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seamusTX wrote:I'm in the software business. On Dec. 31, 1999, the company had everyone who could perform telephone support in a "war room" with water, food, and emergency generators. Nothing happened. The scuttlebutt was that they didn't get a single call except for some wrong numbers.

Every year, when DST starts switching on or off, they get hammered with customer problems.

DST was supposed to save energy, but no one can demonstrate that it does now. I'm sure you remember when the whole country was on DST for most of the year in the 1970s. IMO, they might as well do that permanently -- just advance all the time zones by one hour. I don't care if sunset is at 6:30 or 7:30 p.m. in the winter.

- Jim

The company I was working for at the time made a lot of money selling software upgrades and scaring the daylights out of people. They have never addressed automatically addessing th daylight savings issues though.

seamusTX wrote:I personally don't care one way or the other. I wake up at dawn, whenever that is, and I don't have to commute.

DST is a huge pain in the patootie for people who run worldwide computer networks, though. Many countries switch on different days. Some, like India, have time zones that are 15 or 30 minutes off the GMT hour. When we're switching onto DST, countries in the southern hemisphere are switching off. And all of this changes every year.

- Jim

It really stinks for the folks that work on the computers that run the computers at the oil and chemical industries. Tons and tons of Data are recorded every second or 2 while setting the clocks forward is confusing repeating an hour in fall can really screw things up. While I know of no reported real problems in the Process control industry with the Y2K issues every year I hear or get involved with historian problems that actually cause shutdowns. The time shifting cost these plants a lot of money. Expanding Daylight savings is supposed to be about saving energy. One result I've noticed ab out daylight savings is that I'm more likely to leave the house i the morning with the lights on. I think the only reason we have daylight savings is that government gets a perverse pleasure in telling us what to do. Arizona does just fine without switching the time around.