UK Government Wants to Spring Ahead Two Hours 554
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? (Score:5, Informative)
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..
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Maybe programmers in the UK are accustomed to assuming that localtime always equals UTC.
Re:Wow, who wrote this summary? (Score:5, Funny)
I doubt it, since they would find themselves fired within 6 months.
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Maybe idiots in the UK are accustomed to assuming that localtime always equals UTC.
FTFY.
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I think they're wanting BST to be GMT+2 (Ie, CEST) and Normal time to be GMT + 1 (Ie, CET)
we would, basically, be moving to Central European Time.
However, this can be vetoed by the Scottish Parliment. I hope it does, or else we'll be having dawn at 9am during winter.
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I hope it does, or else we'll be having dawn at 9am during winter.
It's presumably only talking about changing Summer time. IIRC useful daylight in summer is usually from around 5AM to maybe 10:30PM, so this would change our daylight from 6-11:30. That would be pretty cool.
Re:Wow, who wrote this summary? (Score:4)
I think they're wanting BST to be GMT+2 (Ie, CEST) and Normal time to be GMT + 1 (Ie, CET) we would, basically, be moving to Central European Time.
However, this can be vetoed by the Scottish Parliment. I hope it does, or else we'll be having dawn at 9am during winter.
I agree - this should never get off the drawing board. Basically it takes as an assumption that nobody does anything useful in the morning before work. Some of us happen to like the extra hours of daylight in the morning before work because it gives us a chance to go for a run, or work on our own projects or fit in a decent breakfast or whatever.
Most of us wake up more easily and naturally with the daylight than before sunrise, so Summer means extra time and energy for us. The UK government seems to think that's free productivity that they can tap into for the sake of its economy.
Re:Wow, who wrote this summary? (Score:4, Funny)
It still pisses me off that Fedora Linux does not recognise "Edinburgh" as a capital when selecting the TZ during installation but it does recognise USA state capitals.
Have you raised a bug [redhat.com] about it? Thought about submitting a patch? Or are you just going to stay getting angry about it?
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Re:Wow, who wrote this summary? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Never touch a running system? (Score:2)
I would also like to point out that these things are much more likely to break down the more frequently you change them.
I think that sums it up best . . .
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I would also like to point out that these things are much more likely to break down the more frequently you change them.
I think that sums it up best . . .
OTOH, if people changed these things more frequently, things in general would become less likely to break down, because everyone would become more accustomed to it. We would then be able to relegate those people who allow it to break down to the same caste we today relegate the "what do you mean someone can insert random SQL in my obviously numeric GET parameter?!" people. They would still exist, but nobody would really pay attention to their screams :)
Re:Never touch a running system? (Score:4, Informative)
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]).
Re:Wow, who wrote this summary? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow, who wrote this summary? (Score:5, Informative)
The Wikipedia page lists some studies, but I find this one most revealing:
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.
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The more change the better (Score:3)
The rules for starting and ending U.S. daylight saving time and British Summer Time are both set by legislation and have changed several times [wikipedia.org]. Hard coding them into software is a serious mistake. The only safe way to deal with DST is to maintain a lookup table for the specific dates each year or a list of the years when the rules changed, and update these tables regularly. The more often the rules change, the more incentive people will have to adopt appropriate practice, rather than encrusting their softwa
It might cause an alarm clock fiasco (Score:2)
Re:It might cause an alarm clock fiasco (Score:5, Funny)
And the extra sunlight fades my curtains faster...
Re:It might cause an alarm clock fiasco (Score:5, Interesting)
I can predict a worse outcome for the economy than people simply not being at work early. We currently get 3 hours of overlap with the (east coast) americans in a work day – they don't really want to have meetings absolute first thing, and we don't really want to have one last thing... This would give us only 2 hours overlap and compound the cross-atlantic communication problem.
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Isn't that a passing problem?
This because it looks like the US is declining and China is rising.
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The real benefit is that at long last we will be sharing Berlin Time with the rest of Europe.
Except those other parts of Europe that are not on Berlin time.
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It's OK though, their excuse will be they have to spend 30% of their working day employed by apple ;)
BAU (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:BAU (Score:5, Funny)
There's usually somewhere in the rest of the world changes their DST policies on a yearly basis
That place usually seems to be somewhere in Argentina. For some reason, messing with exact timezone rules seems to be a national pastime there.
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They're trying to creep closer to the Falkland Islands?
Cheers
D
Why no skipp falling back (Score:2)
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That's the plan for the winter, but they want the summer time to still be pushed further forward. So, we'll be in UTC+1 for the winter, UTC+2 for the summer, instead of UTC and UTC+1. This means more sunshine in the evening, when I'm awake, and less in the morning, when I'm asleep, so I'm in favour of it. We play ultimate frisbee from about 5:30 in the afternoon during the summer, but we have to stop as soon as the clocks change, because we've run out of daylight, even if it's not raining (improbable, bu
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I don't know why businesses who want to just change their standard business hours to 8-16 instead. This is the case in other northern countries (Denmark, Sweden) AFAIK.
Personally, I'll be annoyed as I think midday should be when the sun's above us, at least for part of the year. Though if it pisses off the Daily Mail (and readers) I'm in favour.
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So, we'll be in UTC+1 for the winter, UTC+2 for the summer, instead of UTC and UTC+1.
Isn't there some fundamental irony here? I mean, UTC is based on GMT [wikipedia.org]. This proposal is intended to fundamentally shift the time zone away from the meridian that was originally defined... by the UK... that runs right through the UK.
The prime meridian is completely arbitrary, but out of the whole world, the UK was allowed to choose it and then base GMT/UTC from it. The more interesting implication is that this proposal is an effort to ensure your "noon" is no longer ever defined as the point when the sun i
It's not just England... (Score:5, Funny)
... it's the whole of the UK. Otherwise, you'd have to adjust your clocks when you drive from one country to another.
I wouldn't expect you Mexicans to know that though.
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I don't read the summary as England-specific, just that the suggestion originated there (in gov?). No reason to get upset.
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To be fair, the Scots are reportedly opposed to the proposals because of how dark it'll make their mornings...it does seem fairly England-led. (Some of England, at least - I'm not at all in favour.)
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I don't want it and I live in the south of England...
meh (Score:3)
Probably not a big deal. Time just isn't that important. For instance the iPhones have screwed up simple time shifts multiple times, and noone seems that concerned about it.
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Summary: no need to crate a technological solution, just get up and go to work earlier!
Why is it that the people who oppose the clocks changing always come up with this "solution".
If you don't like the clocks changing then just go to work an hour later in summer or earlier in winter.
Most of the rest of us have jobs that are tied to wall time. In fact that's WHY the clocks change so that everyone who needs to changes together.
I've worked with people who are able to and do work "dawn to dusk", "making up" the
Re:meh (Score:4, Interesting)
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Just, you know, some of us don't want to go to work in the dark.
Just, you know, some of use don't like going to work AND coming home from work in the dark.
what on Earth is wrong with living in a time zone that reflects your physical location on the globe?
The working day is wrong. 9-5 gives three hours before noon and 5 hours after. Making solar noon 1pm wall time makes the working day symmetrical.
A 9-5:30 day which is common makes it even worse.
So make it 1 hour difference in winter when there are few dayli
*Ka-Ching* Mate! (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the only economy this would stimulate would be the one involving IT Consultants.
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
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There's no need to tinker with time conversion algorithms. They're not introducing new time zones, they're just moving to the same time zone most of the rest of Europe uses. All that it needs is an update changing GB->GMT/BST to GB->CET/CEST. Any software that knows about time zones will already know about CET and CEST. The only programs that are likely to have a problem are ones that hard code the mapping from locales to time zones.
They keep talking about tourism when they mention stimulus, and
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The main reason given for doing it is to make the journey to and from school/work safer by having more usable daylight. It was tried in the 70s and worked very well, but some farmers objected and somehow got their way.
There are two options on the table at the moment. We could go to GMT+1 with DST as well (so GMT+2 when DST is in effect) or we could just stick with GMT+1 all year. I would prefer the latter and it works well enough in much larger countries like Japan that span multiple time zones.
Re:*Ka-Ching* Mate! (Score:4, Informative)
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]
Darker mornings (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA:
Putting the clocks forward by an hour to British Summer Time +1 (equivalent to Greenwich Mean Time +2) would mean lighter evenings in the summer months, but darker mornings.
Am I the only one who feels utterly miserable going to work in the pitch dark, where the first light of the day I see is the fluorescent tubes above my cubicle?
Re:Darker mornings (Score:4, Interesting)
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I'm the opposite, as in I'd happily trade darker mornings for the opportunity to come home and be able to do more outdoors in the evening.
It just seems silly to me that it's dark by 4pm.
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Quite a few people find it depressing leaving work several hours after the sun has gone down. Can't please everyone!
Right. In winter, I go to work before sunrise and leave after sunset, which is pretty depressing. Then again, in summer I go to sleep before sunset and wake up after sunrise, which is pretty nice.
(I live in Finland, little over 62 degrees North. In mid-winter there's about 4 hours between sunrise and sunset; in midsummer, 20 hours. Here, shifting the clocks for daylight savings never made any real sense, except in synchronizing schedules with other countries. Today, it makes little sense anywhere, and it'd
Two? Just two?! (Score:5, Funny)
If you think THAT will help the economy, we're gonna spring forward FIVE FUCKING HOURS [theonion.com]. Just think of the unwarranted extrapolations!
5 hours ruins last-call (Score:3)
5 hours would be daylight again? You mean I would have to look at that last-call score in the daylight? No thanks!
"See you later honey, catch me again on standard time."
England != UK. (Score:5, Funny)
England != UK. Can you lot in the United States of Florida PLEASE try to learn this.
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Given that the proposal only applies to England and the article actually discussees the government's issues with keeping the move unified across the UK, the summary is totally accurate.
Already mostly solved (Score:3)
With the DST changes that Congress mandated a few years ago, I think most commercial and Open Source OS's could adapt to this change easily.
Since we're no longer bound by Railroad timetables, especially in the UK, the concept of standard time and the time zones truly becomes much more localized. What I fear is one day cities will adopt their own time zones rather than regionally. Wouldn't that be fun? It would be like George Carlin's gag.
"In Baltimore it's 6:42, time for the 11 o'clock report."
Even further ahead (Score:2)
I think the bigger impact for some people will be being even further ahead of the US in terms of timezone. At the moment 5 hours is okay, I work with people in the Middle East, Europe, UK and the east coast, from the UK and this is manageable at the moment. I don't start work until about 9 and then work till about 7 or 8 if needed. This gives me a good amount of overlap with everyone. If this goes ahead then I'm going to be have to work later into the evenings sometimes, just negating the increase in outsid
Not if the computer's Unix-ish (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Oops---misparented (Score:2)
DST (Score:2)
Not going to happen (Score:5, Interesting)
Man, this again? We get this from the english MPs every other week. This is the same ol' same ol' with a slight variation of +2 in the summer and +$unknown in the winter. ;-)
For the Nth time, this is not going to happen, the rest of the UK wont agree to it. Scotland is much further north than its mild weather would suggest, and when this was tried shortly after the second world war it was an unmitigated disaster. It was dark till lunchtime in the winter in the Shetland Isles, for little gain in the evening in the summer. And remember we almost have 24 hour daylight in Scotland in the summer, we dont need an extra hours daylight at 3am. And neither we, the Northern Irish, nor the Welsh care if it's dark in England 24 hours-a-day all year round
Every time the government changes and the Conservatives get in they start going on about this. The 'Tories' are an english party, and in England it gets dark at 10pm in the summer. Boo-hoo. It gets dark in Spain at 9pm in the summer, but they are out having beers till 3am. In England everyone is in their beds at 10pm, what do you want an extra hour of light for? Why do you want it to be light while you are asleep or in your house watching cricket and drinking warm beer or whatever it is you guys do? Especially if it's raining. I may be scottish but I've never seen so much rain as I have in Oxfordshire. No wonder you like your boats, you need them.
It's not your timezone you want to change, it's your culture. You want to enjoy your evenings more? Get out more, talk to people in bars without waiting for a formal introduction. It doesnt have to be light outside to have a good time.
Fecking sassenachs. The next time you bring this up we're cutting your power and water.
I may be scottish and as such slighty biased
Not just you scots (Score:4, Interesting)
Its not just you scots who don't want it, plenty of us english arn't too happy either!
I don't much care if its dark when I drive home from work , I'm already awake and have lots of coffee inside me. What I DONT want is it pitch black first thing in the morning when I'm half asleep trying to drive down dark roads with kids trying to get to school crossing said dark roads.
Why the fuck our politicians want this I have no idea. We're more north west than all of the rest of western europe bar ireland which means the time our sun rises and sets bares little resemblence to what happens in germany 500 miles east or france 200 miles south.
Also , can someone explain whats the point of a clock if it doesn't give at least a rough approximation of the real time?
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I completely agree. This stuff makes my blood boil, and the mainstream media only ever put the "let's move clocks forward" side of the story, as if nobody opposed it. Leave my fucking GMT *ALONE*!
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Umm , midday is the middle of the day - ie when the sun it at its zenith, mid night is equidistant between 2 middays.
I know its all a bit confusing for the hard of thinking who confuse the units of time with actual time. HTH.
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I think you'll find plenty of English people don't want them to change it either.
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Who cares? We shouldn't be fucking about with the clocks - stick them at GMT, and whoever it is that's complaining that they don't like going to work in the dark, then go to work an hour later.
Stop trying to change the time because you can't be arsed to schedule properly. Time isn't meant to be changed.
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I know this might be a bit a radical - but you could always get your lazy arse out of bed earlier and so finish work earlier!
Yeah , I know , what a crazy idea!
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Most companies offer flexitime now with reason. Who do you work for, Scrooge & Sons?
1940 (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, the UK, where reinventing the wheel is a daily occurrence!
However, given the British obsession with world war two, this may be an appropriate move - it will be like returning to 1940-1945, when they had "double summer time", mainly so people could work in their gardens, growing vegetables, after they got home from work. Somehow, i don't think this is what they'll be using the extra hour of evening daylight for this time round though - it will be simply an excuse to get more drunk in the evening (if that's possible).
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I remember it. But i'm not sure you do! It was British Standard Time - 1 hour ahead of GMT all year round - which brought the UK in line with nearby European mainland countries.
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I'm not quite old enough to remember it; I do remember putting localtime(0) in a test case once though, and spending ages wondering why it didn't give the expected results.
Two hours? Boring! Try 2:37 (hours : minutes) (Score:3)
That should totally screw people up and result in total confusion.
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Re:Two hours? Boring! Try 2:37 (hours : minutes) (Score:5, Funny)
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Of course it will cause problems (Score:3)
The Australian government likes to mess with the day light offset for sporting events and I think they gave everyone a whole 5 weeks advanced notice a few years back. You get to the point where you just tell computer clocks to keep a common offset and then go change it twice a year.
There are some master time zone files that can be found here:
ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/ [nih.gov]
On Unix like system you can run a command like # zic australasia (or whatever zone is messed up.. or just run them all).
Then things should work.
Here is a script I wrote up to test this sort of nonsense about half a decade ago....
http://www.abnormal.com/~thogard/timezone.shtml [abnormal.com]
Yawnnn.... (Score:2)
Why dont everyone just switch to metric time and get it over with :|
It's been done before (Score:4, Informative)
Screws up transatlantic business (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a UK taxpayer and I conduct a lot of business with the US west coast. Presently, we're 8 hours apart for most of the year, and that means that I can *just barely* squeeze in a conference call with Californian colleagues (I'm co-owner of boingboing.net and all my partners are in LA and San Francisco) and still get out of the office in time to get my daughter from day-care and get home for dinner.
If the timezone difference goes to 9 hours, I'm buggered. The additional hour will have a direct, negative impact on my net income, as it will either require me to participate less in these transatlantic ventures (for example, it would probably mean no more freelance assignments for US editors, all of which generate UK taxes) or hire expensive babysitters to fetch the kid from day-care (something I also would rather not do for sentimental reasons having nothing to do with the economy).
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also it makes no difference to anything.
businesses can already - and do - adjust their timetables accordingly, you know that plenty of people already leave to work at 6 am and plenty already leave for work at 10am.
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It's a conference call... why can't you just leave work at 16:00 or 16:30 to pick up your kids, and join the call from your house at 17:00 or 17:30 ? What difference is it if you join from your home or office?
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For example, could you possibly leave work an
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The City of London won't like it for similar reasons.
Various exchanges open at 07:00 around the world, local time. Which gives London a 1 hour edge on the rest of Europe for trading.
Combine that with your observations on scheduling, and the fact that we speak English, and you've got the three reasons as to why London is treated as the "gateway to Europe" by many businesses.
Get rid of that, and you have to ask why you wouldn't just deal through somewhere like Madrid...
Embedded Controls will have a problem with this (Score:2)
It may not be a problem for high end hardware, but lower end embedded controls with real-time clocks often use hard coded DST algorithms. For example the EU has defined standard DST dates for years in advance, these change-over dates are often hard coded into low-end devices, but with a default +1 advance. This allows a simple hardcoded table to be added to the hardware without the need for any user configuration, other than setting the initial time and date. Short sighted perhaps, but the reality is that t
Why stop at 2 hours? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean if our politicians really don't see why clocks should tell a good approximation of the actual time why just 2 hours? Why not move them forward 12 hours and then it can be dark while we work but we'll have a nice bright nighttime for all those whingers to go out and have their cappucinos at 11pm or whatever the hell it is they want to do in the light late at night.
Sorry , but I don't see the point of daylight saving AT ALL. Contrary to what some morons seem to believe we (surprise!) don't get an extra hour of daylight. The real problem isn't the time, its the fact that the working day is spread unevenly around midday. If everyone started work at 8am and finished at 4pm then this wouldn't be an issue. If you really need the extra light in the evenings get up earlier - thats all you're doing anyway when the clocks go forward!
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http://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/russia-winter-time.html [timeanddate.com] :
"I have made a decision to cancel the move back to 'winter' time starting from autumn this year", Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday, February 8, 2011. The new legislation eliminates the yearly switch between standard time and daylight saving time.
I totally agree, and I love the fact that Russia just "did it". Maybe other European countries won't be so scared if they can follow the lead instead of taking charge themselves so that we can finally end the nonsense.
Oh and by the way I live in Norway, were DST has a pretty strong effect on the sunlight. Just about every autumn the DST is discussed in the media, because people are so sick and tired of messing up their day rhythm. We don't care a
Trying to wake me up one hour earlier ... (Score:3)
... will not make me trust the currency.
A little better for Bangalore (Score:3)
The families of Indian call centre employees will be happier - it means that their sons and daughters will be one hour less from the rest of India. If the UK were to be so generous to go +5.30 onto Indian time, even better
This will cause computer system problems (Score:2)
I recently worked on a trading system that had 50 columns for the half-hours in a day, to accommodate the long day when the clocks go back. So if this happens, they have 6 months or so to expend it to 52 columns and to make sure all the clock changing logic still works with a two hour change. I thought they were considering year-round daylight savings - maybe we will go forward two hours then back only one, and then stabilize at those UTC offsets, so our clocks then match CET. I bet a lot of Europhobes will
we have Daylight Savings TIme, and it sucks! (Score:2)
it does not save anything and you do not get anymore sunlight.
Will not work, US tried it already (Score:2)
This is the exact same BS reason that the US screwed around daylight savings time, with the misguided idea that it would somehow save energy.
These kinds of things might have mattered 50 years ago, but they simply do not in today's 24/7 economy. If people want to shop, they will go out and shop, they won't stay home because it is dark outside.... heck they would just shop online anyway.
The idea that somehow giving an extra our of daylight is going to have any noticeable impact on a national economy is ridicu
Now that I have a toddler... (Score:3)
"It's time for night night"
"Why?"
"It's night time"
"No it's not" *Points a light still pouring through window*
"grrrr"
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But it does give me more USABLE daylight.
Currently, for five months of the year it's dark when I leave the house in the morning and it's dark when I get home at night.
There's no time more depressing than end October when the clocks go back. I've spent the previous few weeks going to work in the dark. Now I get to see the sun coming up on my way in (really useful NOT!) and I know I won't see the Sun in the evening until the clocks change again.
Moving the clocks by an hour will give me a brief interval in the
Re:Not in England (Score:5, Informative)
"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.