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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.
Except for those in Arizona, you insensitive clod!
> The majority of people feel that DST is a bad idea....
Do you have a source for this?
Although I don't think Canadians are insensitive clods.
DST is not a bad idea. Who the hell is going to wake up at 4:00 a.m. in June? Who is going to do anything enjoyable or productive in the wee hours of the morning when they've still got a looming commute to work?
Stop all the damned whining and enjoy the sunlight while you're actually awake.
The older I get the longer it takes me to re-adjust my internal clock. Pick one or the other and stick to it.
I thought the problem was that half of all people still think that it's doing them some good.
Except the Navajo Nation within Arizona, which goes observes Daylight Time, except the Hopi Nation within the Navajo Reservation which doesn't.
http://www.timeanddate.com/tim...
"Losing U.S. popularity - According to a Rasmussen Report from 2013, only 37 % of Americans see the purpose of DST compared to 45 % the year before."
One flick of your mouse scroll-wheel finger. That's what it takes for you to disregard an article that you don't care about. An article which - while having been conducted before - opens discussion of human timekeeping practices, which do impact IT issues.
Not everything in the universe is specifically for you.
"Oh no... he found the
The easiest solution is to have one time worldwide. Essentially, use the military Zulu time (Greenwich Mean Time) for everything. Then there is no confusion about what time it is and international (and coast to coast) communication would be simplified.
And while we are at it, let's eliminate the 24 hr day and 60 minute hour which are based on Sumerian arithmetic. Let's use digital (base 10) time. The primary unit would be the Centon (1/100th of a planetary rotation) which would mean there would be 100 Centons in a day and each would be equal to about 15 of your puny Earthling minutes. Millons would then be equivalent to 1.5 minutes and the new second (.001 Centons) would be about the same as the existing second. Easy to deal with.
The issue of daylight would be dealt with locally. Shops and offices would open at whatever time they choose (just like they do now) but it would probably be the equivalent of the old 8AM or 9AM.
There. I've solved it for you, so no further discussion is necessary. :)
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Here in Minnesota, we have large stores like Mills Fleet Farm and Wal-Mart that have extended hours, if not open 24 hours, and stock items that typical farmers need for maintaining Livestock and doing various repairs. This can also be supplemented with Amazon orders that can be delivered directly to your home. There is an ever decreasing need for DST changes just to support farmers. Also, we have had the electric light for more than 100 years now. I think it's time to change. Farmers will be able to adapt. If they can't, then maybe they should be replaced with robots.
An hour earlier than what?
Humans have been phase-locked to the mean solar day for just over 200 out of the last 6 million years.
1883: Railroads create the first time zones
Not even the sun is phase-locked to mean solar time. There's this little detail called the Equation of time whose discovery dates back to the Babylonians, which governs annual variation in apparent solar time. Apparent solar time just happens to be the primary zeitgeber on circadian rhythmicity in all mammals (that I've heard of) and a great deal more.
Majority of what population? People living north of the 49th? I doubt it.
Majority of people who wish pi was equal to 3 and that the earth's orbit were circular? Almost certainly, even though I don't think these two simplicity boners are conceptually compatible.
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.
And changing our entire frame of reference twice a year in some places at vaguely similar but not the same dates, to me does not meet that test.
We have things called computers and calendars these days with which we could adjust the running hours of our businesses, schools, etc, *if necessary* to the seasons.
My local graveyard manages it.
I run as much as possible on UTC.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
It doesn't matter which we go with, let's just pick one and stick with it year round. The natural cycles make it so that sunrise and sunset change dramatically from December to June. They can't legislate away the tilt of the Earth so let's start by accepting nature and science and do away with this nonsense of changing the clocks.
I try to make sure that the only clocks I have are connected to the internet other automatically adjusted sources - computer, cell phone, DVR, "atomic" radio clock, etc. If it's not connected to the internet or some other source for updating time zone data (because, not only do we need to change the time twice a year, we need to change when we do it, too, and differently depending on location), then I try to buy one that doesn't have a clock so I don't need to bother.
The only clock I still need to adjust that I don't just ignore is my car radio. Do new cars have internet-connected clock/radios?
Despite this great convenience of automatically adjusting clocks, DST is still stupid.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Well, then, let's stick the the DST hours...and freeze it there..then summers would have late hours.
I lived in AZ and the lack of changing hours didn't affect anything poorly, in fact, it was nice to never have to twice a year have your sleep cycle all screwed up for days and have to re-adjust.
I just think in this day in age, it really makes no sense for the majority of the US to have to switch back and forth twice annually.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The rest of the world uses metric time?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I think DST is a crime against nature
This. I think the current idea of time zones is somewhat OK to keep things convenient, but the reference should always be solar time, where 12 at noon means the sun at its highest point. If someone has a better way of defining time, I'm all ears, but arbitrarily moving/renaming things around is no way to standardize them. In fact, we might as well rename current hours as foo, bar, quux, etc. to indicate their complete detachment from nature, logic and math. Physical units strive for independent, natural definitions, and I don't think clock time deserves anything less.
Of course, there's the obligatory argument with early birds: if you want to wake up one hour earlier, then please do, by all means. I think you can do that without messing with my and nature's time.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I am reminded how Elijah Baley was reduced to tears and asking whether the sun would be out when he landed on Solaria. The Naked Sun
I don't find the geek's willingness to divorce himself from the natural cycle of day and night and the change of seasons particularly healthy --- nor do I share his obsession with reducing everything to base 10.
Except that ntp doesn't handle time zones at all. What ntp does is synchronizing clocks to UTC, the operating system then adds a local offset. While distributing whatever changes to tzdata your politicians in their wisdom did this year (or worse, this week) is an interesting problem, it has nothing in common with ntp.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.