• (cs)

    I had to support an application on 1/1/2000 that at first appeared to have a Y2K bug. Then it turned out that it had been in production for less than a year, and that it would've had that bug on the first day of any new year, not just Y2K.

    Also, anybody else have applications that gave trouble on 9/9/01 when the number of seconds since the epoch went from 9 decimal digits to 10?

  • (cs) in reply to sjs
    sjs:
    Clearly you don't live an area where DST is needed. Without DST it would get light at 10-11am here in the winter and dark at about 3-4pm. Screw that!

    I live in an area where it gets dark at 4pm in the winter (gets light a bit earlier than 11am) AND we have DST... Hmmm oh wait thats right DST kicks in during the summer.

  • (cs) in reply to Drocket
    Drocket:

    I understand the concept: I just don't understand what's so difficult about going to bed an hour earlier without having to screw around with the clock for everyone. Is there some sort of law that farmers have to go to bed at exactly 10PM, and the only way to get them in bed earlier/later is to change time for everyone?

    Yes.

    The farm act of 1895 requires that farmers in Canada go to bed at 10pm. What was happening before that was rampant abuse of the farming subsidy. It's based on the hours worked and the goods produced, so farmers would stay up for days or weeks at a time tending their farms. It caused an incredible number of accidents. Saskatchewan became known as "Canada's beheading basket."

    Their US counterparts decreed that the Canadian example was a good one, and in 1897 Congress passed a law that mandated all farmers in the US must be in bed by 10pm. The farmer's lobby said that they were wasting daylight time in the summer months, so Congress passed the Daylight Savings bill in 1899. This meant that the farmers would still have to go to bed at 10pm, but they could use the full daylight time during the summer.

    Recent interpretations of the act in both the US and Canada have been used to prevent farmers from going to bed before 10pm. Current litigation is pending before the Supreme Court of Canada and the US Court of Appeals.

    No, seriously, here's DST in three lines:

    1. Trains required standardized time zones to plan routes.
    2. War with Germany, use less oil in the summer.
    3. Pretend that we're contributing in 2007.

    And here's DST explained in one line:

    1. Everyone else does it, and if you're an hour late for work for six months, you're fired.

    As Dave Barry said, "You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time."

  • (cs) in reply to noehch
    noehch:
    sol:
    Aren't we aproaching a y2kish day here on the 11th?
    Yep...Mar 11 - Nov 4 (http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/daylight_time.html).

    I can understand the "threat" to servers--mostly in generating logs. But, the worst possible effect: you're off an hour for 3 weeks. My, personal, viewpoint...

    [cue annoyingly sarcastic tone] ...ewww...scary...

    [EDIT] The keyword in this would be "personal" (i.e. home computer).

    Or, for those of us in the financial industry (you know, they guys who write the code on which your IRA and 401(k) gets traded?), it might just cause your trade on the global markets to be priced an hour later/earlier, depending upon the context. The brokerages will probably wind up eating a lot of the price discrepencies, and ultimately, it will be a big wash, but anyone who's not saavy enough to check the actual prices might get burned.

  • (cs) in reply to Drocket
    Drocket:
    jessica:
    It's completely outdated now as we use artificial light during the day since we're not all farmers, but how can you not understand the concept?

    I understand the concept: I just don't understand what's so difficult about going to bed an hour earlier without having to screw around with the clock for everyone. Is there some sort of law that farmers have to go to bed at exactly 10PM, and the only way to get them in bed earlier/later is to change time for everyone?

    None of the farmers I know give a rat's ass about DST; neither do they set their schedules by the clock. They work when the light's good for workin'.

    DST was not created for farmers. It was created for urbanites. Franklin's "Economical Project" essay was conceived in Paris and used the city as its hypothetical example; nowhere does it mention farming. Willett - who was arguably more influential than Franklin on the matter - was also inspired primarily by urban considerations, and he doesn't mention farming in "Waste of Daylight" either.

    Industrial societies live by the clock. Agricultural ones, broadly speaking, do not.

    In any case, the arguments for DST are weak. In Franklin's day, and even in Willett's, there was some plausibility to the energy-saving arguments (which, contra Jessica above, are based on using artificial light). These days, in industrial societies, lighting is a small component of total energy use. The 1975 US DOT study that reported net energy savings due to DST is widely regarded as suspect and in any case no longer relevant, thanks to the much greater use today of always-on equipment and HVAC.

    In fact, some people have suggested that there's a net penalty to DST because of greater air-conditioning use in the workplace during the hours of full occupancy. DST tends to push the full-occupancy period for business-day offices into the hottest part of the day, which means more energy is consumed for cooling.

    Personally, I'm hoping for enough of a backlash in the US just from people annoyed that their VCRs no longer switch on the correct dates that Markey and Upton - the idiots who pushed this latest change through Congress - get kicked out on their asses. (That's one Democrat and one Republican, so parity is maintained. And Markey's pretty stunningly dumb even for a Congressman, particularly on security issues, so no loss to the Democrats there.)

    -- Michael Wojcik

  • (cs) in reply to themagni
    themagni:
    No, seriously, here's DST in three lines: 1. Trains required standardized time zones to plan routes. 2. War with Germany, use less oil in the summer. 3. Pretend that we're contributing in 2007.

    And here's DST explained in one line:

    1. Everyone else does it, and if you're an hour late for work for six months, you're fired.

    How does 1 explain DST? We have standardized time zones WITHOUT DST. Who uses oil in the summer? We've had DST way before 2007

    Ane no, everyone else didn't do it. I never participated in DST until a few years ago (although it was a pain, the entire non prime time tv schedule would shift an hour twice a year)

  • (cs)

    Here in Arizona, we don't care. :S

    Also, what's up with this?

    The DST problems are a "bug" now? Unlike Y2K, this one actually isn't the fault of design oversight or a glitch, it's people deciding to shift the rules on us. :P

  • (cs) in reply to chrismcb
    chrismcb:
    themagni:
    No, seriously, here's DST in three lines: 1. Trains required standardized time zones to plan routes. 2. War with Germany, use less oil in the summer. 3. Pretend that we're contributing in 2007.

    And here's DST explained in one line:

    1. Everyone else does it, and if you're an hour late for work for six months, you're fired.

    How does 1 explain DST? We have standardized time zones WITHOUT DST. Who uses oil in the summer? We've had DST way before 2007

    Ane no, everyone else didn't do it. I never participated in DST until a few years ago (although it was a pain, the entire non prime time tv schedule would shift an hour twice a year)

    Agreed on 1. DST being observed in some places and not others creates more confusion for schedules than less.

    On 2, I think he meant winter.

    On 3, I think he meant that it makes us feel like we're contributing to the environment by using less power to generate artificial light during the dark periods. Which is why he says "pretend we're contributing..."

    And you're right. DST isn't observed everywhere. It's so frustrating to code around. When it is observed it's on different dates all around the world.

  • onomatopoeia (unregistered) in reply to sjs
    sjs:
    Clearly you don't live an area where DST is needed. Without DST it would get light at 10-11am here in the winter and dark at about 3-4pm. Screw that!
    While I don't live an area affected by DST now, I certainly did. Most of my life I've lived in areas that had to change their clock twice a year, including some localities pretty far north. Personally, I didn't care for the sun setting at nearly Midnight thank you very much.
  • (cs) in reply to sjs
    Clearly you don't live an area where DST is needed. Without DST it would get light at 10-11am here in the winter and dark at about 3-4pm. Screw that!

    You'd rather have it light at midday, and dark at 1700?

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Saladin
    Saladin:
    The DST problems are a "bug" now? Unlike Y2K, this one actually isn't the fault of design oversight or a glitch, it's people deciding to shift the rules on us. :P
    What sort of poor excuse for a brain dead carrot works in software development and is still surprised when the rules get shifted? :)

    Besides, much like the Y2K bug, the real affect on average people would have been an anonymous server on the other side of the country throwing a fit - only because some equally anonymous person actually fixed the problem little (if anything) will actually happen, and many geniuses will take that as proof that the server shouldn't have been fixed in the first place.

    Also, the DST bug is mostly going to affect time display and buggy applications - because most good software uses ye olde UCT (aka GMT) and only converts to local time for display. Well, ok, that doesn't cover every case - but it covers a whole pile of software, which has no need to care about when DST happens.

  • (cs)

    Here's a solution. Everyone switches to one time zone (GMT would suffice). Then it doesn't matter what the little numbers on the clock say. People in Michigan work from 10:00 to 19:00. People in Idaho work from 13:00 to 22:00. People in Egypt work from 2:00 to 11:00. Whatever it may be. The farmers can work from sunrise to sunset (plus or minus an hour). Sunrise and sunset change from day to day, but if it's light that matters to them then it is the perfect standard.

    It would take a while to get used to but it would solve so many problems.

  • (cs) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    Here's a solution. Everyone switches to one time zone (GMT would suffice). Then it doesn't matter what the little numbers on the clock say. People in Michigan work from 10:00 to 19:00. People in Idaho work from 13:00 to 22:00. People in Egypt work from 2:00 to 11:00. Whatever it may be. The farmers can work from sunrise to sunset (plus or minus an hour). Sunrise and sunset change from day to day, but if it's light that matters to them then it is the perfect standard.

    It would take a while to get used to but it would solve so many problems.

    no No and NO! That would render the old song "Working 9 to 5" useless! We can't have that!

  • Weanie Geschtinko (unregistered)

    DST is silly. I have always said, let them move it one way or the other ONE HALF HOUR, and let's be done with it forver.

    I know some people that actually like sleeping "an extra hour" in the Fall - but nobody I know likes waking up "an hour earlier" in the Spring. At least, it keeps us employed.

    I lived in Germany when I was a teenager, and I certainly didn't miss DST at all. I think I will be moving to Arizona.

    Anyway, Twisti could have also done nothing at all - not even bother to open Access, and it wouldn't have mattered. He wouldn't have been fired.

  • (cs) in reply to webhamster
    webhamster:
    chrismcb:
    themagni:
    No, seriously, here's DST in three lines: 1. Trains required standardized time zones to plan routes. 2. War with Germany, use less oil in the summer. 3. Pretend that we're contributing in 2007.

    And here's DST explained in one line:

    1. Everyone else does it, and if you're an hour late for work for six months, you're fired.

    How does 1 explain DST? We have standardized time zones WITHOUT DST. Who uses oil in the summer? We've had DST way before 2007

    Ane no, everyone else didn't do it. I never participated in DST until a few years ago (although it was a pain, the entire non prime time tv schedule would shift an hour twice a year)

    Agreed on 1. DST being observed in some places and not others creates more confusion for schedules than less.

    On 2, I think he meant winter.

    On 3, I think he meant that it makes us feel like we're contributing to the environment by using less power to generate artificial light during the dark periods. Which is why he says "pretend we're contributing..."

    And you're right. DST isn't observed everywhere. It's so frustrating to code around. When it is observed it's on different dates all around the world.

    For 1, there weren't any time zones at all. Or thinking another way, every city had its own time zone. If you think localization is bad now, try syncing up a train schedule when you're going through 50 time zones and chronological order isn't guaranteed.

    For 2, yes, you're right. I meant winter.

    And for 3, yes, I meant "pretend", for the reason put more eloquently by you.

    UTC for the win. I forced my old place to use UTC for a GPS tracking system. They wanted timezones, but I told them that if we just used UTC, we could power up a collar anywhere in the world and it would know exactly when and where it was.

    For some reason, the NMEA strings don't output the timezone. They're supposed to.

    (Don't blame me, I wanted to switch to UTC -7.5 and keep it there.)

  • Dick Sudmeier (unregistered) in reply to Will

    In the EU DST starts March 25 at 100h, Ends Oct 28 at 100h in 2007

  • Lihtox (unregistered)

    I've heard the arguments for DST, but I haven't heard anyone explain why we should bother to switch off DST for a few months every year. Let's just stay on DST all year and be done with it. (The half-hour compromise would be a pain in converting to/from GMT.)

  • (cs)

    I should mention that even though we in Arizona don't shift our clocks, it creates a whole host of other annoyances that the rest of the country doesn't have to deal with. Such as when I'm given a time (in PST, EST, or whatever), I have to recall whether it's currently DST or not and know how much to adjust by. During the winter, we're in the MST time zone, basically. During the summer, we're in the equivalent of PDT.

    It's not usually a big deal, but when making out-of-state phone calls I have to recall what time difference we're effectively shifted to at this time of year, as well as noting dates and times for anything that occurs on a global level such as web-based events or live TV things.

  • (cs)

    The real WTF is how this DST is implemented.

    How about, instead of changing clocks, JUST CHANGE THE HOURS WE WORK. Call it "Summer hours" and "Winter hours".

    Winter Hours : 9AM - 6PM (November - February) Summer Hours : 8AM - 5PM (March - October)

    Or something similiar. Why deal with all this clock changing crap. Yeesh. WTF.

  • (cs) in reply to CodeRage
    CodeRage:
    The real WTF is how this DST is implemented.

    How about, instead of changing clocks, JUST CHANGE THE HOURS WE WORK. Call it "Summer hours" and "Winter hours".

    Winter Hours : 9AM - 6PM (November - February) Summer Hours : 8AM - 5PM (March - October)

    Or something similiar. Why deal with all this clock changing crap. Yeesh. WTF.

    Why move the molehill when you can move the continent underneath it?

  • James Schend (unregistered)

    As Dave Barry said, "You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time."

    The reason is obvious.

    "We are Congress! We are mighty and powerful! Look as we control TIME ITSELF! Bow before us!"

    Seriously, I think the whole thing is a big congressional power-trip. Like when the government in "1984" would schedule war changes right in the middle of a huge parade.

  • morry (unregistered) in reply to CodeRage
    CodeRage:
    The real WTF is how this DST is implemented.

    How about, instead of changing clocks, JUST CHANGE THE HOURS WE WORK. Call it "Summer hours" and "Winter hours".

    Winter Hours : 9AM - 6PM (November - February) Summer Hours : 8AM - 5PM (March - October)

    Or something similiar. Why deal with all this clock changing crap. Yeesh. WTF.

    you're not making me get up an hour earlier for your obviously anarchist ideas.

  • dreadlocks (unregistered) in reply to Saladin
    Saladin:
    I should mention that even though we in Arizona don't shift our clocks, it creates a whole host of other annoyances that the rest of the country doesn't have to deal with. Such as when I'm given a time (in PST, EST, or whatever), I have to recall whether it's currently DST or not and know how much to adjust by. During the winter, we're in the MST time zone, basically. During the summer, we're in the equivalent of PDT.
    This isn't a problem with Arizona not observing DST. but rather with the rest of the world choosing to not be consistent. :P And another WTF is that certain parts of Arizona simultaneously observing and not observing DST.
  • (cs) in reply to anne
    anne:
    who's the guy in that picture? he's kind of cute!

    That'd be Wil Wheaton

  • TheJanitor (unregistered) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    Pegasus:
    akatherder:
    We all prefer to automate things, but it's not without it's own risks.

    You have heard of that thing call the 'test'. For the uninitiated it is a process used on a non-production system to verify your assumptions regarding how your application will work on a clone of the environment it will work in.

    The whole purpose of computing is to automate things that people do manually. Managing the risk, by test based development and various testing paradigms is what you should be doing as a developer. Ideally mitigating that risk would also mean having a rollback plan in the event your tests were incomplete (e.g. backup the database before doing the installation).

    Ok, give me access to one of the systems you work on. Then you plan a change and you can test for AS LONG AS YOU WANT. Somehow I bet your change just won't work when you try it for real :)

    Which is why you/we/everyone should strive to write idempotent scripts...

  • Benjamin Smith (unregistered) in reply to danodemano
    danodemano:
    sol:
    Aren't we aproaching a y2kish day here on the 11th?

    Yep, it's already causing massive IT headachs where I work. We are scrambling to get everything updated.

    captcha: scooter (comment not found!)

    Yeah, here to. I had to type this:

    yum -y update.

    7 times!!!

  • [twisti] (unregistered)

    Wow, my name on TDWTF, I feel so honored!

    As for the comments that I wouldn't have been fried anyways, thats true, it's almost impossible to fire someone during that specific year. However, they could have easily transfered me into the section where you spend your time cleaning beds and wiping up puke and blood from the floor.

  • (cs) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    Gotta love PHB incompetence.

    Better that than PHB incontinence, though.

  • [twisti] (unregistered) in reply to sol

    Oh, a minor correction, those office systems used NT4.0. I think the hospital had a ban on the 9x series or something of that sort. And one of my predecessors hid a copy of TIM (the incredible machine, a really old fun game) deep within the bowels of the Novell server, so it wasn't JUST minesweeper and freecell ;)

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to oldami
    oldami:
    Actually, it was a whole squadron of shiny new F22 Raptors on their way to a base in Japan. The nav systems all crashed. They had to visually follow the refueling tanker back to the US. Rather embarrising for a new multi million dollar jet. Some ones head should roll for this.

    CAPTCHA: cognac...no thanks, I prefer Scotch.

    Yeah, especially since this happened before with an F15 crossing the equator and promptly inverting.

  • Andrew (unregistered) in reply to Lihtox
    Lihtox:
    I've heard the arguments for DST, but I haven't heard anyone explain why we should bother to switch off DST for a few months every year. Let's just stay on DST all year and be done with it. (The half-hour compromise would be a pain in converting to/from GMT.)

    Think of the children!

    We don't want the kids walking to school in the dark all winter long, now do we?

  • Cabbage (unregistered)

    The real WTF is that guy's tie.

  • Chris (unregistered)

    The computers will all break this Sunday because of the daylight savings time change.

    And if you think that's bad, wait until the UNIX clock runs over in 2038. Of course, by then, the earth will have been destroyed by that asteroid...

  • Nathanael (unregistered)

    Daylight savings is meant to ensure that there is a greater interval of sunlight in your day - doing so by moving time around to suit your schedule.

    The same effect could be as easily achieved through simply adjusting your wake/sleep pattern, however DST is meant to ensure you aren't inconvenienced.

    Yep, right.

    So - who here doesn't have to adjust to DST?

    If you have to adjust, then DST failed for you.

    captcha: Dubya (fix it!)

  • B (unregistered)

    A small nitpick; I don't think Windows 95 included Freecell.

  • (cs) in reply to B
    B:
    A small nitpick; I don't think Windows 95 included Freecell.

    The hell it didn't.

    Addendum (2007-03-08 22:59): http://www.solitairelaboratory.com/fcfaq.html

  • doof (unregistered) in reply to sol

    Nooo - Ben proposed DST as a JOKE. a JOKE. It's the losers who took it seriously..

  • operagost (unregistered) in reply to sjs
    sjs:
    onomatopoeia:
    The Real WTF is DST! The rest of the world should follow Arizona's example (I guess there are a few other places that also don't change?) and just not do it!

    Honestly, I never understood how changing the time could be beneficial to anyone, including farmers.

    Clearly you don't live an area where DST is needed. Without DST it would get light at 10-11am here in the winter and dark at about 3-4pm. Screw that!

    Are you joking? I don't think the day's that short anywhere. And DST is for the SUMMER, not the winter!

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    A lot of people have been burned by automating things. You can test and practice all you want, then 10 minutes before "go time" someone changes an IP address or renames a column or does SOMETHING stupid that they shouldn't have done. The best case scenario is that your script just fails. The worst case is that half of it completes, the other half does something destructive, and the third half breaks the space time continuum along with all known knowledge of fractions.

    We all prefer to automate things, but it's not without it's own risks.

    Um..that's why we have backups. You DO backup everything before running update scripts, right?

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to onomatopoeia
    onomatopoeia:
    The Real WTF is DST! The rest of the world should follow Arizona's example (I guess there are a few other places that also don't change?) and just not do it!

    Honestly, I never understood how changing the time could be beneficial to anyone, including farmers.

    It was introduced during WWII so that people would start working an hour earlier, thus saving an hour of daylight in the evening for productive work. It's mostly useful for work outside, like construction or farming.

    Nowadays I think it's just a boss's excuse to get employees to come in an hour earlier.

  • Ebbe (unregistered) in reply to themagni
    themagni:
    KattMan:

    Actually maybe not. Considering this only affects dates that were saved and treated as dates you didn't have to worry about the field name itself. In an access application, forms are tied to a database table. So you read in a form, find the table it is attached to, scan the table for date fields read the mappings to find the form fields it is assigned to and you update. This is one of the things that Access made easy simply because of the strong coupling of it's UI with the data.

    That might work, unless the dates are stored internally with strings, then parsed out with internationalized formatting based on the XML configuration file.

    Wow! Did Access 97 really support XML?
  • Ebbe (unregistered)

    Actually, the Y10K problem has been solved. This is documented in RFC-2550, whic wou can see here:

    http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2550.txt

  • Dan (unregistered) in reply to jessica
    jessica:
    So, the D stands for Daylight. Daylight is beneficial to everyone because they have to use less energy to create artificial light. Waking up an hour earlier and going to bed an hour earlier for part of the year means you save on candles/oil/whatever energy source.

    It's completely outdated now as we use artificial light during the day since we're not all farmers, but how can you not understand the concept?

    the key is to simply wake up and get to work an hour early and leave an hour earlier.

    Why revolve "time" (the only constant 'element' in the world) around our living patterns?

  • (cs)

    Good story, esp. the happy ending :-) Since mandatory (army/)civil service is no longer required by law here in Czech rep, lots of guys will never experience the good long days of doing nothing but playing CS, AtomicBomberman, watching movies, or doing the private computer business during the "work hours". It was lovely. You see, lots of guys at civil service come from some kind of UNI so they were "used" in IT departments at hospitals, municipalities, schools, although it was explicitly forbidden by law to "be assigned to perform any kind of work other than manual auxiliary labour", which was the institution's responsibility so once you got into IT you could do virtualy anything. Yeah... good old days...

  • ur naim (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    CodeRage:
    The real WTF is how this DST is implemented.

    How about, instead of changing clocks, JUST CHANGE THE HOURS WE WORK. Call it "Summer hours" and "Winter hours".

    Winter Hours : 9AM - 6PM (November - February) Summer Hours : 8AM - 5PM (March - October)

    Or something similiar. Why deal with all this clock changing crap. Yeesh. WTF.

    Why move the molehill when you can move the continent underneath it?

    And why bother moving anything at all when it's not needed?

  • Timwi (unregistered)

    What is your problem with perfectly nice names like "Twisti"?

  • (cs) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Nowadays I think it's just a boss's excuse to get employees to come in an hour earlier.

    Yeah, but they get pawned when the employees leave an hour earlier too. Hehe.

  • (cs) in reply to Franz Kafka
    Franz Kafka:
    Yeah, especially since this happened before with an F15 crossing the equator and promptly inverting.
    Errm, no.

    This fault was found in F16 code and it was found during test in a simulated environment.

  • (cs) in reply to jessica
    jessica:
    So, the D stands for Daylight. Daylight is beneficial to everyone because they have to use less energy to create artificial light. Waking up an hour earlier and going to bed an hour earlier for part of the year means you save on candles/oil/whatever energy source.

    It's completely outdated now as we use artificial light during the day since we're not all farmers, but how can you not understand the concept?

    ... except some dudes here @ Mexico City wake up at 6am or earlier ... and waste more power because it's still dark outside.

    Then again, Mexico implemented DST to keep in synch with the USA, not because we need it. This DST change screwed up that idea.

    Ooooh ... and good thing they didn't change it here too, for it would be hell to work here if they had.

  • Will (unregistered) in reply to Franz Kafka
    Franz Kafka:
    Yeah, especially since this happened before with an F15 crossing the equator and promptly inverting.

    Wasn't there also a thing some years back with some Israeli planes having navigation trouble when they dropped below sea level?

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