Thursday, August 26, 2010

The Reason for this Blog

This blog will concentrate on the reasons for doing away with Daylight Saving Time (DST). Even in a simpler era, the trains fought DST for a very good reason. It caused them a lot of problems. Back then times were much simpler. Today we have television, radio, Internet, airplanes, and problems with even something so simple as Microsoft Windows and Linux both setting the clock differently. At least until recently, Microsoft Windows Windows set the real clock (hardware) to local time and Linux set it to UTC (also called GMT and Zulu) time.

Today we have TV channels with people who still cannot get it right. Take the History channel for an example. If I go to it selecting the Mountain Time Zone, their web site has it fouled up. They show "The Universe: Secrets of the Space Probes" as coming on at 10:00 PM MT. It has been this fouled up for years now. If you want to see when it comes on, select PT. Then add one hour unless you are in Arizona. During winter that is what you do there. During the summer which has DST every place in the Mountain Zone except Arizona that is still what you do since Mountain time is one hour ahead of Pacific Time. But Arizona does not use DST. So during the summer they do nothing in Arizona since the Pacific Time (PDT) has de-facto become the same thing as MST and it is thus at the same time.

Confusing? Of course it is. How should the History channel do it? Stop specifying their two feed times (one for eastern and one for pacific) in local time! Express them in UTC time. To calculate the viewing time just subtract the proper amount of hours depending on which feed is used. If you get the eastern feed you subtract from it. But I can guarantee they will never get it correct until DST is abolished.

Kazakhstan has abolished DST, citing health complications as the reason. That is probably because it caused so many headaches with things like this. Russia has about eight time zones and Kazakhstan still has ties with them for television and other things.

So tell the golfers in Congress to just shift to doing things an hour earlier so they can go out and play golf. They can do that very simply without the added complexity of Daylight Saving Time (English Summer Time).

2 comments:

  1. Hear, Hear!! I am honestly and sincerely glad that I am not the only one who thinks the practice of changing the clocks is idiotic. It is completely unnecessary. All it really does is sooth the psyche of people who can't live with the idea of getting to work at 7:00 a.m.

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  2. Thanks. Keep tuned because even though it has taken a long time for me to do this, we are slowly acquiring all the nails to put DST into its coffin so it will never escape again. We can do the equivalent of DST by just shifting when we do things by the existing clock or do what Kazakhstan or others have done and do away with time shifting altogether and do the same things in both winter and summer. I am agreeable to either of those propositions. I just don't want the clock shifting ever again. Years ago DST was a muisance but with the global communications, dozens if not hundreds of TV channels with varying feeds and modern computer it should be rapidly become obvious to any enlightened person that DST is nothing more than insane nonsense. We need to kill this beast once and for all! Written on 2012-01-05 23:12 UTC.

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