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?

[Antony.S]

I doubt it, since they would find themselves fired within 6 months.

Re:Wow, who wrote this summary?

[Yvanhoe]

I have yet to see one single study that finds economical benefits in using DST. Actually, in the programmers' world, we see a lot of systems costing more because of this : Because DST regulations change almost every year (and I am not talking about leap seconds) the only away to have an accurate local time on a device is to have either regular maintenance or to link the device on internet to receive updates (and add some work to ensure the security of this, which can cost a lot on critical systems). I wish politician computed this cost. They manages to make the simple task of telling the local time too hard for a computer to compute on its own. That is really an achievement on their part.

Re:Wow, who wrote this summary?

[h4rm0ny]

I think they're wanting BST to be GMT+2 (Ie, CEST) and Normal time to be GMT + 1 (Ie, CET) we would, basically, be moving to Central European Time.

However, this can be vetoed by the Scottish Parliment. I hope it does, or else we'll be having dawn at 9am during winter.

I agree - this should never get off the drawing board. Basically it takes as an assumption that nobody does anything useful in the morning before work. Some of us happen to like the extra hours of daylight in the morning before work because it gives us a chance to go for a run, or work on our own projects or fit in a decent breakfast or whatever.

Most of us wake up more easily and naturally with the daylight than before sunrise, so Summer means extra time and energy for us. The UK government seems to think that's free productivity that they can tap into for the sake of its economy.

Re:Wow, who wrote this summary?

[caluml]

It still pisses me off that Fedora Linux does not recognise "Edinburgh" as a capital when selecting the TZ during installation but it does recognise USA state capitals.

Have you raised a bug about it? Thought about submitting a patch? Or are you just going to stay getting angry about it?

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.

BAU

[isorox]

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.

Re:BAU

[dkf]

There's usually somewhere in the rest of the world changes their DST policies on a yearly basis

That place usually seems to be somewhere in Argentina. For some reason, messing with exact timezone rules seems to be a national pastime there.

Re:BAU

[drunkahol]

They're trying to creep closer to the Falkland Islands?

Cheers

D

It's not just England...

[Gordonjcp]

... 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.

Re:It's not just England...

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, the Scots are reportedly opposed to the proposals because of how dark it'll make their mornings...it does seem fairly England-led. (Some of England, at least - I'm not at all in favour.)

*Ka-Ching* Mate!

[RobotRunAmok]

I think the only economy this would stimulate would be the one involving IT Consultants.

Not that there's anything wrong with that...

Re:*Ka-Ching* Mate!

[LordKronos]

That is indeed a possible reason for the change. Tinkering with time conversion algorithms were in the past also attributed to the economy stimulus it would give the IT sector.

Wonderful. So can we count on the next proposal to be sending someone around to bust out everybody's windows, so that we get an economic stimulus in the window industry? And I think the car tire industry could use a stimulus, so what do you think we could do about that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Darker mornings

[PCM2]

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?

Re:Darker mornings

[asdf7890]

No, but it is nice to occasionally leave the office with some daylight, and so feel like there is some of the day left for yourself after work has taken its pound of flesh.

Two? Just two?!

[Adambomb]

If you think THAT will help the economy, we're gonna spring forward FIVE FUCKING HOURS. Just think of the unwarranted extrapolations!

England != UK.

[Anonymous Coward]

England != UK. Can you lot in the United States of Florida PLEASE try to learn this.

Re:It might cause an alarm clock fiasco

[Anonymous Coward]

And the extra sunlight fades my curtains faster...

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.

Not going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

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

1940

[WillKemp]

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).

Re:It might cause an alarm clock fiasco

[beelsebob]

I can predict a worse outcome for the economy than people simply not being at work early. We currently get 3 hours of overlap with the (east coast) americans in a work day – they don't really want to have meetings absolute first thing, and we don't really want to have one last thing... This would give us only 2 hours overlap and compound the cross-atlantic communication problem.

It's been done before

[Max Hyre]

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).

Screws up transatlantic business

[mouthbeef]

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).

Not just you scots

[Viol8]

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?

Why stop at 2 hours?

[Viol8]

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!

Re:meh

[FTWinston]

Just, you know, some of us don't want to go to work in the dark. All the bloody time. I fail to see how moving to CET could possibly bring in extra billions to the economy. Dubious economics aside, however, what on Earth is wrong with living in a time zone that reflects your physical location on the globe? I mean, moving Grenwich off of Grenwich mean time permanently is enough of a misnomer to put me off the idea, but WHY would anyone want to mandate that we all get out of bed an hour earlier in the morning? I find the shift to/from BST bad enough as it is - if this became twice as large a shift, it'd be twice as bad, and if it were an "all year-round" change, most of Scotland would see no light til 11am in the winter. How that's a good idea I don't know... people seem to forget that the "extra" hour is just being stolen from the other end of the day!

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.

Re:Two hours? Boring! Try 2:37 (hours : minutes)

[Rufty]

t=t+rand();

Re:Never touch a running system?

[jc42]

It's no secret that France has long wanted the Meridian to pass through Paris, where other items that define weights and measure reside, so they can all be in one (*ahem* French *ahem*) place. Once we don't use Greenwich Mean Time the next step will be for France to re-name Paris as "Greenwich", ...

Heh. Apparently the French (and probably a lot of Brits, too) haven't heard that GMT hasn't been used for a quarter century now. The Greenwich Observatory got out of the time standard business back in 1986 (google it), when the official time standard was redefined in a way that wasn't dependent on any place or artifact, and renamed "UTC". Since then, "GMT" has been nothing more than a mispelling of "UTC", usually by someone who doesn't understand the difference.

Actually, if you visit the Greenwich Observatory, you'll find that they do have a nice museum exhibit of the history of their time standard, as well as a number of other good exhibits. It's well worth spending a day of your vacation there. Or visit their nice web site (www.nmm.ac.uk).