Prepared for Next Year's Time Change?

wohlford puts forth this query: "Next year, daylight saving time will be extended another four weeks. Slashdot has covered the time change proposal and its estimated impact, already. Since then it has been signed into law. Looking around on the Net I don't see anyone taking this seriously. Will this become the next tech doomsday or just another joke like Y2K?"

Re:Pfft.

[SpaceLifeForm]

What is your solution to 03:14:07 January 19, 2038 UTC?

Halloween

[taniwha]

Sadly this will push the change back past halloween leaving the kids wandering the streets in the light and stealing a lot of the magic of the celebration

If I didn't have my tinfoil hat on I'd think it was part of a plan from the religious right to do away with it

It affects some radio stations

[Announcer]

I work for one of the "dying breed" of Daytime ONLY AM radio stations. Because of the effects of the sun on the ionosphere, Medium Wave (AM Broadcast) signals bounce off of a layer the ionosphere at night, and are absorbed by a different layer which forms during daylight hours. As a result, a number of stations were allowed to operate only during daylight, when the dominating station on that frequency would not be affected.

Case-in-point, WFIF where I work. WTOP (now WTWP) has operated on 1500Khz for many decades. They are the dominant station on that frequency for the entire Eastern half of the US. (At night, you can hear them from Maine to Florida. Been there, done it.) They are located in Washington, DC. WFIF was licensed to operate on that frequency in 1965, as a daylight-only station. Thus, every day at the FCC-established "legal sunset", we must sign off. We cannot return to the air until the FCC-defined "legal sunrise". (The FCC defines the sunrise/set times for each month, based on an average, so the actual sign-on/off times remain the same through each month.)

Now we throw the DST/Standard time curveball into this. Because the sun doesn't change, only our clocks do, this affects when we can sign-on and off, and it affects our program schedule.

Example- under the present system, in October, during DST, we sign-on at 7am and off at 6:30pm. When we change to Standard time on that last Sunday, we get to sign-on at 6am and off at 5:30pm until we hit November. In November, we sign-on at 6:45, and off at 5pm.

Now throw this new monkey wrench into the works...

We will no longer have *any* Standard time operation in October, because it won't kick-in until November... so, that means we won't be able to sign-on until 7:45am! (Right now, our latest sign-on is 7:15am in December & January.) That's pretty darned late in the morning to be signing-on! Once Standard time takes effect, we'd be back to where we are, now: 6:45am to 5pm.

In March of '07, we're going to have another curveball to throw at our audience... we will have been signing-on at 6am for the first few weeks of March. Then the clocks will be changed. Now, we won't be able to sign-on until 7am! Programming that had already re-established itself with our audience will go on yet another hiatus, before returning in April. (The early morning music program already goes away in October & Dec/Jan due to the later sign-on.)

So, as you can see, there are some radio stations and listeners that are going to be ***VERY*** inconvenienced by this mess.

We won't even go into the issue of how many computers are out there still running Windows 98SE, which won't be getting any help from Papa Bill to patch it's internal time-shifting routines. I am hoping for a 3'rd party solution... but won't hold my breath. Since we still have a fair number of perfectly functional Win98SE boxes running, we'll just have to disable the automatic time-shift routines, and do it manually.

Re:I vote for no-DST and use GMT

[FacePlant]

Back home, on a major highway, they switched exits from numbers to mile markers a couple years ago and that's what they did. Old exit numbers were small, new ones were big. It made it easier for people who knew "To get to the park, get off on exit 21."

The best part of making exit numbers reflect the mile markers that they're near is that
folks who can do simple math can figure out how far it is to the next exit.

If I just passed exit 125 and I know the next exit is at 142, I can ask my kid if their
bladder is going to explode right now, or can they hold it in for another 7 miles. If we
just passed exit 5, I more than likely have no idea how far it is to exit 6. Better pull
off to the right and send them behind a tree. No fun.

You can put distances in km on the road signs as long as you put km markers along
the road to go with the mile markers. You better make the km markers a different color too, so they don't blend in with the mile markers.