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Admin
Ever heard of White Nights?? Some places up north ... veeeery north as in "I'm almost touching the arctic circle" have dismal differences on sunrise/sunset times. So, somewhere around the summer solstice, they get "white nights" .. that is, the sun doesn't set completely for some days ... i think its like a week.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Nights
That said, DST or no DST, daylight will be the same times in winter, as yot is standard time. ;)
Admin
Sure. You have to when you are dealing with a script that can wreak havoc on several components all in a single swoop.
Admin
CAPTCHA: pirates (how apt!)
Admin
Are you a nurse, by any chance?
capthca: onomatopoeia. Boing!
Admin
Actually it was introduced in World War One by the Germans. Now the Germans had a lot of good ideas, did a lot of great science and also did an empirical study on a society run by pure evil. DST was obviously a trial for the latter.
DST was not so musch invented by franklin, who suggested that parisians get up an hour earlier to save on candles. Willet made the case to the english, who absolutely refused. Of course, if Germany was going to do it, then they had to do it to.
I never bother adjusting my clocks to DST. I merely adjust my schedule to fit what the rest of the world wants. The semi-viable argument that it keeps more of your waking day in sunlight, which makes it 'nicer' is really bs. This is because where I live, either most of the day falls in the hours when i am working (dark when I get up, dark when I go home) or else there is enough light to go round. Those two days a year where I might have some benefit are not worth the trouble.
Admin
He's in an Irish boy band (westlife)
Admin
That reminds me of an application that used an array element per day for something or another (not mine, don't remember exactly for what). An array of 365, you know, since there's only 365 days in a year.
There was once an article in a programming mag about a kewl way to save space in programs and databases: store phone numbers in 32-bit ints, just flip the first two digits in the string representation, parse to an integer and there you go. That probably seemed like a good idea until they started handing out area codes with the middle digit greater than 1 shortly after that article came out. Not to mention that it only handled North American numbers in the first place because it didn't account for a country/region code.
Admin
Time change is all a conspiracy by Television advertisers. Gotta sell stuff to the farmers also...so, gotta keep em watching "prime TIME".
Tongue is firmly in cheek here.
Admin
The problem is that for over 20 years, the start/end if DST has been fixed, and a lot of devices have that coded in. The 'mini-y2k' is more of mass-confusion than anything else. Devices will be an hour off, people can't log in, TV shows won't be recorded at the right time, etc. All very minor things, but added together can be very inconvenient.
And the worst part is, people will update the time on their computers by changing the clock, rather than the timezone. End result is that the computer's view of UTC is skewed, which causes problems in itself. (Not a big deal, usually, except if you're writing files to fileservers and such which override the file times).
Another effect are things like scheduled meetings. You have a meeting scheduled at 9AM March 12. Now, depending on internal time storage, it may move to 10AM automatically (if stored as UTC) or not... interesting effects have been observed for back-to-back meetings including meeting rooms that are now double-booked, meetings where people are double-booked, etc.
The issue isn't y2k-potential devestation, it's more of a ton of minor inconveniences. Of course, the issue is that we "learned" from y2k since nothing happened, it's not worth investing the effort (basically, everyone worked hard so that nothing would happen - there are many tales of systems that would've disasterously failed had it not been actually fixed in time), and now DST patches are being rolled out last minute...
Admin
The fact that you can make computers work for you is a thing best kept secret among software engineers.
Admin
Because with DST I can actually leave work on time and make it to my son's baseball games. Without DST, the game would start too early for me to get there on time.
It's easier for the government to mandate a clock change than flex time....
Admin
I'm stunned by the number of self-proclaimed IT professionals asking, basically, what's the big deal. Poke you head out of your little patch of sand and look around.
Finally, I have to add - I love going on daylight savings. Granted it's an artifical boundary being arbitrarily shifted. In my case, my working hours are tied to the stock market being open. Daylight savings kicks in, I DO get an extra hour of daylight in the evening.
Admin
Let's all move one time zone to the East (or West) twice a year.
Or once, permanently, and be done with it.
Admin
Well, the problem does not occur on Unix systems, mainly on MSWindows systems, because MS thought they could make do with just one "DST start" rule and one "DST end" rule. I bet that that their "fix" messes up the start and end dates for all previous years, just like it did when they "fixed" the changed "summer time" rules in Europe (when we went from 6 to 7 months of "summer").
Admin
Speak for yourself.
Signed
A. Brit
Admin
As Dave Barry said, "You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time."
Oh, bullshit. I live in Toronto, Canada. Without DST, it gets light about 4:00 am in the morning, when everyone wants to sleep, and it gets dark about 8:00, when people want to be outdoors playing golf or softball or soccer.
DST keeps it dark when most of us are asleep, and light when we want to do more activies after work.
Admin
DST have nothing to do with winter time. Winter uses standard time.
DST is for people that insist on screwing with everyone else's time by adjusting the clock forward by 1 hour during the "summer" part of the year. BTW the biggest trading nation is China and they don't use stupid things like DST.
Admin
2 and 3 are reasonable impacts, although I would expect stock traders to be a bit more on the ball, what with there being most of a day to figure things out.
Admin
Admin
ObiWayneKenobi, Use the force ...