UK Government Wants to Spring Ahead Two Hours

Anonymous Coward writes "In England it has been proposed that the clocks move forward by 2 hours this summer to give us more daylight time in the day, and hopefully in turn stimulate the economy. My question is what impact will this hold for computers that automatically adjust the time to British Summer Time? Could this cause another 'millennium Bug' fiasco?"

Wow, who wrote this summary?

[intellitech]

Could this cause another 'millennium Bug' fiasco?

Y2K was a much different situation [wikipedia.org], one which had absolutely nothing to do with such concepts as "daylight savings," "summer time," and the like. Y2K was caused by silly computer abbreviation of dates, and while DST [wikipedia.org] can cause timekeeping bugs, it's unlikely to cause a worldwide meltdown.

I would also like to point out that these things are much more likely to break down the more frequently you change them..

BAU

[isorox]

Could this cause another 'millennium Bug' fiasco?"

If it happened tomorrow? It would cause a few problems. If it happens in March? Probably enough time to fix it. If it happens in October or later, no problem. There's usually somewhere in the rest of the world changes their DST policies on a yearly basis -- I believe parts of the U.S. changed in the last year or two.

It's an OS patch which you wouldn't even notice, a new tzdata file or similar.

Not if the computer's Unix-ish

[Max Hyre]

Unix & friends use a file or set of files with daylight-saving time changes; it's updated everytime somebody changes things. In Debian, it's in the tzdata package, described thus:

This package contains data required for the implementation of standard local time for many representative locations around the globe. It is updated periodically to reflect changes made by political bodies to time zone boundaries, UTC offsets, and daylight-saving rules.

Every time (*ahem*) some gov't tweaks the rules, the new info is encoded, and the updated package is sent out. Note that the superseded info is retained, so that if you ask about a time in 1974 in New York City, it'll adjust correctly for the idiotic Nixonian ``let's all go to work in the dark'' time.

Debian's files live under /usr/share/zoneinfo, and amount to a bit over 6MB of data.

It's been done before

[Max Hyre]

During WW II, Britain adopted Double Summer Time [wikipedia.org], skipping ahead two hours. It reverted to one hour after the war (modulo some funkiness a year or so later).

Re:Not in England

[garyok]

"United Kingdom" (a country) "England" (a province)

So very wrong. United Kingdom = state. England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland = countries. Ulster (Northern Ireland + 3 counties in Eire) = province. Great Britain (or just Britain as we're not so big-headed these days) = England + Scotland + Wales + islands (but not Northern Ireland, and definitely not Eire). Nationality of a UK subject - as we're subjects of the Crown rather than citizens of the state - is British.

Hope this clears up the confusion.

Re:*Ka-Ching* Mate!

[LordKronos]

That is indeed a possible reason for the change. Tinkering with time conversion algorithms were in the past also attributed to the economy stimulus it would give the IT sector.

Wonderful. So can we count on the next proposal to be sending someone around to bust out everybody's windows, so that we get an economic stimulus in the window industry? And I think the car tire industry could use a stimulus, so what do you think we could do about that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window [wikipedia.org]

Re:Wow, who wrote this summary?

[theCoder]

The Wikipedia page lists some studies, but I find this one most revealing:

A 2008 study examined billing data in Indiana before and after it adopted DST in 2006, and concluded that DST increased overall residential electricity consumption by 1% to 4%, due mostly to extra afternoon cooling and extra morning heating; the main increases came in the fall. The overall annual cost of DST to Indiana households was estimated to be $9 million, with an additional $1.7-5.5 million for social costs due to increased pollution.

There may be benefits to DST, but DST does not save energy, one of the original arguments for DST.

Keep in mind, the main purpose of DST is to get people up earlier in the morning so that they don't waste that daylight. People are used to getting to work/school by some set time, say 8 AM. If you told them that in the summer, they had to get to work/school by 7 AM, even though they could leave an hour earlier, most people would balk. But if you tell them that 7 AM is really 8 AM, they don't seem to have any problem, and they'll happily go along with it.

Now, maybe it's easier to just redefine the hours of the day this way than having different schedules for winter and summer months. Lots of people are easily confused by time, and changing your clocks is a one time event, then everything else is "normal." I do find it humorous that people like to keep this convenient fiction, though. If we never had DST and someone proposed it, I think most people would find it ridiculous. But since most people have done it all their life, it's just what we do in the spring and fall (and they think that places that don't do it are somehow backwards and wrong). Just a matter of perspective, I guess.

Re:Wow, who wrote this summary?

[Dragonslicer]

In the USA, there are 3 time zones

There are four time zones in the continental United States: Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific. Alaska and Hawaii are each in different time zones as well.

Re:Never touch a running system?

[jc42]

It's no secret that France has long wanted the Meridian to pass through Paris, where other items that define weights and measure reside, so they can all be in one (*ahem* French *ahem*) place. Once we don't use Greenwich Mean Time the next step will be for France to re-name Paris as "Greenwich", ...

Heh. Apparently the French (and probably a lot of Brits, too) haven't heard that GMT hasn't been used for a quarter century now. The Greenwich Observatory got out of the time standard business back in 1986 (google it), when the official time standard was redefined in a way that wasn't dependent on any place or artifact, and renamed "UTC". Since then, "GMT" has been nothing more than a mispelling of "UTC", usually by someone who doesn't understand the difference.

Actually, if you visit the Greenwich Observatory, you'll find that they do have a nice museum exhibit of the history of their time standard, as well as a number of other good exhibits. It's well worth spending a day of your vacation there. Or visit their nice web site (www.nmm.ac.uk [nmm.ac.uk]).