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Admin
I wonder what products they're selling that have a battery life of between 2–10 years. Probably something utilitarian like smoke detectors.
Admin
The last one is easy, those years must have had leap months.
Admin
I had a client once that had a similar "feature" listed for their IoT product. The difference was actually not hardware but mostly how quickly the cooling fan was spinning. So if you opted for a high battery life, you got an EPROM which ran your hardware dangerously hot - but multiple longer than the "normal" setting.
Admin
Lousy Smarch weather...
Admin
Melbourne is nominally 10 hours ahead of London, but when the eastern states in Australia are in Daylight Saving time and London is not, they are effectively 11 hours ahead.
Admin
As it looks like someone else noticed, London is on British Summer Time until the last Sunday of October. Melbourne IS UTC+11, but BST+10, so the RWTF is thinking the calculation here is incorrect.
Addendum 2026-10-23 12:53: And yes, Australian Eastern Daylight Time is currently in effect - Oct 4, 2026 through April 4 2027. So sometimes it's 10 hours different from London, sometimes 11 ....sometimes 9...
Admin
I've seen, so, sooo many "independent" hombrew re-implementations of timezone handling. Store your times in GMT, use the routines built into your language/OS to do the conversion. Everytime someone rolls their own, god kills a puppy.
'Dependency' ... when I saw this I immediately thought "tzdata" https://xkcd.com/2347/
'Falsehoods programmers believe about time' https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b923ca
Admin
Yeah, the list on github seems to miss two major common mistakes I constantly hear:
The city I'm currently living in already had 12 different ones in recent history (which means on my continent 500 years).
Addendum 2026-10-23 16:06: To clarify with different I mean same "name" technically but different ways to calculate time. So one has to be extra careful with old timestamps in general and not asumme the current ones will be representing the same thing in the future.
Or in other words: Never persist anything other than UTC - time zones are used for display to humans like converting to Dungeon & Dragon units :-)
Admin
It's not always time zone handling that's the problem. Humans have a hard time conversing about time when both parties are on different longitudes. Think about the question "Do you eat breakfast at the same time as me?". If you ask that of someone two time zones away, the other party might say yes and there is still a misunderstanding. Did "yes" mean that they both ate the same local clock time, or did it mean that if one called the other during his breakfast, the other would be eating breakfast?
Admin
Until there are so many updates to the TZDATA db that your operating system can't keep up with them. Like this year and next are gonna be all sorts of crazy because idiots, I mean "politicians" in the US and Canadia believe permanent DST somehow fixes something.
Admin
You are right! :-)
Admin
Wait, you guys are getting rid of the pointless, expensive and disruptive daylight saving nonsense?
That is a surprsingly smart move :-O
Admin
It's not a move, it's a process! For example, within the EU, it has already been agreed upon at top level that DST is to be abolished. The consensus is: We will abolish DST within the EU, but the individual member countries must now decide if they want summer time or standard time ("winter time") to be the standard time. So the decisions have been delegated to state-level parliaments... and there hasn't been a decision yet. The fear: Will our economy collapse if we don't turn the clocks back and forth? Will people suffer? Oh okay, people don't count, scratch that. But will our smartphones keep running? Who should advise us? Which consulting firm is the most expensive one, as they should have the best answers? Should we let the people vote? Nah. And what about the economy? Can it handle this massive change? Hmmm... let's discuss this in a further meeting when we will discuss further meetings. Hey, it's not that us polluticians get paid for doing nothing! And yes, I know I'm an hour late, because my lazy maid couldn't be bothered to adjust the clock properly! Dummes bildungsferners Proletatiat...
Admin
No. The real WTF is that the time difference of 10 hours is correct (London is on GMT+1 until October 25th and Melbourne is on GMT+11 since October 4th) but the time stated is only 9 hours ahead (23-14 = 9).
Admin
True, but London was in daylight savings on October 14th as was Melbourne and the difference between 23:54 and 14:54 is nine hours.
Admin
And the answer to that is "yes". It would be one of the proposed alternatives. ("Neither" is, at best, improbable.)
Admin
DST is not pointless, expensive, or disruptive, and I am sick of people claiming it is.
Admin
It absolutely is disruptive and expensive because it causes unnecessary friction. And where ever you have friction you have the potential for disruption and error and thus costs associated with preventing and mitigating the same. And the additional overhead it adds to date handling is not insignificant. This site has plenty examples of that.
It also has proven negative health effects on people. I have read claims that there is a marked spike in hearth attacks, depression and it of course causes sleep issues as your biological clock is thrown out of sync with your wall alarm.
Add to this the added negative effects on our overall well being that comes with suddenly being told that due to an arbitrary rule starting tomorrow when you clock out it will already be dark outside which is just plain depressive and you have a system that is genuinely bad.
As to it being pointless that depends on your line of work. If you are a farmer, construction worker or something like that where daylight legitimately is a factor you have to consider than it has some point. But for us office workers it really is just painful for no good reason.
Admin
The problem with this argument is that this will happen regardless. We are only talking about an hour difference and with the days growing ever shorter in the winter, even keeping DST on, it will still get to that same point, only some weeks later instead, so it is just prolonging the inevitable.
As for being depressive, that is entirely subjective.
If that were really the case, than it would be just as painful with DST never going away. As I said, it will still get to that point, just later, so if it is painful, that is more a matter of how you look at it and how you live your life, rather than purely being a problem with DST itself.
The bigger problem is businesses that do not allow people to adjust the start and end of the work day instead of strictly adhering the same time on the clock regardless. Some places do do that and it helps a lot. And getting rid of DST in some places will also still leave it in others, or some may leave DST always off while others always on, so there will still be problems on the technical front for years to come if such changes do actually start manifesting. What we cannot run away from if the fact that days are going get shorter and shorter, and later longer and longer, so being dark are annoying times will happen at some point or another.
Admin
That hour of difference can make for literally months of additional dark days depending on your locale. And that is significant.
The feeling you get when you walk out the office in summer and feel like you have the whole day ahead of you still is just great. It makes you feel like you have not just wasted all of your day working for someone else's profit. In winter when you get out of the office and the sun is gone it's the opposite. You just feel like your whole day is dead and gone. It's depressive.
And there is absolutely no reason why us office workers whose work does not rely on the sun have to suffer it. Let those outside laborers start their day a hour early if they really need to and leave us alone.
Admin
If people would all just move to the tropics and leave the cold dark polar regions to the wildlife, all this whining would be eliminated. And by "polar" I mean beyond about 30, maybe 35 degrees latitude N or S.
Admin
If you're working a 9-5(17) -ish office job, then you're are working the whole day; you know what you were getting into when you took that shift. Also, do you not have a lunch break where you can go outside?
If you want something different, than the onus is on you to find something different. A different shift, or a place that allows that. Or work from home so you can sit by a window and go outside from time to time. Or work for yourself. Or any other number of alternatives where you don't have to look at walls for most of the day. It all comes back to your choices and maybe that is more the driver than the amount of ambient light outdoors.
You know, I have heard all my life on the news and such about DST depressing people, but I have never ever meat anyone who actually gets that way simply because it's dark, either of people I have known directly/physically, or of the many I have known online. A lot people seem to love the night time feel, especially during the Halloween season. Otherwise it seems many just want to make drama out of it for the sake of it.
Admin
Job-based DST is a really interesting idea. But I think there are some practical considerations that would make it challenging to implement. For instance, some municipalities have noise bylaws that dictate certain hours of the day when loud machinery may be operated in residential areas. If those bylaws use the "outside laborer" time zone, then the noise will disturb people's sleep. If they use the "office job" time zone, then labourers will lose an hour of productive labor. There are also any number of edge cases: for instance, what about people who work in the administration of, say, a landscaping business: would they be subject to the "outside labourer" time zone because of the nature of their business, or the "office job" time zone because of the nature of their work? Each choice has its complexities.
Admin
I newer said it would be easy. Just that it sucks that us office workers had to spend a lifetime suffering to account for a calendar system that was designed in a time when your only options for light were the sun and the occasional candle.
Admin
You don't have a choice about that. Society has decided what working hours shall be and that is what you get. At most you get some wiggle room. But you can't exactly find a job in software engineering that lets you work 7-3 like in the good old days.
Honestly, I think times were better back when office work was 7-3 and not 9-5. Sure you had to go to bed earlier and get up early but you traded a couple useless hours late at night for a couple useful hours of daylight. I'd rather go to bed at 22 and get up at 6 than go to bed at midnight and get up at 8. It's not like there is anything useful you can do in those two hours.
Must be a regional or cultural thing. Over where I am from it's basically universal that people hate those late months of the year for the reasons I described. Especially among us older folk.
Here is to hoping the quotes work out.