Impact of Daylight Savings Time Changes? 572
jason718 writes "With the pending changes to U.S. Daylight Savings Time, what impact will those changes have to existing systems and their applications? Are some operating systems more open than others with regard to the configuration of Daylight Savings Time start and end dates, or will we need yet another update or patch to modify the internal calendar?"
Daylight Saving = Duping 11pm (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Daylight Saving = Duping 11pm (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure all operating systems will need to be updated to work with this new system...lol. BIOSes too.
Re:Daylight Saving = Duping 11pm (Score:2)
A) OSes... My OS uses a nice list of time zones and DST dates and such. I just edit the file and modify the dates and bam, done.
B) BIOS... no way. if your BIOS does DST changes then it is broken.
Re:Daylight Saving = Duping 11pm (Score:3, Interesting)
Who cares? (Score:2, Insightful)
Wouldn't a patch for this sort of thing require all of 10 seconds to make?
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
Planes will fall out of the sky! The banks will collapse! LIFE AS WE KNOW IT WILL CEASE! We need to panic people! PANIC! Start hiring floors and floors of programmers to change all the code out there.
Ok, maybe not...
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Look! Down the hall! It's Pedantic Man!
He knows it's Daylight Saving Time
(not Daylight SavingS Time)
I have yet to figure out why anyone outside of the states of Indiana, Arizona, and Hawaii actually give a rat's posterior about DST (because it's a part of life and takes place seemingly without effort). Those are the only three states which do not observe DST. Indiana has several clusters of counties near Chicago, Cincinnati, Louisville which do so on their own. Indiana's legislature also enacted a law to observe it, but now it requires Federal action to finish it, including which time zone(s) are observed. So there's a "fact finding" tour underway where people can sound off regarding which time zone they want to "belong to".
One state legislator voted against it because it would mess up his constituents' schedules when they had to take their kids over the state line (to Illinois) and the time difference would force them to restructure their days. No one took the time to point out to this moron that part of Indiana was on "New York time" (an hour ahead of that area of Illinois) six months a year and on "Chicago time" (the same time as that area) six months a year. So being at the same time or a difference of one hour constantly is less confusing than switching every six months?
That's no worse than years ago when those in the rural areas I grew up in complained it would mess up the cows' milking schedules. No one pointed out to them cows' don't look at the clocks. What they meant to say is it would mess up their schedules but using the cows as an excuse seemed to make it sound like it was somehow more critical? You wouldn't have believed it this year. Parents whined it would screw up kids going to bed: "How can you tell kids it's time to go to bed at 8:30pm when it's still light out?" Drive-In theatre owners whined it would cause shows to start later (although the number of drive-ins around the country, including Indiana, is a pittance of what it used to be), restaurants bellyached it would screw up supper hours because people would go out to eat based upon how light it was, not the time on the clock. You'd think no one else in the world had ever dealt with DST before.
I think the only people who would have whined more are those who would have had a million dollars bestowed upon them - but in pennies and they'd have to count and lug them to the bank.
(To be honest, it was always good sport to watch the political turmoil. I find it no different than the current Supreme Court nomination. In spite of the long-term importance, and regardless of one's personal political perspective, I find watching political friction to be one of America's great indoor sports. The higher the level, the more interesting it becomes. All of the others (sports) have been ruined by tweaking the rules.
On a more humorous note, I actually had something cooked up to take advantage of the annual turmoil in Indiana's legislature. I planned to circulate a story to the effect:
Microsoft was behind the lobbying effort to stop the observance of DST because of all of the Windows machines which list Indiana as its own timezone. Microsoft was afraid they would find themselves responsible for creating and supporting patches for all of those PCs, even for OSes which are no longer under active support.
My intent had been to start on March 29-30 so there would be a couple of days to circulate and work toward passing it along to a couple of friends in the local media - hopefully, using some forged email as additional proof. I thought of it as an interesting birthday experiment (my birthday is April Fool's Day). Alas, the missus never permitted it. She was afraid there would be some legal repercussions, despite the opportunity for humor.
oh well.
Re: DST and Time Zones in General (Score:4, Interesting)
In fact, timezones themselves are stupid.
Everyone should be on UTC.
Who said that local Noon should be when the Sun is directly above our heads?
In fact, with time zones, the Sun can be directly above your head anywhere in the range between 1130 and 1230 (or even earlier/later, because time zones are not strictly longitudinal), and DST can increase the range even further.
In the "old days", each town/city had its own time zone, synchronized to local Noon.
The railroads were largely resposible for our current system of hourly time zones.
There are places on Earth today that don't follow the hourly convention, and are one-half, or even one-quarter, of an hour "off" the conventional system.
Why does the local day have to change when the Sun is on the other side of the Earth?
I could kind of understand this back in the "old days", when everyone went to bed at sunset, but in our increasingly 24-hour society, in makes much less sense.
What detrimental effects would there be if the day changed from Monday to Tuesday when it was light out?
When everything is open 24 hours anyway, I doubt that there would be very many.
Note that I don't mean that kids should be going to school in the middle of the night, etc.
In some locales, kids would go to school at 1100 UTC, in others, at 1700 UTC.
Note that they do this already; it's just that 1700 UTC may be 9 AM local time.
People's schedules wouldn't necessarily change vis a vis daylight and nighttime; only the time measurement would change.
If everyone used UTC, communications across time zones would be much easier.
(No more "Is that 10 AM East coast time, or 10 AM West Coast time?".)
People wouldn't have to reset their watches every time they visted Aunt Mabel in the next state over.
The International Dateline would disappear.
Oh, and since we would be doing such a massive change anyway, this would be the perfect opportunity to decimalize time (and it's about time that we decimalized time).
Just think: With decimalized time, most people would be working only 3.3 hours a day!
(On the down side, whenever anyone said "Just a minute!" or "Just a sec!", you would have to wait longer.)
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
Aren't there a hell of a lot of machines to patch?
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
I estimate that we will perform zero patches to handle these specific rule changes.
The switch already happens - it'll just happen on different days. And if you recall, these changes have happened before - so it isn't really unexpected for those who have been in the business a while.
The Y2K contracting folks will have you jumping off your seats, but for everyone who runs these systems: no big deal.
I'm sure some home users will be caught off guard, but then again most desktop users have their clock set to the wrong timezone.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
And about 10 years to get fully deployed. There are machines still running unpatched copies of Windows 98 and IE 5.0 out there.
I hope they give us several years' notice, so that we can all go out and buy New-DST-compliant VCRs along with our HDTV-compliant TVs.
So-called "atomic" clocks (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, the radio signal does not include DST information; that's a "client-side" feature of the clock itself. Most clocks allow you to configure which time zone offset you wish, as well as to specify whether you want the clock to observe DST during the appropriate time of the year.
And the
Impact of DST changes (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Impact of DST changes (Score:3, Funny)
What is this "Daylight" you speak of?
Re:Impact of DST changes (Score:4, Funny)
NAME
sleep - delay for a specified amount of time
I expect it to... (Score:5, Funny)
No daylight savings time here (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No daylight savings time here (Score:2)
Re:No daylight savings time here (Score:3, Insightful)
My Dad, about 17 years ago got holt of several hundred feet of stainless steel tubing. Nice fairly thick walls. We borrowed a drilling rig and bored seven shafts in the backyard. Each about 85 feet deep. Insert the tubing which Dad had wielded into long shinny 'wickets' about 78 feet long. Wield the 'wickets' together in series, and viola closed cooling loop. Add a heat exchanger in the form of a 130 gallon stainless steel canister. Add one reversible compressor and
Re:No daylight savings time here (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to go to work an hour earlier, just go to work an hour earlier. All this goddamn "pretend it's an hour later than it really is" bullshit is completely whacked. People who think DST is a good idea are like people who think setting their alarm clocks ten minutes later will improve the likelihood that they will get to work on time.
Noon should always be when the sun is directly over my time-zone. If you want to adjust the business day according to available sunlight, it makes more sense to: 1. Change the start time instead of the clocks. 2. Do it gradually, the way available light changes gradually. That way you don't fuck up people's sleep cycles either.
I wonder if the health problems (and sick days off work) due to disrupted sleep patterns has actually cost our society more than the energy saved by the whole DST concept. Seems like something which should have been studied by now...
Re:No daylight savings time here (Score:5, Funny)
Enlightened isn't the word. Arizona avoids going on Daylight savings time to thumb it's nose at the Federal Government.
At the same time, the Navajo Nation in Arizona thumbs it's nose at the Arizona State Government by going on daylight savings time
Re:No daylight savings time here (Score:2, Funny)
Re:No daylight savings time here (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No daylight savings time here (Score:2, Funny)
Re:No daylight savings time here (Score:2, Funny)
Re:No daylight savings time here (Score:2)
Re:No daylight savings time here (Score:4, Insightful)
That would be nice if the other government rules and laws didn't mention time at all. But they do. In DC, they constrain when I can buy beer, play my radio audibly, ride the subway, etc. Changing DST has a real effect on those things.
Re:No daylight savings time here (Score:3, Insightful)
So running a weedeater or lawnmower is the same at 2AM as it is at 2PM?
Re:No daylight savings time here (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No daylight savings time here (Score:2, Informative)
Other countries and DST (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, the countries of the world that do change their clocks don't change their clocks at the same time. The EU starts DST on the last Sunday of March [webexhibits.org] whereas we (currently) start ours on the first Sunday of April. Currently, we both end ours on the last Sunday of October.
If we're going to change how we handle DST, I'd recommend that we match the EU. I know that the idea of following the EU's lead is anathema to many of us, but hey, it's a small sacrifice and shows that we're willing to make compromi
Re:Other countries and DST (Score:3, Interesting)
It gets even better - In Australia, some states don't observe DST at all, and of those that do, not all of them start and end it on the same dates (Yes Tasmania, I'm looking at you). Making things more interesting is that the Northern Territory and South Australia are only 30 minutes different from their eastern neighbors (but only SA observes DST), so for part of the year Adelaide is 30 minutes
Re:No daylight savings time here (Score:2)
Re:No daylight savings time here (Score:2)
Might want to check your facts next time. Even the irrigation system for watering lawns is from well water. I actually had to get up at 2am to start and 3am to shutdown the irrigation channel on my days when I li
Didn't we just argue over this? (Score:2)
Embeded devices. Clocks, DVD players, etc. Anything thats not network accessable that can be patched - is going to be screwed.
Re:Didn't we just argue over this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Few devices adjust for DST. To my knowledge, only computers do this. And that can be turned off and done manually if need be.
Re:Didn't we just argue over this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Let me just look around my room here... My TV does. So does my VCR. There are lots of things out there besides 'computers' that adjust for DST. Certainly my TV and VCR aren't 'patchable' to changes to when the time changes occur.
Re:Didn't we just argue over this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't these use the time code encoded in the VBI in TV broadcasts?
Re:Didn't we just argue over this? (Score:2)
The two atomic clocks I just bought do. Fortunately, I live in California. If I lived in Eastern time, these things would be doorstops (since you can't set them forward an hour because there's no U.S. time zone over there).
Any way you cut it, though, I'm really pissed. I just spent all that money so I wouldn't have to set my (&@#^$&@ clocks forward and back manually,
Re:Didn't we just argue over this? (Score:3, Informative)
All of the radio-controlled or "atomic" clocks work on the same idea -- they receive a time signal from a low-frequency transmitter (60kHz in the US). The device will typically set an internal quartz clock from the received time code. The time reference signal is strongest at night, so it's typical for these clocks to set themselves at 2 or 3 am (local time). Some newer designs will
More trouble (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More trouble (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, that only accounts for systems that have people sitting at them and who happen to glance at the clock. I predict that there will be some servers that are off by an hour for a while, but that
Re:More trouble (Score:2)
I though most servers ran on GMT, not local time. Mine do, anyway.
Re:More trouble (Score:3, Funny)
Re:More trouble (Score:4, Funny)
Re:More trouble (Score:2)
I'm feeling this already (Score:5, Funny)
Who elects these guys? (Score:3)
Right...
Re:Who elects these guys? (Score:2)
As a kid, I was always relieved by the time change in October. Is there anything lamer than daylight trick-or-treating?
Re:Who elects these guys? (Score:3, Insightful)
We travelled the world with my (now older) kids last year .... halloween found us in India ... pumpkins were in short supply ... in the end we carved watermelons, they work great if you leave a little red flesh
FRIST PSOT!!!!!!11!!! (Score:5, Funny)
My apologies... (Score:4, Funny)
Yup. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yup. (Score:2)
Daylight Savings makes everyone feel sunnier! (Score:2)
I smell a new viral sig.
Re:Daylight Savings makes everyone feel sunnier! (Score:2)
Just great... (Score:2)
(kidding)
Nothing* (Score:3, Insightful)
As a Canadian... (Score:5, Informative)
(Until we follow you guys)
Re:As a Canadian... (Score:3, Informative)
That's assuming every province adopts it. Saskatchewan [wikipedia.org] never adopted the original change.
DST is BS anyway.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:DST is BS anyway.... (Score:2)
Re:Affords me better fitness (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Affords me better fitness (Score:3, Interesting)
The end result is that we have the sun rising at 4-30am, going down at 5-30pm, and the locals (I'm a recent addition there) see it as perfectly reasonable. Personally, time with a little sunshine in the evening is more useful than getting up at an unholy hour of the morning to "enjoy" the sunshine, as much as it is p
Who is fooling who? (Score:4, Insightful)
The absurdity of fooling yourself by changing the clocks (not really unlike those that set their alarm clock fast so they are never late) reminds me of a former coworker, who came in later to work every day. One day he came in as we were leaving for lunch. Soon he came in on a Friday as we were all leaving for happy hour. Eventually he "lapped" himself and started coming in so late it was early the next morning, and eventually he came in at a normal start time of 8:00 or so. Of course, the trend continued and he just started coming in later again.
Re:Who is fooling who? (Score:2)
Re:Who is fooling who? (Score:2)
"And sometimes Wednesday is after the first of the month"
Re:Who is fooling who? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.ku.edu/~edit/whom.html [ku.edu]
Who refers to a subject, whom refers to an object.
You should have said: "Who is fooling whom?"
I offer this tip merely to help you advance your career, not to be a national socialist.
Think of the Children... (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the silliest reason I've ever heard of. Energy consumption I can understand if the facts support that it will really make a difference.
Here in northern Michigan for our family at least we always wait for it to get dark before we go out. Maybe it's like having snow for Christmas, but it's doesn't seem like Halloween would be the same when you can see just how cheap all the costumes and decorations really are.
Also how would this affect livestock? How do they know what time it is? If daylight savings time is so great, why revert at all why not just move it forward the whole year and let Indiana print their own TV Guides.
Boycott! (Score:3, Funny)
Err... wait.
Re:Boycott! (Score:2)
A solved problem (Score:2)
Windows and Linux aren't the issue. (Score:5, Interesting)
Many of the packages are expecting the 1st Saturday/Sunday in April to have 23 hours and the last Saturday/Sunday in October to have 25 hours.
Do you really want the power grid to put into production a patch that hasn't been tested for many months ? ( Or do you want blackouts, or the cost to quadruple ? )
Re:Windows and Linux aren't the issue. (Score:2)
Why would
Fuck, my watch (Score:2)
For the love of God, people... (Score:5, Informative)
Should not be a problem. (Score:2, Informative)
Instead of tweaking it, they should fix it (Score:2, Interesting)
Here in Hawaii... (Score:2)
My gremlin! (Score:3, Funny)
what about a happy medium.. (Score:2)
This could be good (Score:3, Funny)
--
watch funny commercials [tubespot.com]
Re:Cows Use Clocks? (Score:2)
More of an inconvenience to farmers than cows (Score:2, Informative)
Because the farmers and their families would still have to work with their product during certain margins of the day to accomdate the plants, they would have to readjust their schedules to do non-farm things like shop for food, meet w
Re:Reason #7,234 -- Daylight Savings Time Headache (Score:2, Funny)
Re:international flights (Score:2)
I am sure that it will affect farmers somewhat. I remember during the energy crisis of the 70's the beginning of DST was earlier and I remember standing in the dark waiting for the school bus in the morning. But I also remember having more daylight when I got home. I do
Wrong way around (Score:2)
Re:As long as we're making changes (Score:2)
Correction. That's your 5 cents.
Re:As long as we're making changes (Score:2)
Wouldn't that be 5 cents then?
Re:Not a big deal for *nix - Solaris (Score:2)
Of course, making sure all the systems are patched, and everyone has the time zone correctly defined to begin with... that is the greater challenge.
Canada is intermixed with USA (Score:2)
Re:This ougta mod well. (Score:3, Funny)
It's be simple to implement: day = oldDay + jesus.lifespan()
Except when you get the compile-time error: ERROR: jesus is not defined
Re:I, for one... (Score:2)
I can see it now... "Why would you call me at 3pm? Its in the middle of the night!" Talk about causing confusion. I can + or - from GMT, and if the whole world used GMT, you would still have to calculate what hours they were open, when is it too early or too late to call, etc. That would be a worse nightmare.
Re:US is getting desperate (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, let's take as a given that Peak Oil has already passed, just for the sake of argument.
All that this means is that crude oil pumped from the ground will continue to become more expensive. Not in great leaps and bounds, but at a relatively steady pace.
As crude oil becomes more expensive, alternate fuels become relatively less expensive. Sooner rather than later we'll see both synthetic crude (from farm waste, of all things) and expanded hydrogen trade.
In a hundred years, we won't be back to hand-working on farms. We'll have a bunch of telecommuters working the same networked jobs they all want to work now, and the same green revolution farms, only the tractors will use more electric motors and less internal combustion.
Is Peak Oil going to give us change? Yes. It is going to cause a capitalist apocolypse? No, not really. We did rather well before gasoline, and we'll do farily well long after it's gone.
Re:US is getting desperate (Score:3, Interesting)
Tar sands in Alberta require huge gas inputs making it barely worthwhile from the energy standpoint. The Energy Recovered to Energy Invested ratio for tar sands is on
Re:US is getting desperate (Score:3, Interesting)
Fission energy (ie. uranium) will peak just like oil.
What's the timeframe for that if fast breeder reactors are used?
Re:US is getting desperate (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It won't really matter, except (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, here's a new conspiracy theory! Maybe this is all a scheme by MS. They'll patch it, but only for Windows 2003 and newer systems, in an attempt to force everyone to upgrade. Pure brilliance, I say!
(Why not, they seem to think people will upgrade for IE7.)
Re:routers, kerberos, and the resulting shitstorm (Score:5, Informative)
Or at least it would force you to study the command reference a bit better, and find the second optional form of the command that allows you to specify the beginning and end of summertime.
That would mean you require only a configuration change, and not a code upgrade.
But of course you would need to read the manual...
Re:USA think they're the rulers of the world and T (Score:3, Insightful)
There may be quite valid reasons to dislike U.S. (foreign) policy, but this is really an internal issue. If the majority of the U.S. population suddenly decided to scrap any celebration of Christmas or any other somewhat coinciding or similar holiday, that w