One Step Away from Changing Daylight Savings Time 898
An anonymous reader writes "Congressional leaders from both parties have signed off on a proposal that will change daylight savings time in the United States as early as this year. All that is left is a signoff by President Bush. If the proposed solution becomes law, DST will be extended two months, from March to November. With many IT applications relying on accurate time information and many having automatic adjustments for DST, how will the IT world handle this change? And with the proposal reportedly taking effect this year, is there enough time to implement change?"
Billing rates are going up!!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Hopefully the consulting companies will be able to sell the scare and raise the billing rates!
Jobs!!!! Jobs!!!!
How about we have our 'puters set for GMT?
Seriously-Many applications have DST deep in the code. I can see the folks that develop things like the Netbackup scheduler (and others) to be freaking. Didn't they just fix bpsched? (again?)
This is spectacular (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll tell you how they'll handle it. They'll handle it the same way they handled Y2K, and that's by offering more jobs for people like me. The increase in demand for employees posessing the special skills needed to fix this problem will subsequently raise the expected salary for software engineers and IT professionals. Under these premises, I'd say this gives us something to toast and look forward to.
I hope that Bush doesn't screw this up by not signing off.
--
I'm not a troll; I'm just a skeptic.
Software yes, hardware no. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's nice to see the American government coming up with a solution like this instead of concentrating on and suggesting alternate energies.
Really warms the ol' cockles of the heart.
No big deal in *nix (Score:5, Interesting)
For most *nix systems, look in /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo for zone definition files. If you're lucky (or have Solaris), there's a src directory in there.
You'll find a README file with a reference to a place with updated zone files [nih.gov].
On the other hand you could try to roll your own like I did for Belo Horizonte and edit the rules in one of the source files (I would think "northamerica" for the US ;)
Do a man zic for more info on compiling and then distributing to other systems.
Re:DST is artifical anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
It's DayLIGHT savings time. (Score:3, Interesting)
To say nothing of the energy necessary to light the dark hours. Why do you think they implemented Daylight Savings in the first place? Have you seen the price of oil lately?
Personally I think we all should all just use zulu time and let businesses and schools etc. set their own hours. Of course we'd have to stop thinking of 12 as noon and midnight... but then we could learn true times based on longitude instead.
Which is the Standard time, then? (Score:1, Interesting)
I haven't noticed lately, but (for US west coasters, in this case) does society still refer to Pacific Standard Time (PST) and Pacific Daylight Time (PDT)? And if so, since most of the months are now going to be on the adjusted schedule shouldn't they now be refered to as Standard Time, then?
Also, something interesting from Wikipedia's entry on DST [wikipedia.org]:References are noted in the entry.
Re:Abolish DST (Score:1, Interesting)
it is stuipd for every one to have a 9-5 job.. i have to deal with people over seas all the time and it has gotten to the point were i have 5 clocks on my wall - one for each place.. so i don't wake them up.. ijust can't kep track of how many hours ahead are they and what time is it there
if we all used the same damn time it would make sooooo much more sence.. the fact that you can have a flight and you have to set your watch BACK becuse you landed before you left..
and when you live near a time zone switch.. dealing with what time stores are open.. it is crazy
and DST does nothing but make it more confusing.. hell the only time i know it changes is becuse my computer tells me. and honestly from the looks of it.. that might not work right (at least for a while)
Re:Why the IAFC is against the change (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, every couple of years I ignite some paper in a can and hold it under the detector to make sure it actually detects smoke. A test-button may test the alarm, but what about the smoke detecting part?
Just be careful not to burn your house down if you do this. }:)
-Z
Re:Don't they have a dick to pull... (Score:3, Interesting)
Seeing as how DST was implemented FOR business to begin with, so what?
There's no reason for this...and the cost for changing everything will make the costs of Y2K seem like a pittance.
Nonsense.
Y2K included all kinds of subtle problems in code. DST is primarily implemented in the OS's time-keeping functions. For systems where the application does the DST calculations, it is going to generally be a well-defined area that can be reasonably easily modified without much worry about surprising side-effects.
Re:Abolish DST (Score:4, Interesting)
Just because it ( usually! ) takes a while to cross a time zone now doesn't change the fact that your clock is no longer correct after flying cross-country, even though it has kept correct track of the number of seconds which have past since you left. A clock that just shows GMT is always correct for that locallity, it's the local time elsewhere that's been shifted so that, for whatever reason '8:00 AM" is always morning, even Australia.
That said, I understand why it's done, but it's a convention, and a completely arbitrary one at that.
The idea that there are several places where you can drive a half-mile down the road and have to change your clock to support such an arbitrary convention is more than illogical and annoying. It's downright stupid. I can't imagine what folks do who live near a time zone demarcation line do, although I know what large cities in such a position do- they arbitrarily choose one zone or the other, which just shows how dumb the whole thing is.
Sydney olympics in 2000 (Score:2, Interesting)
Everyone complained a lot about how inconveniect it was going to be, but everything went smoothly.
For my part, I was mainly working with Windows boxes. There was a hot-fix from Microsoft that came out some time before to let Windows know what was going on - and not much else needed to be done.
Horrible from a Jewish perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
The specific case which shows the problem is the Passover Seder, which has to begin after nightfall, and there's about 2 hours of stuff before eating. Right now, about half the time, Passover falls during ST, and starts at a reasonable hour. With this change, it'll be much harder to keep children up to participate.
-David Barak
Re:This is spectacular (Score:2, Interesting)
Then we could actually dig out of the hole instead of delaying it getting bigger.
But again, this is B-USA-H. We don't look in the long term for the exit strategy.
Re:This could be a Hallmark event (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why the IAFC is against the change (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, I went to public school in the US and I learned Spanish and German starting in the 4th grade.
This is the thing about the United States that people from other (smaller) countries don't seem to grasp... and as you illustrate, even a lot of Americans forget it. It's a huge country, and it's very regional. There are 50 states. There are tens of thousands of school districts within those states. Every district does things differently. Is it fair? No. But you can't generalize like this about the US, about almost anything.
I'd be willing to put money down that there are more fluent Spanish-speaking Americans than fluent English-speaking Spaniards, even as a percentage of the population.
Farmers *hate* DST (Score:5, Interesting)
DST is there to make factory workers get up an hour earlier, without the government having to admit that it's telling everybody to get up earlier in the morning. Rather than messing with the clocks, they *could* just tell the TV stations to run earlier schedules, and most Americans would obey....
There's no reason to set the clock to some other time - during Standard Time, the sun is at its highest at 12 Noon in the middle of the timezone area, and you could just as well leave it there.
Parent is Flamebait or Troll (Score:1, Interesting)
> against anything by calling it "American-style"? (I'll tell you: it's
> the kind of country that, 138 years later, still prints their colonial
> ruler's face on their money.)
Why is this modded as "Insightful" rather than "Flamebait" or "Troll"?
Aside from the fact that the poster appears to be seeing "knee-jerk reaction" in the article that few others are seeing---most everyone else seems to consider it quite coolly and reasonably written---posting a newspaper article for the express purpose of insulting its country of origin is difficult to call anything other than trolling for a flamewar.
As for the secondary point of the poster, well, there are plenty of good reasons why Canada wouldn't be quite so interested in extending DST as the US. The most obvious one is that the US is further south, and hence doesn't have nearly as many worries about icy roads---making everyone drive to work an hour earlier in November mornings is going to put a whole lot more people at risk from black ice on the roads.
Re:Daylight Saving Time is a Joke... literally (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_savings_tim
The major issue (Score:3, Interesting)
In the course of writing the handler for DST, we came to realise that any standard UI widget that only lets you enter a date and a time is fundamentally flawed for dealing with critically important dates and DST. This is because every possible time that occurs between 1am and 2am on the "fall back" night (in the current system) actually occurs twice that night, an hour apart from each other, and there's no way to disambiguate which one it is given only the date and the time.
I suspect this is not accounted for at all in a LOT of systems. We haven't come across any kind of standard way for the user to indicate whether they mean 1:30am before the "fall back" (for instance) or 1:30am after.
You know your government is out of control.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Time and time zones are kind of a creation of governments, especially the British empire, which is why GMT is where it is. Time zones are OK things, especially versus the chaos that they imposed order on.
But daylight savings time is a complete abomination. If the time when kids go to school or you go to work doesn't jive well with the Sun, then change the time you go to school or work and don't F**K with time itself. Politicians who sieze control of time are just engaging in the ultimate power grab, ita a
Re:Why the IAFC is against the change (Score:4, Interesting)
If the current, shared royal family dies out, there is no reason Canada would adopt the same royal family as England.
Another situation where they could diverge is the sovereign of England is also the Head of the Church of England. In theory, if the Queen (or her successor) converted to Islam, or some other religion, then she would cease to be the Queen of England, but she would remain the Queen of Canada.
Re:Horrible from a Jewish perspective (Score:3, Interesting)
High latitudes must be bad from an Orthodox Jewish perspective as well!
Nightfall in the summer (depending on how you define it) routinely occurs as late as 10PM here. Go further north and night does not fall at all.
Re:Why the IAFC is against the change (Score:3, Interesting)
Did you know that English spelling reform was almost undertaken but was shelved because the French were doing it? We've suffered 300 years of crazy English spelling for that one.