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?

[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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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: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: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();