, and giving me less quality time with my wife who will be working normal UK hours.
Nice idea, but not something that is particularly convenient for myself
If you read a speed reading book, does it take you less time to read the second half?
Every time (*ahem*) some gov't tweaks the rules, the new info is encoded, and the updated package is sent out. Note that the superseded info is retained, so that if you ask about a time in 1974 in New York City, it'll adjust correctly for the idiotic Nixonian ``let's all go to work in the dark'' time.
Debian's files live under /usr/share/zoneinfo, and amount to a bit over 6MB of data.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
Maybe programmers in the UK are accustomed to assuming that localtime always equals UTC.
You are ignorant because you have never heard of British Summer Time.
And the submitter is a stupid fuck, because it doesn't know about either BST or actually what the y2k issue was.
Is there even really a point to DST anymore? I just end up having my circadian rhythm thrown off for a while.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Man, this again? We get this from the english MPs every other week. This is the same ol' same ol' with a slight variation of +2 in the summer and +$unknown in the winter. ;-)
For the Nth time, this is not going to happen, the rest of the UK wont agree to it. Scotland is much further north than its mild weather would suggest, and when this was tried shortly after the second world war it was an unmitigated disaster. It was dark till lunchtime in the winter in the Shetland Isles, for little gain in the evening in the summer. And remember we almost have 24 hour daylight in Scotland in the summer, we dont need an extra hours daylight at 3am. And neither we, the Northern Irish, nor the Welsh care if it's dark in England 24 hours-a-day all year round
Every time the government changes and the Conservatives get in they start going on about this. The 'Tories' are an english party, and in England it gets dark at 10pm in the summer. Boo-hoo. It gets dark in Spain at 9pm in the summer, but they are out having beers till 3am. In England everyone is in their beds at 10pm, what do you want an extra hour of light for? Why do you want it to be light while you are asleep or in your house watching cricket and drinking warm beer or whatever it is you guys do? Especially if it's raining. I may be scottish but I've never seen so much rain as I have in Oxfordshire. No wonder you like your boats, you need them.
It's not your timezone you want to change, it's your culture. You want to enjoy your evenings more? Get out more, talk to people in bars without waiting for a formal introduction. It doesnt have to be light outside to have a good time.
Fecking sassenachs. The next time you bring this up we're cutting your power and water.
I may be scottish and as such slighty biased
I would also like to point out that these things are much more likely to break down the more frequently you change them.
I think that sums it up best . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Australia stuffed around with daylight savings dates for the Olympics. Most distributions pushed updates with enough time that it wasn't a problem. I saw a few Windows servers that weren't patched miss the change. A few TV stations didn't make the update in time but that happens with DST normally. Some outlook calendar entries misbehaved.
Postgres is always unhappy with countries that stuff around with this since causes extra entries in the lookup table.
Mostly it works and mostly it doesn't matter and its fixed manually in a day or two when somebody notices.
Another hour offset sounds good--just let it be in the opposite direction.
Ah, the UK, where reinventing the wheel is a daily occurrence!
However, given the British obsession with world war two, this may be an appropriate move - it will be like returning to 1940-1945, when they had "double summer time", mainly so people could work in their gardens, growing vegetables, after they got home from work. Somehow, i don't think this is what they'll be using the extra hour of evening daylight for this time round though - it will be simply an excuse to get more drunk in the evening (if that's possible).
That should totally screw people up and result in total confusion.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The above comment should have been in reply to the first comment, asking about Y2K-like problems.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
The Australian government likes to mess with the day light offset for sporting events and I think they gave everyone a whole 5 weeks advanced notice a few years back. You get to the point where you just tell computer clocks to keep a common offset and then go change it twice a year.
There are some master time zone files that can be found here:
ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/
On Unix like system you can run a command like # zic australasia (or whatever zone is messed up.. or just run them all).
Then things should work.
Here is a script I wrote up to test this sort of nonsense about half a decade ago....
http://www.abnormal.com/~thogard/timezone.shtml
Why dont everyone just switch to metric time and get it over with :|
This was suggested by the Lighter Later campaign of last year. Basically by having brighter evenings the country saves a lot on electricity and heating etc.
While being on the same timezone as the rest of western europe would simplify business and tourism, the main benefits is for the population to enjoy their post work / school hours in a better, lighter way...
As for it being dark in the morning, I don't really care. My alarm clock wakes my body up but my mind is not working untill lunchtime anyway, when the caffeine really kicks in. In the summer it is light at 5am or earlier which makes no sense to the general population.
My other Sig is very funny.
During WW II, Britain adopted Double Summer Time, skipping ahead two hours. It reverted to one hour after the war (modulo some funkiness a year or so later).
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
I'm a UK taxpayer and I conduct a lot of business with the US west coast. Presently, we're 8 hours apart for most of the year, and that means that I can *just barely* squeeze in a conference call with Californian colleagues (I'm co-owner of boingboing.net and all my partners are in LA and San Francisco) and still get out of the office in time to get my daughter from day-care and get home for dinner.
If the timezone difference goes to 9 hours, I'm buggered. The additional hour will have a direct, negative impact on my net income, as it will either require me to participate less in these transatlantic ventures (for example, it would probably mean no more freelance assignments for US editors, all of which generate UK taxes) or hire expensive babysitters to fetch the kid from day-care (something I also would rather not do for sentimental reasons having nothing to do with the economy).
If you want to get an extra hour of daylight in the evening....get up earlier? Why does the government have to mandate a change, schools / jobs in England can just start 1 hour earlier if they want the sunlight, and the rest of the UK can carry on as before. Problem solved! With on demand TV, its not like the TV schedules matter any more...
It's DST hell -- just a little more sadistic.
The problem is not the computer, nor Y2K-like bugs, not ven the programmers as professionals... the problem are those obnoxious things we call "persons".
I, unfortunately, am one of those who suffer during DST. People use to say "you'll get used to it", but after some years through these hellish period, I can say I never get used at all. In fact, it just worsens to the day it ends (fortunately, yesterday we left DST to return to normal time -- after 1 night better slept I already feel amazingly better!).
I don't know how I can solve this. In the latter years I've been abandoning DST: I just wake up one hour later, which make a lot less productive and I get to leave work with sunlight still available -- which I don't care at all, since I'm a nighttime guy... "hello darkness, my old friend".
Just to say this is one of the biggest idiocies they can do to UK, but hey, who am I? Just a foreigner! What can I possibly know? Go on! Do it! Enjoy it!
It may not be a problem for high end hardware, but lower end embedded controls with real-time clocks often use hard coded DST algorithms. For example the EU has defined standard DST dates for years in advance, these change-over dates are often hard coded into low-end devices, but with a default +1 advance. This allows a simple hardcoded table to be added to the hardware without the need for any user configuration, other than setting the initial time and date. Short sighted perhaps, but the reality is that there are huge numbers of these types of devices already installed.
There are lots of embedded controls used for time scheduling control of HVAC, Lighting and other timed automatic controls with this level of technology. I can foresee huge problems with equipment needing to be replaced or firmware upgraded if this occurs, or the need for 6 monthly manual time changes.
Its not just you scots who don't want it, plenty of us english arn't too happy either!
I don't much care if its dark when I drive home from work , I'm already awake and have lots of coffee inside me. What I DONT want is it pitch black first thing in the morning when I'm half asleep trying to drive down dark roads with kids trying to get to school crossing said dark roads.
Why the fuck our politicians want this I have no idea. We're more north west than all of the rest of western europe bar ireland which means the time our sun rises and sets bares little resemblence to what happens in germany 500 miles east or france 200 miles south.
Also , can someone explain whats the point of a clock if it doesn't give at least a rough approximation of the real time?
I mean if our politicians really don't see why clocks should tell a good approximation of the actual time why just 2 hours? Why not move them forward 12 hours and then it can be dark while we work but we'll have a nice bright nighttime for all those whingers to go out and have their cappucinos at 11pm or whatever the hell it is they want to do in the light late at night.
Sorry , but I don't see the point of daylight saving AT ALL. Contrary to what some morons seem to believe we (surprise!) don't get an extra hour of daylight. The real problem isn't the time, its the fact that the working day is spread unevenly around midday. If everyone started work at 8am and finished at 4pm then this wouldn't be an issue. If you really need the extra light in the evenings get up earlier - thats all you're doing anyway when the clocks go forward!
... will not make me trust the currency.
Welcome to CET
You can do whatever you want with your clock, it will not make your day any longer. The length of the day is not affected at all by the setting of your clock.
why stop there? why not get really outside the box and make it fully algorithmic instead of lookup table based.
The Australian government likes to keep meddling with timezones. There is always some device that you can't update automatically, manually or otherwise... If it isn't a thin client or a PDA of some variety that has no updates available from the manufacturer and no way to manually edit the TZ data it will be some obscure piece of hardware, or you find a Windows 2000 server that you have to manually update the tzdata. At least most of the changes we've had are just wait two weeks, it will fix itself... (till next year). Changing it to 2 hours means waiting 6 months before it rights itself - I mean the user will make you actually fix it by then! Poor bastards in the UK.
The families of Indian call centre employees will be happier - it means that their sons and daughters will be one hour less from the rest of India. If the UK were to be so generous to go +5.30 onto Indian time, even better
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
This would align the UK with the rest of Europe (CET). I guess that would be good for trading hours etc. Not loosing an hour flying one way to the UK etc. So I guess it would be a good thing during summer. Assuming the most important goal isn't to align with the US which is already kind of hard.
The current non adjusted BST time makes it unpleasent to leave work at 5pm in the dark for the larger population during the middle of winter.
An extra hour adjusted would eg change the sunset from 4pm to 5pm in the London area on 1st of January.
After February or earlier than November would this extra hour mean a more "happy" population with that extra light for their own personal/family time? Would the NHS dispense less Prozac?
My other Sig is very funny.
"United Kingdom" (a country) "England" (a province)
The North of England, Scotland, bits of Wales and NI would be worse off with this in Winter, as we know from experience
Could this cause another 'millennium Bug' fiasco?
No. The particular details of daylight savings time (when it starts, when it ends, whether in fact a particular state or territory as it at all) changes frequently in different time zones all across the globe. All operating systems issue timezone database updates to deal with precisely this issue. If your particular operating system is out of support then just change the timezone manually.
I'll go with this change if we get to bring all of America with us onto CET. That makes only slightly less sense than this proposal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/us/politics/20data.html?_r=1
pretty funny, no? 'our 'secrets' will kill us'? looks like the world at large is not thrilled with some of ours.
time, space & circumstance does seem to be changing more noticeably before us. are hours still relevant? adjustments seem to be much more frequent now. almost nothing else of value can occur until all the sick/scared/hungry babies are cared for. see you there?
I recently worked on a trading system that had 50 columns for the half-hours in a day, to accommodate the long day when the clocks go back. So if this happens, they have 6 months or so to expend it to 52 columns and to make sure all the clock changing logic still works with a two hour change. I thought they were considering year-round daylight savings - maybe we will go forward two hours then back only one, and then stabilize at those UTC offsets, so our clocks then match CET. I bet a lot of Europhobes will be unhappy with that just on principle!
every spring we move the clocks forward an hour and every autumn we move the clocks back an hour, personally i wish we would split the difference and then leave the damn clocks alone!
it does not save anything and you do not get anymore sunlight.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
_ so the vampires finally figured out, how to suck us dry in sunlight.
This is the exact same BS reason that the US screwed around daylight savings time, with the misguided idea that it would somehow save energy.
These kinds of things might have mattered 50 years ago, but they simply do not in today's 24/7 economy. If people want to shop, they will go out and shop, they won't stay home because it is dark outside.... heck they would just shop online anyway.
The idea that somehow giving an extra our of daylight is going to have any noticeable impact on a national economy is ridiculous.
The only bug you shall face, is politics and idiots against this idea. Including people who do not get up early in the morning and are stressed out.
/. mods to even understandand this when they are so far up their own arseholes.
I am awake around 04:35 to 07:00 each day. I do hard work before daylight and then relax for the rest of the day as it is MINE. I earned the rest of the day for myself and put in all the "Front End" work. I do not expect some
When will you learn that dedicating your life to hard work... defined as the work you do not want to do. You can stop crying like a baby.Now fuck off and go and whistle on facebook or some other shit social network site.
All cows eat grass!
fixing the computers is another way to stimulate the economy
People have difficulty to jog in cold weather. So I suggest to make the meter 10 cm shorter for the winter.
Just some minor adjustments are to be made: separate summer and winter measuring sets, some changes in aircraft software, etc.
I soooo hope they do this, I might even consider voting tory for a millisecond
DST sucks when you have kids.
"It's time for night night"
"Why?"
"It's night time"
"No it's not" *Points a light still pouring through window*
"grrrr"
Now I find the UK has a "backyard barbarque" lobby too. In the US, such measures were defeated because politicians rightly realized that the ire of hundreds of millions of people having to deal with double the number of time changes would more than outweigh the political support of people who wanted to play for another hour of daylight in the evening.
Perhaps this move will have a benefit, like hastening the recycling of the current crop of politicians.
the existing summer time system hurt more then aid economy as there is as much productivity lost in the changeover as is gained with the daylight.
Tho i suspect that when much more of the light was provided naturally it made sense. But these days we can keep shifts going 24/7 thanks to artificial lighting.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
The rules for starting and ending U.S. daylight saving time and British Summer Time are both set by legislation and have changed several times. Hard coding them into software is a serious mistake. The only safe way to deal with DST is to maintain a lookup table for the specific dates each year or a list of the years when the rules changed, and update these tables regularly. The more often the rules change, the more incentive people will have to adopt appropriate practice, rather than encrusting their software around the old rules. (Not that the rules should be changed arbitrarily; they just shouldn't be left unchanged for fear of "breaking" something.)
Stop moving the fucking clock already! It does nothing 'cept confuse people!
can we vote on it please?
I want a "stop dicking about with the clocks and leave them at UTC all year anyway" option.
thanks.
And that something is the Greenwich meridian, which is in the east of the UK, so most of the country is west of this line.
Now this change wants to bring us into line with countries that are either mainly east of the meridian or sufficiently far south that they see more winter daylight than we do.
It's a bad idea, it was tried in WW2 and also from 1968-1971, and it was unpopular and unwanted then.
Why we're going down this path again I really don't know.
Sheesh!
-- BtB
get rid of time zones.
GMT everywhere all the time.
get up when it is light.
It's fucking retarded. I've lived with and without it, and guess what I like about my current locale.. it's not a DST timezone.
The argument of "I want an extra hour with the kids/shopping/surfing/seeking prostitutes" or whatever you would do with an hour is obviously a fallacious slippery slope. If you want one, then why not two or twelve?
If an extra hour is needed by everyone in the afternoon, how about they learn to schedule their shit? Instead of something as silly as changing your clocks, just fix the underlying issue of shifts at work ending late/school finishing late/etc. FFS, people.. use your brain.
We went on daylight savings time a few years ago... and were expecting that it would change our economy from a classic agrarian model to a modern, service driven powerhouse. All that happened was a rise in sales of coffee, energy drinks and replacement alarm clocks. It's good to see you'uns across the pond imitating good old fashioned Hoosier know how. (and yes, the rustics here say "you'uns" instead of "y'all)
-- $G
Cows give more milk during daylight hours...
You're not being visionary. Make the sun rise half an hour before people need to leave the house in the morning, and make it set 16 hours later. Problem solved. If celestial mechanics were paid as much as politicians, we'd have fewer problems.
That's how it will stimulate the economy. Loads of consultancies will frighten companies into upgrading their systems to cope with the change. CIO's of said companies have nothing to loose in getting the board to reduce profits for a year or two and invest in IT infrastructure...
That said it would be a bit easier from a psycological point of view if they just didn't put the clocks back in the autumn, rather than adding 2 hours in spring
Art is the mathematics of emotion
The only safe way to deal with DST is to maintain a lookup table for the specific dates each year or a list of the years when the rules changed, and update these tables regularly.
What is the best practice to "update these tables regularly" for a device that is not connected to the Internet for security or cost reasons?
Hopefully there was a very good reason you couldn't use the public domain zoneinfo data and BSD-licensed library code.
It might be the case if a device has no way to automatically check for and download updates to the "public domain zoneinfo data". This can happen on a device with no connection to the Internet.
I nominate this AC for a position in Government, based on his keen grasp of the benefits of additional DST. Or, at the least, a position in a lobbying firm.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
t=t+rand();
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As many of us IT folks found out last time around, while the OS was just fine after it received it's patches for tzdata, there was one teensy problem:
JAVA
It does not play well with others, it uses it's own routines for determining time, and does not use the system, so after checking out the systems, we were all smiles and happy that of course the patches worked. Then the reports started rolling in, the applications were showing and generating the wrong time, as if they knew nothing at all of the tzdata change. So now the mad dash was on to figure what was wrong!
Production failing, applications crashing, why why why?
JAVA likes to keep it's own time, which was learned after couple hours of investigation, now the mad dash was on to get the patches from SUN to fix all of this. By the end of the day all was right with the world again, but after a very exhausting 8 hours!
Now imagine, an application that does not use system calls to maintain time, and requires it's own patches just to maintain TZ tables!
So, we saved so much time by mucking around with DST, and then spent it all and more FIXING an application issue!
OT anyone?
I'm sure they will be fine .. one way or another.
But from experience .. every time the clock is changed it pisses people off. Not only that .. but it does it for a long time. Long after the week or two it takes your body to adjust to the time change you will still be hearing the same thing from various people .. leave the damn clock alone.
Change working hours from 8-5 to 6-3... problem solved.
They changed the start/end date of DST in the US of A rather recently. Epic fail. Aside from the pain it caused all the computers and hard-programmed wristwatches (you know, those pieces of jewelry people wore before everyone had a cell phone), it did absolutely bupkis for the economy, and not even anything for SaveTheChildren(TM) with respect to daylight at school bus stops.
Changing DST by any amount, or deleting it, will not help anything and will cause trouble.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Think about it: Five years ahead all the economic troubles might have been solved by some magical invention which we can assume have happened in between.
Here's what to expect: those who do not patch their servers are going to have time anomalies. Electronic thermostats are not going to recognize the switch, so heating/cooing systems may start up or shut down at odd hours, i.e. not in sync with office/operations hours. Electronic time clocks are also likely to be screwed up. And why do I know this? Because these are problems we encountered in my office when Dubya changed the dates DST changes in the USA to allegedly save energy.
My advice? DON'T DO IT! There are too many industrial controllers that have pre-programmed DST switchover offsets, and they either can't be or aren't upgraded. I'm not a fan of DST in any way, shape, or form. Of course, I'm originally from a place that does not do DST, so I might be slightly biased.
(and what the frack is up with this double-spacing? That ain't the way I entered it!)
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
Just put on your cape and your wizard hat, and you can stop em!
I can guarantee there will be issues. We had this change forced on us for 3 years as a trial in Perth, Western Australia and every single Windows computer / Outlook+Exchange server got screwed up (although only 1 hour). For the entire 3 years. Because every year MS would release a new patch which was not in Windows Update (i.e. you had to hunt it down manually) to fix the date changes and every one of those patches only effected a single year. So come March 1 everyone would suddenly start complaining "my appointments are all 1 hour out!".
I see no reason to suspect it would be any different in the UK; except perhaps the UK might be a big enough market for Microsoft to try harder.
When the US changed the DST two years ago it was a far more costly fix on computers and equipment then Y2K caused. I was working as a contract IT hire for small business and easily billed 500+ hours on it. Not to mention all the devices that will never become compliant like my digital thermostat that probably wastes considerably more oil for the heater because it is off ever DST cycle. Idiots learn from the idiots in the US government for once it didn't work.
With Britain so close to the Arctic circle the length of daylight in the summer is already quite long so I'm not sure what the purpose of this is.
If they move sunrise to 7am, this would almost make Britain the land of the midnight sun.
In a modern world Daylight saving doesn't save anything. If you want to save power for lighting just mandate the end of incandescent bulbs.
Its also really annoying having the time change in the middle of March when it would affect meal times.
I have lived in both hemispheres
Why do we keep going through all this insanity where clocks have to change twice a year? Is the benefit really worth the hassle? Adding another hour seems like yet another variable to worry about with marginal benefit. I wish we could just stay on daylight saving time all year long so it isn't dark when I leave work in the winter, and my clocks never change.
Just a few days ago I read news that Russia had decided to stop changing their clocks entirely, and that they had abolished time zones. Apparently what this meant was that the government had laid claim to the entire commodity of time.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jwXLE1lFaS1LKhimZT5at-QMjZ3Q?docId=CNG.152f8947ca6447e697fff35e7e7d6f49.381
Quote: /quote
"Seconds, minutes, hours and other units to measure time are government property and cannot be privatised," Izvestia daily wrote Friday, accompanied by a drawing of a man with a cuckoo leaping out of his head.
It seems sensible to me. One thing i read said something along the line of, "the cows domt know what time it is". I always agreed, you either live and work by a natural cycle or an artificial one. Naturally, you wake up when day breaks and you stop working when its too dark. Artifically, you work 9 to 5.Â
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Spain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands should all be on GMT. Personally, I think that would make far more sense than Britain switching to CET. The Greenwich meridian is in the UK, for heaven's sake!
I've always been amazed that businesses don't counter these time shifts by adjusting their business hours to negate the offset.
Look, DST is a net loser for the economy. Rather than the law of diminishing returns, considering 2 hrs is the law of dimwitted returns.
That almost sounds like what China did. China is about as big as the United States, but the whole country runs on Beijing time.
The time zone database maintainers wouldn't be too thrilled. They're already not too happy with Lord Howe Island which has a 1/2 hour DST change. I know Oracle 10 is broken for LHI. Time doesn't exist for LHI for about 1/2 hour during DST change. Apparently someone hard coded a 1 hour DST change. Fixed in Oracle 11 supposedly. I use LHI and Canada/Newfoundland for DST testing which is how I know about this.
The UK should do it and find all the other software out there with hard coded 1 hour DST changes for us.
So peoplebfind that waking up at six or seven am is normal in the sense "what my great grandparents did is normal".
But your great grandparents werent globally connected and constantly brought to global relevancy by handheld devices. They didnt have communicators, yet. It was sci fi to them.
I think DST wad largely like scifi to the American public, as well. But like somebody who purchases the twisty energy savet bulb, they count the energy being "saved": "by the time my grandkid is born, she and everybody else in the country will be benefitting feom increased standard of living reflecting saved hours of light multiplied by productive value of one work hour multiplied by the number of citizens working with population increase ... why, why well all be millionaires, congress is a genius."
So even if common sense says "fucking with your clock doesnt actually make more daylight happen", if you bury it behind a layer of economic voo doo, that makes it easier to swallow.
Well, the energy saver bulbs are an environmental hazard disaster, there arent any flying cars, and amazingly wow, the economy is tanked.
People who are down and out get really sensitive. Its one thing when you're on top of your game and the entire drive to work has you screaming "show me the money" out your car window. But when your hours are cut, an you can only affordnto be sober, you probably begin to discover things like, the extra letters "S" in the weekends dont cast a magical spell that lets you sleep in, and youll tend to wake up around sunrise and get sleepy when it gets dark out. Imagine that.
So what really happens with timekeeping is that your employer is legitimised in driving you into the ground, on the basis that you agreed that what the clock says is more relevant than nature. The DST scheme only works if everybody has to work banker's hours. If you're a farmer, you probably get up either between 3 and 5 AM, or else around sunrise. If you go to work around noon, the nonsense of DST becomes even more pronounced.
But bankers would try to squeeze blood from a turnip if they could make money off more blood.
In the modern world, with our global connectivity and instant global relevance, most of our communications dont take months to arrive. We speak instantly to people halfway around the planet. We talk about "now" and "a few hours ago", "a few hiurs from now".
What we should all do is stop pretending that layer upon layer of conventionand fix and patch and capitulation and modifixation are actually "doing" anything, and drop the time zone bubbles, and the nausea inducing clock holidays, and just everybody, all workers, all employers, all personnel, and all pets and psychotics, just go onto UTC full time. so wht if that means it's brightest where you are at "five o clock"? Who cares? Its not your own little world, assclown. There arent flying cars and time isnt even fucking REAL!
Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! It's, it's, it's threeeee THIRTY, baby! Cry, baby! Cry!
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
I imagine it will cause about as much disruption as a year or two ago when the start date was changed in the U.S. Almost none.
England != UK. Can you lot in the United States of Florida PLEASE try to learn this.
As soon as y'all Limeys learn that there is no "United States of Florida", it's the United State of Texas", dang it!
The proposals mean that on the shortest day of the year, the sun won't rise in Southern England until 9:13am, and Northern Scotland 10:04am. In contrast, in New York on the shortest day of the year, the sun rises at 7:16am.
It seems like it would almost be easier to ask businesses to adjust the workday, rather than change the clock: have everyone work from 7-4 or 6-3 instead of 8-5.
apt-get install tzdata (or equivalent for other platforms). Problem solved. Just make sure your cron jobs don't get skipped over if they're important.
Since the George Bush time change a few years ago, my old phone was almost useless in a vehicle. Some towers were telling it to sync to this time and the other towers to that time. The phone could not update automatically and required the user to always accept the time changes, if you did not accept the time changes the phone would stay on the acceptance screen and not process anything else. My alarms clocks TVs, VCR, stereos, refrigerator, stove, microwave even the house alarm would not change time correctly any longer because the built in programming only allowed for DST on certain dates. Sure I could manually update them, but now I'm spending a few days finding all of the clocks that are wrong. Time is a silly measure anyways. If it is dark at 0600 (6am) I will turn a light on, if it is light out at 0600 I will not, the same goes for 1800 (6pm for those who do not know). much more energy, effort and money is wasted on changing time at this point, now that time changes are pre-programmed into almost everything. If it is to dark for you at 0600, then sleep in, if it is to dark for you at 1800, go to sleep, It works well for animals in the wild.
Most cities base their street lights on one of two systems (or a combination of both): photoelectric (when it falls below a certain light level the street light s go on) or timer (at a certain time the lights go on regardless of ambient light levels). In either case, electricity will be wasted still.
... While golfing.
5 hours would be daylight again? You mean I would have to look at that last-call score in the daylight? No thanks!
"See you later honey, catch me again on standard time."
Policy makers are always coming up with some change in local time somewhere in the world. It's an OS patch that happens all the time. Been there done that. The only way to really throw a wrench into things related to date/time any more would be if the calendar was reconfigured or the 24hr/day scheme was abandoned.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I am at +02:00 at the moment, the problem with England is that it is 2 hours and 20 years behind us...
This would not "give us 2 more hours in the day", it would merely shift what the "time" of these hours is...
Why not just get up 2 hours earlier? It would achieve the same result... The idea that you have to get up based on something as arbitrary as a clock is ridiculous.
In fact, people should stagger when they do things so as to decrease traffic at "peak" times...
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Absolutely no fear -
In Brazil we had lived with more than 10 years of irregualr schedules for D.S.T. (although it was al=ways for one hour, never two) -
sometimes computer locks would be off by one hour for a week or more -- and the country never experienced any major failure from that. Event today old windows xp installs change the time back and forth D.S.T. in the incorrect dates, again wioth no victims.
(We have regular dates for the switch since 2008).
-><- no
I am EST (-5:00) timezone. Instead of working 09:00-17:00, why not work from 14:00-22:00.
Then if any government wants to change working/school time, simple declare a different time. No computer change necessary.
This was achieved in Indiana. Political leaders also said it would bost the economy. It FAILED miserably
"give us more daylight time in the day"..... how does a bureaucratic decision alter the time in a day? Can the politicians proclamations actually alter the rate at which only the UK revolves around the sun?
A day is still 24 hours, the earth has made one full rotation and the UK has received n hours of sunlight. They way people talk about extra hours of sunlight is so aggravating.
I don't understand why we need BST at all, if you want to be inline with your EU customers then open 1000-1800 rather than 0900-1700.
If your customers are in the US man your sales teams 1300-2100 or open a US office.
If you want to see the sun come up get up earlier - why adjust time at all?
- Look at our new DST plan, we will add TWO hours to our clocks during the summer.
- Oh, I see. And most countries add just one?
- Exactly.
- Does that mean you get an extra hour of sunlight?
- Well, yeah, you see most countries think that it is not that good when it starts to get dark at say 5pm, so they add one hour and there you are, light until 6pm, but then it still gets dark. Nothing you can do, see, at 6pm it will still get dark. What if you wanted to shoot some more hoops for, say another hour, what do you do then?
- I don't know...
- Well, what we do is, if you need that extra hour you have it, because we push the clock one extra hour and you've got daylight until 7!
- So why don't you just leave the clock as it was and go to work one hour earlier, so that you can finish your work and go for hoops an hour earlier? It will get dark at 6, but you would have had your extra hour by starting your day earlier...
- [pause] WE'll add TWO hours for DST!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I tell you Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.
George Orwell, 1984
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
It's only going to...
root@GPLHost:node6503>_ ~# apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
tzdata
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 76.9MB of archives.
After this operation, 0.7MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
this what is happening is crazy! People arent rich!! they must understand that!! Rhodes island - Greece
This marks a perfect opportunity to get rid of timezones all together and move to Swatch Internet Time.
Y2k was different in that it was very possible the software simply did not understand years >1999. In this case even if you can't get your code fixed/tzData updated or whatever worst case you have an admin on hand to advance the clock an extra hour and restart services.
Yes it might be an interuption and might even mean a little down time but I really can't think of more then a few situations where manually advancing the clock won't fix the problem.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
And of course the politician must be certain that, come the next election, footage shall get run, possibly under a humorous tune.
It violates the spirit law to change a countries clock system so that it subsequently gives a false location of the sun in the sky. Grindalf
The purpose of existence is to make money.
Why be nice? Make it so the random number comes from one of a set of random number servers, depending on the day of the week, the phase of the moon, and how long it's been since some little kids' cricket team in an obscure town in Australia won a game? (Just to add an element of chance to the whole question.)
Personally I'm sick of your miserable tin-pot socialist paradise dragging the rest of us down to your lowest common denominator life of slavery. I would like to finish work and have an extra couple of months to get outside in daylight and do things. What is stopping you wasters in Scotland from operating your own time zone? Get off of my back and put your own house in order. If you want to do things differently from Westminster then get on and do it instead of wailing all the time that someone else is telling you what to do like teenage girls. Now that we have used up all of your oil I don't give a toss what you scroungers do, I'm tired of my taxes being wasted on you. You have your own parliament so get on and devolve the damn thing and take your independence so I can stop subsidising you alcoholic deep fried Mars bar eating drug addicts. I want to walk, cycle, garden, barbecue, whatever outside, not get pissed the moment I get out of work. No wonder you people have the worst health in the whole universe.
Actually I don't mean any of that mean stuff particularly, but its a good laugh continuing the cliché that the English and the Scots hate each other, you can keep your filthy water and power, I'd rather buy it from an Arab dictator.. I do think that it would be possible to have multiple time zones in the same country. After all we currently work in a time zone that is different to the rest of Europe and it seems to work fine. Its dark in the north of Scotland all bloody day long anyway- I should know I worked in Stockholm for a couple of yours and its at the same latitude so it doesn't matter a hoot what time zone you use. It would seriously improve my quality of life if I had more daylight in the evening here in the far south west, so I am really hoping that they give it a try.And if as you say the presence or absence of daylight doesn't matter to you whilst in a Bar getting pissed-up then you really wont notice the difference anyway.
I know that most people who live in cities don't care what time of day it is when the light is supplemented by the sun, so this change will be a dismal failure because it doesn't involve a talentless television soap character or a pubescent rap star and their aspirations to rip off the little people and achieve great wealth and offspring.for no effort. So the main value in the experiment is that I approve of the idea and it will irritate everybody else. I'm looking forward to it with great anticipation!
Something to take into account is that currently the UK is one hour behind (most of) the rest of Western Europe.
I think the proposal has the objective to align the UK with the rest of Europe and this is supposed to help doing business with the neighbour countries and ultimately the economy.
What y2k fiasco? are you referring to that over-inflated cock and bull story sold to millions by the IT industry so that software engineers could amass a small fortune?
NZ changed the dates for it 'summer' last year - it was published a year out - all major distros and time servers had had the new dates loaded and it was mostly seamless.
....
:-)
MS even put out an update to update the timezone file on Windows
The only people that had any problems where those that where running old system (read big Unix/ mainframe system that never miss a beat - but do not accept updates either, due to being isolated from the outside world - they needed the timezone file to be manually updated) , or had not applied the updates.
Mostly - moving the date by 2 weeks at each end of 'summer' was a none event - but it meant I was able to get home and have beer on the deck in the afternoon sum
Cheers
Ha. Australia seems to change is day light saving every other week. Its not a big problem, just a bunch of your servers stop working because there is a greater-than-5-minute difference in their clocks, they won't resynchronize because only half the computers have the updated change-over date installed basically wasting a few hours of business. So, while everyone hopes it will stimulate the economy its likely to waste employers money while IT works out the influx of bugs.
Well, thats how Microsoft helps Australian business when the Gov wants to alter the change-over. Maybe they care more for the UK?
This will cause turmoil among the sailors in the UK. They are used to converting UTC to BST by adding an hour before doing their navigation. Now they will always wonder if they added one hour or two.
We trialled daylight savings for a year or two and ultimately voted against it. Result: crap patches from Microsoft and every calendar and blackberry going out of whack at least twice. Be prepared for all your scheduled appointments to be incorrect for a while- or worse, duplicated! Don't do it- the extra daylight will fade the curtains faster. As others have suggested- simply changing the workday makes a lot more sense... except if you've got a public transport system to run...
It's academic - any decision to change the clocks in the UK has to include a buy-in from the devolved Welsh and Scottish assemblies - both have a veto, and the Scottish will use theirs!
It seems that we have this particular Chestnut come up every year, and every year it's the same - it isn't going to happen (sadly!)
@peetm
The origin of this is greed and urbanite mentality. We country cousins just get up earlier in the morning. Citified people need to learn to develop a bit of personal motivation skills and just do it. None of this wanking with the clock.
Fucktards! Leave nature alone!! Quit trying to turn us into autonomous sheltered clock watching drones; this hive mentality obsession of finding a way to increase national productivity a percentage point at the expense of our health ... sucks.
People who live in one country are trying to dictate what happens in another country, to the likely detriment of that other country.
This would be an absolute gift to the Nats. Both the Scots Nats and the Welsh Nats.
For the more proximal issue of what would happen to computers if there was a move like this ... most people would probably have to manually put in a bodge during the several years proposed trials and relate it to "Greenwich Mean Time" (by then utterly notional, as it wouldn't be the time in Greenwich, ever). While I don't know the ins and outs of NTP, I would anticipate that there is configuration file somewhere that defines the meanings of various abbreviations (GMT, BST, CET ... etc) means in terms of offset from UTC, and whether a daylight saving time is implemented, and by how much, and what dates it applies to etc, etc, etc. So people who keep their NTP implementations up to date won't have any real problem, and people who don't keep their implementations up to date will have problems.
There would quite likely be an update to the ISO-3166 (IIRC) list of country names at the same time, with Scotland fairly likely to secede from Great Britain, and the United Kingdom to cease to exist. So people would need to get used to using .gb and .sco domains, etc. All in all, the clocks changing would be one of the smaller issues.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
True, but haven't you considered the value of being in the same time zone as our government? [...] The real benefit is that at long last we will be sharing Berlin Time with the rest of Europe.
CET is Berlin time?
Ah right, the favorite past time of the British Islanders: One can kill anything by simply claiming it is a German take-over.
You forgot, that going to CET was never a sign of German take over but simply a prerequisite.
timezones change all the time, your pc should get updates of the timezone database.
your alarm clock or other such products may get problems with a new timezone, but you just modify it manually and that's it.
The important systems such as banking servers definitely already have the mechanism to adapt to new timezone logics.