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Morocco Decides To Scrap Seasonal Time Changes (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Morocco has decided to scrap winter time and will instead keep its clocks at summer time, GMT+1, all year around. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the time measured on the Earth's zero degree line of longitude, or meridian. The announcement comes less than two days before the clocks would have gone back by one hour on Sunday. Avoiding the switch would save "an hour of natural light", Administrative Reform Minister Mohammed Ben Abdelkader told Maghreb Arabe Press. The north African nation joins a number of others, mainly in Africa and Asia, which do not use daylight saving.
I guess the closer you are to the equator, the less sense it makes.
With this little warning just consider the confusion that this will cause. Computer systems with time changes programmed in; transport crossing international boundaries, eg a plane will leave France and timetabled to arrive at a certain (local Moroccan) time; diaries printed months ago and already on sale, etc. Did the political muppets think about this ? For anything like this 18 months is needed.
i am hard pressed to think of any reason why we keep going through with this ritual. Pick a time and stick to it. If you have a specific need for daylight, schedule appropriately.
Daylight saving time(DST) is a huge problem in programming. Almost any software that has to deal with time has some sort of bug related to DST. E.g. iPhone alarm didn't wake people in time, electric locks keep people out when it should let them in, stealth robbery in hotel because computer doesn't save any entry logs during one hour every year, Google/Microsoft calendars out of sync etc.
The complexity of implementing this correctly is higher than it is in thread safety. I was once part of a big project (200 people or so) and there were whole team of software architects thinking about DST related bug and how it could be solved. It was really bad, because the system that was used was accessed fron any country in the world and everything had to be in sync in millisecond accuracy, now imagine one country changing their time by half an hour when all the other clocks in the world keep their old time, not to mention that countries change their DST settings every now and then so you have to be prepared for those also in a system that is not allowed to be offline pretty much ever. Obviously it is rare to get problems this bad, but like I said before, even for simple problems, there is usually always a bug, because it is so hard to spot as it happens only twice a year. Especially so when writing global software.
GMT is *not* a reference time zone. It used to be decades ago, but since GMT is subject to DST like the rest of Europe, it no longer serves that purpose. The reference is called UTC - Universal Time Coordinated.
Slashdot - half truth for nerds.
It seems there is a lot of software that automatically changes the time for you. It won't be Y2K but it will be interesting to hear what happens if everything doesn't get updated in time. It is hard enough doing meeting with people in Arizona at this time of the year but at least software like Outlook keep the times right.
Daylight Savings Time was a stupid idea in the first place and has not gotten any smarter since. It's a worthless pain in the keester and kills pedestrians. The more and faster it is stamped out the happier the entire planet will be.
AC
All criticism for their hastiness aside, note that their neighbor Algeria was one timezone away and is now in the same timezone, and their neighbor Spain across the Mediterranean is now only one timezone away, not two. I'm sure that daylight considerations were not relevant to the decision, especially since Morocco is closer to the equator than many countries with daylight saving timezones. Even in winter, their nights are not that long.
Think of the history that will be wiped out when people in the future can't be sure what time something happened in the past.
who gives a fuck what morerocko does?
Step 1: People working 8 am to 4 pm
Step 2: Clocks shifted so that people start work 1 hour earlier wrt the sun, but still nominally 8-16
Step 3: People getting tired in the mornings and gradually shifting their workday to 9-17
Step 4: GOTO 1
This is my issue with DST. Once you detach the definition of time from (suitably quantized) solar time, you lose all sense of reference. I'm OK with changing working schedules, but at least if you keep noon at 12, it's easier to see how things are changing. (Imagine changing the measures of length and weight willy-nilly just because some things feel too short or too fat.)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Most technology has settings to apply a setting for DST or not. Being off a hour doesn't really break anything and even the dreaded Y2K thing was way overblown and this would have way less affect on technology. In most cases you could just set the clock to the correct time and be done with it.
Does it affect the moon and stars?
Stupid moving the clock around. In the agricultural days, farmers, that's all they did...farm. What difference did it make? NONE. it was all a con job, to "allow" people to have what they though was more free time after work to go do things. IE: spend money. The old Indian saying is best. "only white man would cut bottom from blanket, sew it on top and think he had longer blanket" Just put the clocks either on standard time or daylight savings time and LEAVE IT.
The time change is done to keep sunrise around the same time (by the clock). So there is no GOTO 1 step because once you've shifted the clock so the start of the day coincides with sunrise, there's no need to shift the clock any further.
If the common reference were noon (sun furthest overhead), there would be no issue. In winter sunrise would come a bit later, sunset a bit sooner. But people like to (or liked to in the past) start their day with sunrise. In winter this assures you have the maximum amount of the short daylight available. In summer it assures you don't waste any daylight when sunrise shifts to very early (by the clock).
But in modern society, aside from a few agricultural jobs, the omnipresence of artificial lighting means there's little need to continue to do this. The only real argument for it I can think of is that you can guarantee at least one of the commute times (morning or evening) happens in the safety of daylight. Whereas if you keep the time synchronized around noon, in extreme northern latitudes both morning and evening commute would happen in darkness during winter. But the research I've seen says the time change itself is much more dangerous to people's health than the elevated risk of commuting in the dark.
Ugarte might still be alive, and Victor Laszlo might’ve had an easier time getting out of there.
#DeleteChrome
If you're going to come across so strong and authoritative it would help if you were actually right. Have some knowledge:
GMT is a reference timezone linked to mean solar time.
GMT does not have any daylight savings time.
The UK does not use GMT, they use British Standard Time (BST) which includes Daylight savings (UTC+0 and UTC+1) depending on the time of the year.
Despite the UK's standard time not being linked to GMT directly, some countries legally do reference GMT as their reference timezones.
In the English language generally when not speaking scientifically then GMT and UTC are synonymous. https://en.oxforddictionaries....
With this little warning just consider the confusion that this will cause. Computer systems with time changes programmed in; transport crossing international boundaries, eg a plane will leave France and timetabled to arrive at a certain (local Moroccan) time; diaries printed months ago and already on sale, etc. Did the political muppets think about this ? For anything like this 18 months is needed.
Oh, the humanity! Whatever will people DO when their automatic systems briefly display the wrong time?!?
Anything that operates internationally or trans-nationally should just be running off GMT/ZULU time anyway, so it shouldn't adversely impact that.
As for what can the common Moroccan do on the ground about this horrific, nightmare situation in which their watches or clocks or computers briefly display an incorrect time of day... well, they could simply undo whatever change their automatic system made, et voila. Fixed.
By the way, do you know what the prevalence is in Morocco of automatic time-keeping systems versus manual ones? Isn't it just possible that more people have to change their watches manually, and as word gets out, (hey, we're not doing that stupid twice-yearly clock and watch change ritual anymore!) and I'm pretty sure it will, they'll be talking about this over tea and coffee and very nearly everyone WILL get the message, I predict, that the change, even right before the event, will result in LESS confusion rather than more? I'm confident that most of these automatically changing systems can be configured NOT to automatically change, and if they can't, they really should be replaced.
If the system cannot be fixed, then whoever made it should be fired for making a system that stupid; there's no excuse for that kind of incompetence in the modern day! Anything like that, however, I strongly suspect CAN be fixed, because this is 2018 and all the crap like that has long since been replaced with something created by people who exhibited basic fucking competency in programming. I hope the rest of the world follows the example set by Morocco, (a sentence I didn't think I'd ever write,) not in taking-over and occupying a neighboring country, but rather in abolishing the abject stupidity of changing clocks for what turned out to be no good goddamned reason twice a year.
DOWN WITH THE STUPIDITY OF DST!
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
When I first replied nearly six hours ago, this nonsense had only attracted one reflexive "informative" mod.
After I and five other people pointed out how parent is laughably, demonstrably incorrect (including actual supporting citations), it continued to get modded all the way to +5.
Slashdot - half truth for nerds.
Thanks for doing your part to keep that average low.
So, I changed the Subject, big deal... it's all about the Bennies:
https://www.fi.edu/benjamin-franklin/daylight-savings-time