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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?
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.
DST is nothing more than collectively agreeing that we will get up and go home an hour earlier all summer long. Hence the traditional opposition in farming areas - farmers work on the sun, not the clock, and if every store closes an hour earlier, it is more difficult for them to get there after the farm work is done but before they close.
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.
My car has inbuilt sat nav and I still have to adjust the time manually twice a year. It knows exactly where I am, but can't relate that to a timezone, let alone sync time to the GPS signal. Or the digital radio. Or my phone when that's connected via bluetooth. It's weird that it seems to have multiple data sources that could potentially keep the time accurate but doesn't use any of them.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
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.