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Daylight Saving Time Change On Sunday For N. America
An anonymous reader writes Just a reminder that DST starts this weekend for most of North America. The majority of people feel that DST is a bad idea and want it to stop. If that was done, the main question would then probably be whether to go to Standard time year-round, or "summer" time year-round (more). For the latter, there is some evidence that it helps reduce crime (at least initially); for the former, more northern locations would have sunrise occur 08:30 or later, which would make the morning commute difficult. Some even argue that the U.S. should go to only two timezones. The DST change occurs at the end of March in the EU, so there will be a second round of confusion for trans-Atlantic conference calls then.
Does that really make it easier? Seems like it just exchanges one problem for another. You might know what "time" it is everywhere, but you don't know when they're working, sleeping, etc.
"What time is it in China? Oh right, 3pm, same as us. Wait, when do they sleep? Can I call there now?"
"What, we're having dinner at 2am? And tomorrow we travel to India for an afternoon meeting. When will that be? 9:30? WTF?"
Considering how important time is for a computer and people writing code for them, the hassle of dealing with timezones, daylight savings time, and even the occasional leap second is something that most programmers need to know to varying degrees at some point. If you don't care about hour-scale precision, I suppose it won't matter much, but if you do, it's quite a twisty maze to figure out what the time would have been called locally in a particular year and location. That's why there are whole libraries written to deal with it.
For example, it was a challenge for programmers when the rules for DST switchover changed a few years ago (2007). Plenty of code was badly written to handle it because the rules were hard-coded. I still have a few old, impossible-to-update machines around that are always off by an hour 4 times a year unless manually set. Those machines don't know about the new DST switchover date, so they ignore it in spring, then they switch on the date of the old DST switchover (manually reset again), and then the whole thing happens again in the fall the other way around.
It's a lesson in bad coding and how to do it wrong, and every time the rules change it's yet another annoyance, which is why some people are saying "screw the whole thing". Which will be another thing to change in the code :-(
If we ever do invent time travel, I figure it's going to be routine for people to show up from the future for important historical events and discover they're an hour off.
The Hopi know that cutting one end off a blanket and sewing it on the other end doesn't create a longer blanket.
They deal with crops.
Right. And crops care what time we call it when the sun comes up, right?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.