Is Daylight Saving Shift Really Worth It? 652
Krishna Dagli writes "Two Ph.D. students at the University of California at Berkeley say that Daylight Saving Shift will not do any good or create any energy savings. We are already spending money for software upgrades in the name of saving energy and after reading following article I wonder has congress really studied the impact of DST shift? " I also read some back story on the concept; OTOH, I found TiVo's suggestions that I manually change everything on my Series 1 device to be somewhat...insulting.
Re:Another case of academia vs. the real world (Score:4, Informative)
Issues so far (Score:4, Informative)
The letter from TiVo (Score:3, Informative)
Dear TiVo Subscriber,
As Daylight Saving Time commences three weeks early this year, we
thought we'd beat the clock to let you know how this unusual schedule might
affect recordings on your TiVo(r) Series1 DVR. (Hint: Chances are
slim.)
While the TiVo service will continue to automatically record your
Season Pass(tm) programs and WishList(r) searches at the correct airtimes
without incident, there are two things to note:
1) For the three weeks that follow the new Daylight Saving Time start
date (March 11), your Series1 TiVo(r) DVR may display the incorrect
time.
Again, to be clear, this is only a cosmetic issue and should not affect
your Season Pass(tm) and WishList(r) recordings.
2) If you have any MANUAL recordings scheduled between March 11 and
April 1, you
will need to adjust those recordings as appropriate. Here's how:
- From TiVo Central, select Pick Programs to Record, then To Do List.
- Locate your Manual Recording (by channel, date, time) and adjust
accordingly. For example, if you have a daily manual recording from 8:00 am
- 9:00 am, you will need to change it to 7:00 am - 8:00 am on March 11.
(Quick Tip: If there are no recordings in this list preceded by the
word "Manual", there's nothing further you need to do.)
- On April 1 be sure to change it back to its actual time, i.e., 8:00
am - 9:00 am.
For more details, please visit www.tivo.com/dst
Thanks for being a TiVo subscriber and here's to a beautiful spring!
- Your friends at TiVo
TiVo, Season Pass(TM), and WishList® are trademarks or registered
trademarks of TiVo Inc's subsidiaries. ©2007 TiVo Inc. 2160 Gold Street Alviso,
CA 95002-2160. All rights reserved. Please feel free to review our
Privacy Policy.
Re:Already spending money? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Another case of academia vs. thereal wrld - YES (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Golf industry pushed the change? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
Re:More driving? (Score:3, Informative)
That assumes programmers learn from experience (Score:3, Informative)
I'd buy into that if there was any evidence that programmers ever learned from their mistakes. But in my experience, the opposite is true: We keep making the same damn mistakes, over and over.
Hell, look at buffer overflows. Still the #1 cause of security bugs. It's not like bounds checking is a radically new idea.
If you're of a historical mind, read The Mythical Man-Month, by Fred Brooks. It's illuminating to discover that we are still struggling with the same problems today that they were dealing with in 1960.
why can't the clients change too (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Already spending money? (Score:5, Informative)
Fortunately, WWV includes a DST flag so that at least those so-called "atomic clocks" (actually radio clocks) automatically changed at the right time.
Re:Another case of academia vs. the real world (Score:4, Informative)
When I camp I get up with the sun and set up camp around sunset regardless of what the clock says. DST doesn't give you more daylight.
Re:Already spending money? (Score:5, Informative)
In the US, it was changed federally in 1918, 1920, 1942, 1945, 1966, 1974, 1975, 1985, 1986 and 2007. That averages out to about once per decade. Up until 1966, many individual states also fiddled with the times. Even today, states are allowed to opt in and out of DST altogether, and Indiana just recently changed its rules.
The coldest hour (Score:4, Informative)
If you live in the northern US and are doing the responsible thing and turning your central heating down overnight, then getting up an hour earlier means you're turning the heat back up earlier. Why is this wasteful? Because on sunny days in March there's significant solar gain once the sun's up. In my house that can be enough that the heat doesn't even need to be turned on in the morning - unless we get up too early.
In the evening, both the house and the outside environment lose their heat relatively slowly. The darkest hour isn't literally just before the dawn, but the coldest hour is. It's much better to spend the coldest hour under the covers - from an energy use point of view - than to get up during it or right on its tail and turn the furnace up to compensate.
Of course, if the government just looks at electrical use, this may not show in areas that don't primarily use electric heat. The increase in oil and natural gas use though, from this idiocy, will be real and significant.
Re:News Flash (Score:3, Informative)
There are very very few businesses where start / finish times really matter, though there are more where they are enforced. Service oriented you say? Contractors (carpenters, electricians, plumbers, sanitation, maintenance) not only can choose their hours as they please (with the exception of emergency calls), but the frequently do. Consumer banking keeps retail hours, so you need to be there when the storefront opens, but they have no regard for their customer's schedules; after all, the term "Banker's Hours" exists for a reason. Construction and manufacturing require their workers to keep strict hours, but there is no reason they couldn't change those hours throughout the year to work during daylight...
How many jobs have you had? And I'm not talking employers... How many different jobs have you worked? I'd venture to guess that the answer is one or two.
Re:Another case of academia vs. the real world (Score:2, Informative)
However it is a bad example, I would keep the headlights on for safety reasons anyway, and most (if not all) newer cars have daylight running lights which are always on.
Re:Another case of academia vs. the real world (Score:5, Informative)
On /. we obey the laws of thermodynamics. You are absolutely, 100% using more energy running your headlights in your car. ALL of the energy used by your car comes from the gasoline that you put into it (with the small exception of any charge already in the battery when it was installed). Therefore, you are using more gasoline with your headlights on than you would if they were off. It might be too small to easily measure, but the difference is there.
If you want some tangible proof of this, find a small hand cranked generator and hook it up to a blinking light bulb. You can actually feel the crank get harder to turn when the light is lit and become easier when it goes off. So the more electricity used by your car, the more gasoline you use or your battery goes dead.
Usable daylight. (Score:3, Informative)
Then we got clocks, which came in handy for things like train schedules. The railroads had a problem. When an Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe train left the former at noon, it was still 11:57:46 in the second city, and 11:16:41 in the latter. The difference caused all sorts of problems. So the AT&SF might decide to standardize on Topeka Time, while the Union Pacific would choose Omaha, which would be a minute and 36 seconds behind Topeka, complicating matters where passengers or cargo had to change trains from one line to another.
So one of the railroad men came up with the bright idea of a standard time system for the whole country, where just the hour would differ between 'zones' approximiately 15 degrees of longitude in width. Since astronomers used the meridian of the Greenwich Observatory as '0', that would put Atchison, Topeka, and Omaha all well within 7.5 degrees of 90W (just east of St. Louis), while Santa Fe was just west of the 105W meridian, and would have its clocks set to an hour earlier.
In practice, the actual boundaries have tended to skew westward, so that even in the Winter, astronomical noon is after 12:00 Standard Time, leaving more daylight after people get off work in the afternoon. The boundary between the Central (90W) and Mountain (105W) time zones actually touches the 105W meridian in TX, and Saskatchewan effectively pushes it further west by declaring that it's on permanent DST (which is a contradiction in terms, and is therefore rendered on maps as being inside the CTZ rather than permanent MDT)!
Of course, a lot of Slashdotters rarely the light of day, so to them it's all a pointless exercise.
Re:Already spending money? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't understand why you wouldn't use the flag -- it seems easier to just read the flag than to calculate the start/stop dates. There's even a countdown so you can miss several days of syncing before the switch and still know when it should happen. Apparently not all clock designers share my hatred for calendar calculations.
FYI: Common radio clocks use the 60kHz WWVB signal not the 2.5-20 MHz WWV signals. They both contain the digital timecode information, but WWV and WWVH also include frequency information (440 Hz, 500 Hz, 600 Hz, 1000 Hz and 1500 Hz beeps) and vocal timestamps, and reports about the weather, GPS health, and solar/radio conditions. In general WWV/WWVH are intended for manual use (all the time information is available in a format useful to human ears) and use outside the WWVB range, but WWVB is more accurate where available (better straight-line propagation) and less complicated to decode electronically due to the extremely low bit rate (a standard serial port can decode directly from an AM amp).
Re:Is it worth it? (Score:3, Informative)
I think you underestimate just how large / bad the problem was/is. In larger companies it is a huge effort. You seem to think that deadlines for other projects were not changed, or that "Bill" simply has to work more hours. Nothing can be further from the truth. Maybe in your company where management doesn't track what their employees are doing and the status of their projects, but not here.
It wasn't just OS patches, but many many applications, network devices / appliances, etc. had to be patched too. Some legacy systems were worse as their as were no patches, so systems had to be updated manually. Some are just plain broken and there is no workaround. In larger companies, this usually means that many teams from many departments were involved. It wasn't just a "oh yeah, gotta change the time early" thing, it was a coordinated, planned effort, with testing, documentation, etc.
Re:Is it worth it? (Score:3, Informative)
Tens of thousands of machines patched.
Hundreds of pieces of software considered.
Real projects were pushed back 4-6 weeks for this non-work.
Agree about "a day's work for a day's pay" angle you have. In fact, it's how we work around here-- any given day you can be off one project and on another random one that is now higher priority.
But, I'm pretty sure this cost us at least 2-3 weeks of real productivity.
Re:Is it worth it? (Score:3, Informative)
Where I work, we have a reasonably fresh environment. Better than any other significantly sized business that I am familiar with, mostly due to several rounds of cleanups. Everyone aware of the costs below was LAUGHING about how we are so much better off than a few bigger businesses in the industry who's stories we heard. Let's consider the cost associated with the DST switch:
I count 487 man-hours plus $64000 in direct costs and lost profit. Figure an average employee cost of $100/hr. $112,700 in total costs. Wow!
I'm still really, really confident that we had it better than most.