daylight savings time.

[Spicoli]

more longer happy hours!

http://www.smileyvillage.com/smilies/banana005.gif (http://www.smileyvillage.com)

[oddlycalm]

Yep, and it only cost most companies 30% of their quarterly IT budget to deal with all the unintended consequences...:\

oc

[Sean O'Gorman]

My VCR will never be the same.

Then again, my VCR was never the same since the day I dropped a 530 lb DVR on it. :gomer:

[RHR_Fan]

Yep, and it only cost most companies 30% of their quarterly IT budget to deal with all the unintended consequences...:\

oc

And this is supposed to save energy and $$$...

[Stu]

Yep, and it only cost most companies 30% of their quarterly IT budget to deal with all the unintended consequences...:\

oc

greater cost now, less cost in future years.

but who cares about cost, i was just happy to be able to drive home after work today and see the sun shining bright. :thumbup:

[devilmaster]

since the day I dropped a 530 lb DVR on it. :gomer:

You gotta buy the first run of everything? ;) :D

[JLMannin]

Daylight savings time sucks. What is the point? We live in a 24 hour economy. The years of living in sod houses reading books by window light are gone. Whenever we are home, the lights are on.

Hell, let's make the golfers go apeshit - let's move to GMT, then in the summer, it would be daylight until 3 am.

[devilmaster]

Hell, let's make the golfers go apeshit - let's move to GMT, then in the summer, it would be daylight until 3 am.

Oh sure. Say that now.... Now that I don't have my Navy job which required me to regularly convert to/from GMT anymore. ;)

[edit] and btw, Sir Sanford Fleming rocks! ;)

[Sean O'Gorman]

You gotta buy the first run of everything? ;) :D

Yes, but it evens out since I buy everything secondhand. :laugh:

[SteveH]

Daylight savings time sucks. What is the point? We live in a 24 hour economy. The years of living in sod houses reading books by window light are gone. Whenever we are home, the lights are on.

Hell, let's make the golfers go apeshit - let's move to GMT, then in the summer, it would be daylight until 3 am.

Actually it does make a difference to some retail and recreational businesses. My brother owns two convenience stores, business drops off in the fall when time changes and it gets dark earlier. And vice versa now. I was surprised when he told me that but it makes sense. Some people just do not like to venture out in the dark regadless of where they live.

[racermike]

Daylight savings time sucks. What is the point? We live in a 24 hour economy. The years of living in sod houses reading books by window light are gone. Whenever we are home, the lights are on.

Hell, let's make the golfers go apeshit - let's move to GMT, then in the summer, it would be daylight until 3 am.

So what is Zulu time?

[devilmaster]

So what is Zulu time?

zulu is GMT. Each time zone is designated a letter.

[Andrew Longman]

Actually it does make a difference to some retail and recreational businesses. My brother owns two convenience stores, business drops off in the fall when time changes and it gets dark earlier. And vice versa now. I was surprised when he told me that but it makes sense. Some people just do not like to venture out in the dark regadless of where they live.

True. I heard a piece on the radio that the loudest lobbyist for DST for years have been retailer. They claim they can for example sell 100M more BBQ grills and 200M of golf clubs for every hour of DMT

Standard time is now only in effect 4 months of the year. Sounds pretty "standard".

[KLang]

Yep, and it only cost most companies 30% of their quarterly IT budget to deal with all the unintended consequences...:\


Is that an actual number you read somewhere? It certainly wasn't that big of a deal here. I had one fix for the mainframe which I installed several months ago as part of regular maintenance. Our network guys pushed out the Windows and Outlook patches from microsoft. No big deal at all.

[Ankf00]

our automatic DST patches had issues.

[nrc]

30% seems steap - maybe for companies with very time sensitive data or companies that were in complete disarray to begin with.

We pay have spent 5% of our manhours this quarter. The biggest hassle was going through all the software and deciding what needed specifically addressed and tested what would be ok. OS was a breeze (at least on the Linux/Unix side) it was the applications that were the hassle.

[Andrew Longman]

I was with about 17 presidents and VPs from Calvin Klein on Friday and they were in complete meltdown (and apparently had been for days) because their Blackberries had all their schedules out of whack for the coming week. It was a huge distraction for them all day as they tried to figure out what they were supposed to do about this patch and that patch on their Blackberries and computers at work and home.

Of course by the end of the day the IT guys had it all worked out.

[KLang]

I was with about 17 presidents and VPs from Calvin Klein on Friday and they were in complete meltdown (and apparently had been for days) because their Blackberries had all their schedules out of whack for the coming week. It was a huge distraction for them all day as they tried to figure out what they were supposed to do about this patch and that patch on their Blackberries and computers at work and home.

Of course by the end of the day the IT guys had it all worked out.

My wife just started using a Motorola Q. I found instructions on microsoft's website on how to update it and sent her the link but as of late Sunday it still showed the wrong time. I think she is afraid of updating the software on it. Hopefully her IT guy took care of it.

[oddlycalm]

Is that an actual number you read somewhere? No, of course not, hence the half serious emoticon. Just enjoying the irony of the "energy saving" causing some energy to be expended.

Some outfits did have quite a bit to do, others like your shop didn't. We ended up having to update one SQL database app and that was about it.

oc

[Andrew Longman]

Just enjoying the irony of the "energy saving" causing some energy to be expended.

oc

Considering that retailers were among the strongest forces behind the move I assume they expect people to be hopping in their cars to do shopping they would not do otherwise. Great.

[Insomniac]

My wife just started using a Motorola Q. I found instructions on microsoft's website on how to update it and sent her the link but as of late Sunday it still showed the wrong time. I think she is afraid of updating the software on it. Hopefully her IT guy took care of it.

The time isn't taken off the cell towers?

[Andrew Longman]

In the case of the Blackberries at CK it had to do with booking meeting times and posting IMs/emails presumably in Outlook.

[Ankf00]

don't the blackberry's operate on a mobile provider network as well?

[KLang]

The time isn't taken off the cell towers?

Yes but Windows Mobile seems to be applying a timezone offset. I assume the software patch is to change when the offset changes. During a trip a couple weeks ago she was complaining that the Q didn't automatically update to current time like most cell phones can. I found other Q users online complaining of the same thing.

[Insomniac]

Yes but Windows Mobile seems to be applying a timezone offset. I assume the software patch is to change when the offset changes. During a trip a couple weeks ago she was complaining that the Q didn't automatically update to current time like most cell phones can. I found other Q users online complaining of the same thing.

That's interesing. I can see the issues that come up and the reasons for having it both ways.

[Gangrel]

The wife just sent me a couple of emails from work, and they both showed up on my computer as an hour earlier. Her laptop and my laptop both show the correct time, so it's gotta' be either her exchange server or mine...ahh, the little details... :D

[WickerBill]

Or the spam filter it went through (Postini, for instance, will alter the timestamp to "correct" the TZ), or or or or....


Imagine a device that, let's pull something out of the air, chills chemicals to make medicine. Imagine that device having a proprietary OS that connects to the network to dump data and get its instructions. Imagine a batch of medicine in this chiller costs the company $210,000. Imagine it chilling a substance for exactly an hour shorter than it was supposed to.


Now yer talkin.

[devilmaster]

Or the spam filter it went through (Postini, for instance, will alter the timestamp to "correct" the TZ), or or or or....


Imagine a device that, let's pull something out of the air, chills chemicals to make medicine. Imagine that device having a proprietary OS that connects to the network to dump data and get its instructions. Imagine a batch of medicine in this chiller costs the company $210,000. Imagine it chilling a substance for exactly an hour shorter than it was supposed to.


Now yer talkin.

I was kinda waitin to see if this was going to finally do the disaster that the y2k problem was supposed to do. That woulda been funny for the last half hour of the earth. :D

[SteveH]

Just found out my Garmin GPS has the wrong time and I can't adjust it through the 'keybad' Eveidently I have to download a patch off their website and update its firmware.

Palm also has a patch for its OS. Didn't get that either.

Watch still works though. :gomer:

[coolhand]

My wife just started using a Motorola Q. I found instructions on microsoft's website on how to update it and sent her the link but as of late Sunday it still showed the wrong time. I think she is afraid of updating the software on it. Hopefully her IT guy took care of it.

Good reason to be afraid of Microsoft updates. You PC will just get slower and slower

[TravelGal]

The folks on the Mexican border are not amused. Neither are ALL the international airlines. Screwed their scheduling royally. The air traffic system is an interconnected web. When a major player changes the time, the carefully conceived connections don't.

[WickerBill]

TravelGal, but isn't it true that Israel and a couple other countries change their daylight saving weeks every single year?

[TKGAngel]

The wife just sent me a couple of emails from work, and they both showed up on my computer as an hour earlier. Her laptop and my laptop both show the correct time, so it's gotta' be either her exchange server or mine...ahh, the little details... :D

Here's another one. My Outlook calendar at work shows all of my weekly recurring meetings occuring in March as one hour later than they should be. In April, they go back to the normal time. :confused:

[Andrew Longman]

Watch still works though. :gomer:

My second grader made a sundial in class this week. Now I know why.

[Audi_A4]

don't the blackberry's operate on a mobile provider network as well?
I took me all of 20 seconds to update the time on my blackberry.

[oddlycalm]

Imagine a device that, let's pull something out of the air, chills chemicals.... That's exactly what I had in mind when I made the crack about significant budget hits, and nobody will ever know the magnitude of the expense. Modern manufacturing is a sea of programmable logic controllers (PLC) of all different makes and vintage, nearly all time sensitive in some manner, and they interact with each other through hard wire (simple contact closure w/ macro) and full bi-directional interfaces to make these places run.

In an automotive parts plant like the Visteon plant on English Ave. in Indianapolis there are literally thousands of PLC's that are used to process parts and get them to the same place for assembly on time. Or, to carp from another thread, when you are assembling airplanes in three days using a heavily choreographed process, how many PLC's with the wrong time code will it take to screw up the works and cost you a quick $100 million? As TravelGal observed, this cost the airlines a fortune.

Nice to know that the office wonks with blackberries bled a few drops as well. Maybe next time the guvmint want to reset the clock some eager young aid with a blackberry will speak up and it won't seem so much like Tony George is running the show....:tony:

oc

[KLang]

I hope the software engineers have learned that hard-coding the DST start and end dates isn't really a good idea.

Kinda reminds me of some COBOL date stuff I wrote in the 80's. Someone had to go back and fix that stuff before Y2K. :D

[Insomniac]

I hope the software engineers have learned that hard-coding the DST start and end dates isn't really a good idea.

It's an algorithm, you have to code it.

[cameraman]

He said hard coding it. As in in the non-updatable rom buried somewhere inside of our quarter million dollar spectrophotometer that now has to have the time zone changed to manually work around the change in the rules.

[KLang]

Nothing to stop the government from changing it again anytime they feel like it.

Anyone know how Vista handles DST changes?

[Insomniac]

He said hard coding it. As in in the non-updatable rom buried somewhere inside of our quarter million dollar spectrophotometer that now has to have the time zone changed to manually work around the change in the rules.

I know what he said. Most software engineers/programmers wouldn't hard code (i.e. program in the specific dates that DST start and end for each year) because they'd be making the assumption that it won't change and they will also be putting a limit on the number of years the software would have the correct time.

Your issue with ROM can never be fixed fully since it's write once. You need a new chip that is updated if you want it, or any other problem fixed in the chip.

[Insomniac]

Nothing to stop the government from changing it again anytime they feel like it.

Anyone know how Vista handles DST changes?

I'm not sure. I remember when I moved from eastern TZ to central TZ and changed my TZ setting in Windows. It completely messed up my Outlook 2003 calendar on all day events (like birthdays were all 1 day early). I never figured out if it was Windows or Outlooks fault. Dealing with time is just a huge PITA with timezones and DST.

[JLMannin]

Imagine a device that, let's pull something out of the air, chills chemicals to make medicine. Imagine that device having a proprietary OS that connects to the network to dump data and get its instructions. Imagine a batch of medicine in this chiller costs the company $210,000. Imagine it chilling a substance for exactly an hour shorter than it was supposed to.


Now yer talkin.


See, Mitch Daniels was right - DST is saving your company on energy costs. After all, you said the chiller was running cycles one hour shorter, thus saving energy.

Never mind the fact that the product is junk because the process did not follow the ticket instructions.

[WickerBill]

Vista has the new DST rules built in.


So, there's one thing it does.

[TravelGal]

TravelGal, but isn't it true that Israel and a couple other countries change their daylight saving weeks every single year?

This is a good question. I had never heard of that.

I'm going to have to do a bit of investigating to give you a sensible answer. I called a friend from El Al and he said he never heard of it either but that they flew the flights at the same times no matter what. If necessary, he thought Israel just adjusted what time the flights arrived and departed.

So why is it different with the US? Maybe just size. (it matters??? :eek: ) A small airline and a small country vs. many airlines in a large country?? I'll do some more asking. I love it when someone asks a thoughtful travel question that I have not thought of before!

[TravelGal]

Nothing to stop the government from changing it again anytime they feel like it.



Isn't it supposed to change by one MORE week next year? Or was that only a rumor?

[WickerBill]

Wikipedia says (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Daylight_Saving_Law) Israel stopped the "ad hoc" DST in 2005.


In the past, the unpredictability of DST in Israel became frustrating enough that Microsoft Windows stopped trying to track them and just made Israeli time be Greenwich Mean Time plus two hours (GMT+2) (and disabled the daylight saving option). This has led to various ad hoc solutions to the problem in Windows systems and other Microsoft software (e.g. Outlook calendar entries are often off by an hour when shared, due to the lack of DST support).

[Turn7]

Here's another one. My Outlook calendar at work shows all of my weekly recurring meetings occuring in March as one hour later than they should be. In April, they go back to the normal time. :confused:

That is because the meeting was scheduled prior to the patch being applied to either your pc or the exhcange server.

If it is that bothersome, you can have the meeting organizer delete the current meeting and schedule it again.

In the current condition your meeting is in, it will be off again this fall for a month.

[Andrew Longman]

Isn't it supposed to change by one MORE week next year? Or was that only a rumor?

I don't think so, but Congress is spending $150M to study the impact of the time change and may change it back depending on the findings.

Of course they'll probably find that making any change creates such a cluster#### that they'll never change it again. I mean $150M should buy quite some study.

[KLang]

I know what he said. Most software engineers/programmers wouldn't hard code (i.e. program in the specific dates that DST start and end for each year) because they'd be making the assumption that it won't change and they will also be putting a limit on the number of years the software would have the correct time.

I'm not suggesting anyone coded the actual dates. The part that is hard-coded is 'The First Sunday of April'. I assume now XP is coded for DST to start 'The Second Sunday in March'. The problem still exists. The next time DST is changed we will go through this whole thing all over again.

[grungex]

Windows 2K-->Vista DST fixes are here (http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_hu1).

[Insomniac]

I'm not suggesting anyone coded the actual dates. The part that is hard-coded is 'The First Sunday of April'. I assume now XP is coded for DST to start 'The Second Sunday in March'. The problem still exists. The next time DST is changed we will go through this whole thing all over again.

Ohhh. There really is no way to avoid it, something has to be coded. They could make it user settable I suppose. Not quite sure what the ramifications would be though. Turn7 points out that applying the rules change to events scheduled before doesn't help, so it seems individual applications may need to apply the new rules to pre-existing events.

[KLang]

Ohhh. There really is no way to avoid it, something has to be coded. They could make it user settable I suppose. Not quite sure what the ramifications would be though. Turn7 points out that applying the rules change to events scheduled before doesn't help, so it seems individual applications may need to apply the new rules to pre-existing events.

I think something could be done via the time server. I've got one of those weather stations that gets time updates via radio from the atomic clock in Colorado. It updated correctly on Sunday. I assume there is something imbedded in the signal that told my device that DST had just started. I have the option to tell the device not to honor DST.

I'm not at all familiar with the innards of Outlook/Exchange. No idea how that could be handled.

[RARules]

Ohhh. There really is no way to avoid it, something has to be coded. They could make it user settable I suppose. Not quite sure what the ramifications would be though. Turn7 points out that applying the rules change to events scheduled before doesn't help, so it seems individual applications may need to apply the new rules to pre-existing events.

No, it's really much easier than you may think. Linux and MacOS X have support for (and use) a table-driven approach. Someone puts together a master list with the rules on the Internet somewhere (I'm not going to talk about the deployment, but that's not tough at all) - yes, just one person/group to figure it out - and a utility on each computer runs the algorithm and outputs a table with the proper offsets for that computer. Your computer now knows all of the offsets for all the time zones in the world. Based on the TZ that the computer's in, all offsets between computers (the reason for these problems is coordinating meetings across timeszones with changing offsets from GMT) can easily be calculated. Applications have only to use the right system call to make everything work properly.

My MacOS X update at home was automatic, and calendar items were just fine. At work, I had to run some application to fix my Outlook Calendar entries. It worked OK, but I had to audit the effects, as I don't trust these guys. And what would have happened if I ran the app twice? Or some admin had already run it for me and I ran it again? It would probably keep readjusting them. What a mess!

I'm not at my home computer right now, so I don't have access to my email where I have the link, but suffice it to say that some Open Source folks figured it out and it works. Microsoft - of course - follows different and suboptimal (quasi-hard-coded) programming practices. This is not the only case of this kind of programming. There's another link to a MS web page describing the mess. In a very small font, it's about 23 big screens full of details. Yes, what a mess!

Oh and no, UNIX is not perfect either. In 2038, the 32-bit dates in older UNIX systems turns over. As in Y2K, the OSs may be easy to update (e.g. to support 64 bit dates), but apps are the tough ones to patch. Remember my warning 30 years from now.

[trish]

Am I the only one who forgot? Time to fall back.

[stroker]

Yes. :p