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?"

Comments

Wow, who wrote this summary?

[intellitech]

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..

Re:Wow, who wrote this summary?

[theCoder]

The Wikipedia page lists some studies, but I find this one most revealing:

A 2008 study examined billing data in Indiana before and after it adopted DST in 2006, and concluded that DST increased overall residential electricity consumption by 1% to 4%, due mostly to extra afternoon cooling and extra morning heating; the main increases came in the fall. The overall annual cost of DST to Indiana households was estimated to be $9 million, with an additional $1.7-5.5 million for social costs due to increased pollution.

There may be benefits to DST, but DST does not save energy, one of the original arguments for DST.

Keep in mind, the main purpose of DST is to get people up earlier in the morning so that they don't waste that daylight. People are used to getting to work/school by some set time, say 8 AM. If you told them that in the summer, they had to get to work/school by 7 AM, even though they could leave an hour earlier, most people would balk. But if you tell them that 7 AM is really 8 AM, they don't seem to have any problem, and they'll happily go along with it.

Now, maybe it's easier to just redefine the hours of the day this way than having different schedules for winter and summer months. Lots of people are easily confused by time, and changing your clocks is a one time event, then everything else is "normal." I do find it humorous that people like to keep this convenient fiction, though. If we never had DST and someone proposed it, I think most people would find it ridiculous. But since most people have done it all their life, it's just what we do in the spring and fall (and they think that places that don't do it are somehow backwards and wrong). Just a matter of perspective, I guess.

Re:Wow, who wrote this summary?

[Dragonslicer]

In the USA, there are 3 time zones

There are four time zones in the continental United States: Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific. Alaska and Hawaii are each in different time zones as well.

Not if the computer's Unix-ish

[Max Hyre]

Unix & friends use a file or set of files with daylight-saving time changes; it's updated everytime somebody changes things. In Debian, it's in the tzdata package, described thus:

This package contains data required for the implementation of standard local time for many representative locations around the globe. It is updated periodically to reflect changes made by political bodies to time zone boundaries, UTC offsets, and daylight-saving rules.

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.

Re:Not in England

[garyok]

"United Kingdom" (a country) "England" (a province)

So very wrong. United Kingdom = state. England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland = countries. Ulster (Northern Ireland + 3 counties in Eire) = province. Great Britain (or just Britain as we're not so big-headed these days) = England + Scotland + Wales + islands (but not Northern Ireland, and definitely not Eire). Nationality of a UK subject - as we're subjects of the Crown rather than citizens of the state - is British.

Hope this clears up the confusion.