Daylight Savings Time

[COTTRELL, JAMES]

/*
> >> I think the concept of DST is stupid, but so long as
> >> it has to be dealt with, some means must be provided.

Who says you have to deal with it? The Mythical Man Month chides IBM's
360 OS (whatever it's called) with wasting 300 bytes (or so) of
resident kernel space worrying about various date changes (end of year,
leap year, or DST or some such) when this would be (so they say) better
handled by the operator once (or twice) a year manually.

UNIX will never pass a Turing test with such sophisticated algorithms!
What most people do is wonder around until they notice they need to set
their watch correctly. Of course there is the bootstrapping problem,
*somebody* has to set their watch first! Probably TPC. Hey, maybe that's
where the algorithms came from.

Besides, where is the interest on all that borrowed time? Talk about the
National Debt, how much does the government owe us on that one.

> >Perhaps, perhaps, but it'd be better to leave that up to the application
> >instead of stuffing the library or forcing some PC user to create a file
> >at certain times of the year just to run some program that happens to be
> >written in 'C'.   ...

It wouldn't have to. It would just check for the file, see that it was 
not there, and pretend it wasn't DST. The worst that would happen is
that you would be (consistently) an hour off. Then there would be a war
between the C programmers & the Fortran programmers about setting
back/ahead the clock because the time was wrong.

Besides, you don't have to use the library routine.
 
> Watch out people!  The latest proposal in Congress to keep elections from
> being decided before the West Coast gets its chance to vote involves a bad
> change to Daylight Savings Time!
> 
> As I read it in the Post yesterday, the proposal is to make the polling
> places close at 7:00 EST, 8:00 CST, and extend Daylight Savings Time for the
> West Coast two more weeks till election day!

Don't you have it backwards? 8pm CST is 9pm EST.
 
> The idea of changing the DST algorithm for a) West Coast sites only, and
> b) only in an election year doesn't really turn me on AT ALL...  

Me neither. Look at the NFL. It's games are broadcast in real time. 
Aren't national elexions more important? Why not just keep the polls
open till midnite here & nine out west? We never get the vote counted
before morning anyway.

> I think this
> is a powerful argument for hiding the kluges in either a library routine or
> the system.  Somewhere it can be setup when the system is configured, and not
> have to be replicated in hundreds of programs.  If it is in the system, one
> would not have to rebuild programs sent from elsewhere, while if it is in the
> library one would at least have to re-link-edit.

Or just ignore it. You see, no one has a seasonal hemishpere date. Can
you imagine NHD (Northern Hemisphere Date) & SHD being exactly six
months apart? If the Aussies & Latins can have Xmas in the summer, why
not just have ONE time zone! This is the only way I'll ever get to work
by 9 in the morning. 
 
> Let's keep our eyes on this particular snake - it just might bite us all
> someday...

More snake oil?

> Ben Cranston  ...{seismo!umcp-cs,ihnp4!rlgvax}!cvl!umd5!zben  zben at umd2.ARPA

	jim		cottrell at nbs
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