Belgium to the rescue as UK consumers freeze after BST blunder British consumers awoke to cold houses this morning as Nest “Learning” Thermostats failed to accommodate the switch to British Summer Time. Nest customers have not only been deprived of an hour's sleep, but also a warm house in which to struggle to wake up. According to complaints raised on the Nest community support forum …
Time is a largely arbitrary concept but losing daylight for most of the population in the interests of a few members makes no sense to me.
Why the heck do I have to live with GMT wintertime? Who buys their milk straight from the farm at daft-o-clock?
If the farmer wants to milk their cows at point that suits the cows and the farm plus factory process do it then. The produce will still arrive at the supermarket, corner shop or dairy when it gets there and be available for purchase.
As for the statistics from the last 'experiment'. All the reports I have seen point to an 11% reduction in accidents affecting children. You may not care about the children not getting hurt but if that is the case at least think about the reduced cost to the NHS of not having to treat them.
The last time it was the Scots who had problems. Since apart from wanting money from London - (just look at them salivate over the proposed London housing Tax sorry mansion tax), the Scots can do whatever they like with Scotland time, - or the scheduling of their activities. They should do what they want when they are ready to do it, without slavishly clock watching.
Daylight savings time wasn't invented for farmers, but as a way to save energy (by shifting work hours to times of day when less artificial light would be required) and to give office and factory workers more access to daylight in the evening. It was first proposed by a new zealander and first implemented in germany and austria-hungary during world war 1.
It is entirely a myth that it was created for the farmers. That's an excuse politicians use to justify its continued existence.
Time is not quite arbitrary. The definition currently accepted around the world is based on the rotation of the Earth on it's axis in relation to the Sun, and is intricately associated with popular angular measurement.
Putting aside the discussion on units of time, my view is that noon should be when the Sun is highest in the sky. There's no particular reason it should be so, I just think that this should be the case.
I'm not (quite) suggesting that we go to completely local time measured solely by the Sun, but quantized into hour-wide zones with some geographical adjustments for national reasons seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
"my view is that noon should be when the Sun is highest in the sky."
It used to be that way. Then someone invented the railway and steam trains and eventually they got to places so quickly that the time on the town hall clock was noticeably different from ones pocket watch which made it difficult to schedule trains to timetables, especially when on a jaunt to ones country estate.
Or goats…or sheep…or, as I prefer, buffalo. I'd REALLY prefer reindeer - highe saturated fat content than single cream, most wonderful milk I've ever tasted. Never catch on, though, what with the NHS scaring everyone stiff with their BS about saturated fat and cholesterol… pity, because it's far healthier than any other milk due to the high fat content.
On the face of it farmers are the least likely to want clock changes - cows do not conveniently change their milking schedules.
The arguments against abolition used to be about children en route to school when it was dark. IIRC accident statistics gathered in the last abolition experiment did not support that argument. However for some reason the trial was not allowed to become permanent.
As it is this time of the parliamentary cycle are you:-
1) standing for election on the abolish BST platform?
2) voting for a candidate that will propose 1) above if that is so vitally important to you
3) do nowt?
What is it then. It is it 1) then I am sure that you'd get a few votes from the readers here. not so sure about the wider electorate though.
Summertime rules are set by the EU
Not sure what statement you're trying to make there. Are you suggesting it would be better if member countries did whatever they wanted whenever they wanted as far as DST is concerned? Bearing in mind how fractious Europeans are the result would probably be chaos.
Surely even euro-sceptics have to draw the line somewhere and accept that a degree of coordination is better for the common good.
I was at primary school in Westmorland when experiment with all year summer time happened. One reason why accident rate for school kids didn't go up was in areas like it's where it was pitch black for trip to school that parents got together to sort out rotas to drive us all to school plus local garage started a mini bus service and we all stopped waking to school.
"One reason why accident rate for school kids didn't go up was in areas like it's where it was pitch black for trip to school that parents got together to sort out rotas to drive us all to school plus local garage started a mini bus service and we all stopped waking to school."
I'm guessing this was in about 1969 or thereabouts (I think, I was about 7 or 8 then) and all the school kids around here were issued with (or had to buy from the school, I'm not sure) reflective armbands and/or sashes. We walked to school without parents. Less traffic back then and we were taught how to cross roads and then allowed to actually do what we had been taught. Alone and without adult supervision!
John Oliver did a section of Last Week Tonight where he explained the genesis of daylight savings time in the U.S. (probably the same thing as BST). I'd put down a link, but you'd need HBO to access it (legally--its probably on YouTube on a whack-a-mole basis).
In short, blame Kaiser Wilhelm and the WW1 Germans!
"When are we going to do away with BST, it's only a few jock farmers that want to keep it. Note to farmers, either get up an hour earlier or an hour later."
Actually, as someone who likes to spend some time outside when work finishes (17:30 all year round), I rather like it; I'm sure I can't be the only one?
I'm sure I can't be the only one?
No, you're not. If the weather was cooperating a bit more I could get a round of golf in this evening after work and will be able to for several months. My preference is actually to start work at 8am so that I can get even more light after work. Sadly at the moment that's not an option so the switch to BST is very welcome.
Anyway as far as the article goes I'll just point out that the 7-day programmable, predictive thermostat that's been controlling my heating for over a decade had no problems. Its radio controlled clock changed to BST and it did exactly what it was supposed to. Tell me again - what's the advantage of Nest and similar?
Funnily enough, most people I know get the switch the wrong way round.
Most people I know think that the clock change is to adjust time to suit the sun in Winter. This is the argument some people used to try to prevent children going to school in the dark, but that argument is bogus, because winter has the clocks aligned with sidereal time.
So all abolishing BST will do is to make the lit evenings an hour shorter in the summer months. At one time, when people worked in the fields, this may have made a small difference, but with the reduction in manpower required to run farms now, most farmers will be pretty indifferent to this. They get up when required, and often work the fields by floodlight to extend the working day in the evening.
I have no problem with abolishing BST, but not with aligning the clock to BST permanently, which some people suggest, or even aligning the UK to CET/CEST, which some business leaders want (blooming Gallophiles)!
When are we going to do away with BST
Having our clocks change at the same time as the Europeans is very convenient for those who do business internationally. It would be very tedious if we didn't change times at all. Have you ever tried scheduling multiple regular international calls when the participants have clocks changing at different times? Some of us spend most of our working day on such calls!
There is a case for moving to CET (with winter/summer time) -- but presumably that is not what the poster here is asking for. Personally I think we do very well by being close to European time but one hour closer to US time. I have worked for 30 years for US IT companies in the UK. One reason they employ people in the UK is to be their interface to Europe. I am virtually in the same time zone as my European contacts, but I have an extra hour of overlap with the US allowing more company work to get done at reasonable times of day (I work a bit late, they work a bit early, but not excessively so). I currently work for a European company but for a team run from the US -- they find it much easier to use me than the people in our European company HQ.
The time zone is part of the UK's competitive differentiation for inward investment from the US.
It couldn't come soon enough in the year for me. As someone who habitually wakes at dawn, it galls me to wake up at 5.30 then go back to sleep for two hours when the sun is up just because I only have to leave at 8 to get to work. I could do something productive with those two hours, but it's 6 o'clock in the morning, man!
Could be convenient for those doing business "internationally" with Europe. But for those of us working with people in, for example, California it would move us another hour away from them. I'm already staying in the office till 7+pm at least twice a week for phone confs with rest of team in "silicon valley" ... Extending that to 8+pm would be a significant problem
It would be more appropriate for portions of Europe to join us on GMT as several (France/Spain/Portugal) either have the Greenwich meridian pass through them or they are West of the line.
This 'give up the time-shift' happens twice a year and normally is linked to the 'Use CET' sub-plot with the advantages to business forefront amongst the reasons but everyone saying that ignores the way that the US have a lot of time-zones and not only do they see no problem but they actually take advantage of them allowing a split office East/West coast to cover a much larger portion of the day without needing people to start early/stay late.
In Spain the argument goes that it should move back an hour to be in the same timezone as Britain so that the sun sets at an earlier time (it's a bit of a problem for those in the west of Spain) and this should help as part of the overall effort to reduce those interminable lunchtime breaks, have more productive working hours and therefore a more productive economy, and finally improve peoples' work-life balance.
It ain't going to happen though, tourism and working all hours God sends apparently form part of Spanish culture.
The issue isn't BST. The issue is stupid people who bought overpriced programable thermostats. Should have saved their money and bought one from a real appliance manufacturer for a quarter the price.
This.
Those annoying bloody adverts telling me how my life can be so much different now because I can fiddle with the hot water whilst out and about with my daughter... RAAAARRR! Like what did I do before, eh? Had to go to the woods and chop two oaks down before stoking the hypercaust?!!!
It always surprises me when IT things use wall-clock time rather than UTC.
Someone was asked to design a logged 24x7 CCTV system. They were going to use wall-clock time for the log. It was pointed out to them that there would be ambiguous times during the hour in which the clocks went back at the end of Summer Time.
To be pedantic, even UTC has discontinuities; TAI should be used on devices that are not expected to handle leap seconds.
More on topic, though, how on earth did this get missed in testing? It has got to be pretty high up on the test strategy for a domestic appliance that uses time to schedule things, surely!
"[...] how on earth did this get missed in testing?"
Possibly someone made a small code change whose expected effects were "so obvious" that it didn't need full regression testing. The changed code apparently did what it should - and the ripples were not fully understood or considered.
Most Americans I meet seem to think that "GMT" means "the time in London", and have no concept that Daylight Saving Time means that the UK is not always on GMT. They'll say "3pm GMT" when they mean "3 in the afternoon UK time", ignoring the fact that in the summer the UK is on BST. Perhaps this 'smart' thermostat software has the same assumption built-in?
Do we have an "IoT Fail" icon yet?
Some social media sites store their postings' timestamps in UTC seconds - but display them adjusted for the viewer's local time zone. There is a sneaking suspicion that a further correction is applied according to the current Summer Time state whenever it is subsequently viewed - not that which pertained when it was written.
The standard *NIX approach is to do all your data storage and maths in linear UTC and only for humans do you display it in a readable form and at that point you allow for the local time-zone & language. Its the sensible way.
The complication arises when you have a time-of-day event that some human wants at a set local time and you need special logic if that is in the hour where the "clocks change" as you could get either 2 or 0[*] time-crossing occurrences depending on the direction of the change. But that is independent of which zone your in, other than it is a zone that has "daylight saving" with is practically all significantly northern and southern latitudes.
It makes bugger-all difference to the amount of daylight of course, but humans seem unable to cope in modern times with doing things that are not a set times.
* - of course when local time jumps from 1am to 2am you cross all times in between, but how do you handle that? You could trigger all events set for 1-2 simultaneously, but what if the person needed A to be 5 mins before B, and both 10 min before C and all in that 1 hour window?
in the hour where the "clocks change" as you could get either 2 or 0[*] time-crossing occurrences depending on the direction of the change
Some systems can be configured to change the time gradually (eg, if the `date` program has a -a option on some *nix systems, or using the adjtime(3) system call), but changing the apparent rate at which time changes introduces different problems. On the whole, changing it gradually probably breaks fewer assumptions that people might make in their code but I would guess that this Nest problem would still manifest either way.
I think you are talking about changing the underlying system clock (i.e. UTC time).
That is normally slewed by NTP unless its a leap second (where the kernel gets that and ought to handle it properly for event timers, etc) or if the time error is too big to be done in a sensible window (typically at system boot where you have no idea if the clock is OK).
The "jump" I am referring to is in local time when the daylight saving hour goes in/out of effect. I don't know of any system that would slew the DST value, but its not an impossible thing to consider.
One of the first serious pieces of code I wrote and got paid for was to add user-defined event scheduling to an operating system that was very good at milliseconds and microseconds, not so good at days and months. And one of the primary uses was to schedule the clock changes.
Since I was 17 and clueless at the time my code was, of course, hopelessly wrong*. I don't know what happened the first time the system hit the 2am "set the clocks back to 1am" event as I had buggered off to Uni at that point, but I suspect the phrase "rinse, repeat" may have been relevant.
*Among many other things, it was perfectly happy for you to set events for times that didn't exist, such as the middle of the skipped hour in the Spring.
It was nice for the last few weeks when we have had an extra hour per day to do business with Americans. I had the novelty of them replying to an email while I was still at work and it not taking several days to get issues fixed.
I would vote to end BST if I had the choice.
Quote
"And when Scotland comes independent, we'll have CET, The Euro, border controls and driving on the right. Right ?"
yes and they ( The Spastic Moron Party ) will Ban right hand Drive Cars (they are so English) so your have to scrap your Car (for Sod All) and Buy a Left hand Drive Car ( AS WE ENGLISH SAY A KACK HANDED CAR)
This post has been deleted by its author
"The wall clock should remain constant, and our routines should change. That would be more logical than trying to falsely adjust a 'constant'."
Do you mean the 'constant' time at which the sun sets?
If BST were abolished, I'm pretty sure my employer would agree to me working 08:00 to 16:30 in the summer. Would yours though? Would everybody else's?
I'm sticking to my guns --- and probably inviting repeats of my earlier downvotes --- I would rather have more daylight hours after work than before work. My ideal job is probably refuse collection: start early, several hours of physical labour, be out of work in time to collect the kids (now sadly grown up) from school.
Yes, almost everything can be done by artificial light, farming, commuting, working --- but some things are nicer in long evening daylight: sitting in the garden; walking in the countryside; messing around with horses, boats, model aircraft, etc. I do realise that some people would rather have daylight for a morning run than an evening one, but it's always going to be like that ...
... unless ... we have alternate months of BST and GMT during the summer. Any takers?
This post has been deleted by its author
"If BST were abolished, I'm pretty sure my employer would agree to me working 08:00 to 16:30 in the summer. Would yours though? Would everybody else's?"
Look into the flexible working laws...
Your employer has to give a valid reason you can't work from 08:00 to 16:30 instead of 09:00 to 17:30. Because they don't want you to is not a valid reason.
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
>> What's the difficulty? Printed timetables could just include a note to the effect that, "services will run an hour before the printed time between April and October, whilst on-line and electronic timetables could adjust automatically.
So if I want to get the 14:22, to <wherever> which train do I catch?
>> In America? Well you will work 14:00-22:00 and have lunch at 18:00. <<
Doesn't that just change the problem?
Consider you're reading and the subject has breakfast at "15:00". Is that early, normal, late? It wouldn't be possible to tell unless you find out where the character is. So, does the time become "15:00 90degW"? That wouldn't seem to be a simplifcation.
Similarly, if you were to schedule a business meeting between UK and US colleagues, it might still be necessary to know whether all parties are likely to be awake and at work.
At least with the current system, once the time conversion is done, I can easily determine if it's a normal business hour, or not.
Just my 2p.
This post has been deleted by its author
I'm guessing you don't live in Scotland - since if you did - rather than accussing "Jock farmers", you'd find just about everyone can't be arsed with BST and would prefer if the damn time was just left at GMT the whole year round - and for exactly the reason you've managed to get arse about face - BST makes it darker in the mornings the further North you live - so as far a light levels go, people in Scotland *are* effictively getting up an hour earlier than people in the South of England.
Scotland is also futher west than England, mostly. Taking the mid-point as being 4 degrees west, both Wales and Scotland should be 16 minutes behind GMT, ideally. Even middle-England is about 1.5 degrees west, so should be on average about 6 minutes behind GMT. London's spot on, though :)
Fun fact: the eastern end of Edinburgh Waverly station is actually a tiny bit west of the western end of Cardiff Central station.
Household clocks in the UK and Europe can adjust for Summer Time automatically with a synchronising national radio signal. It also usually keeps them accurate to the second all day long. Not sure if North America has equivalent transmitters to what used to be known in the UK as "MSF".
Yup, I love BST too. Hours of day light after work has finished. Saves lives and energy.
Yes, I know time is just a number but all that happens if you stay on GMT is that most people are in bed for the first 2 hours of daylight in the summer then have the lights on before they go to bed.
While on the subject of BST, why is savings time not based on the calendar? By which I mean the clocks go back much 'later' in autumn than they reverse in spring i.e. there is much less daylight at the end of October than there is at the end of March. 'Forward' is about 7 weeks before the shortest day while 'back' is 14 weeks after it - why is that?
When Daylight Time was first proposed at the turn of the last century it didn't get very far, until it was implemented by Austria during the Great War as a scheme to preserve coal supplies used in the generation of electricity. The theory was an extra hour of daylight would reduce the need for lighting. It was then mostly abandoned until the next world war, after which it was abandoned again. When reintroduced in the US during the early 1970's energy crisis it was again promoted as a way to conserve electricity, seemingly in the face of the fact that those going to school and work in the morning would be turning on their lights an hour earlier.
As others have noted, subsequent justifications advanced for DT included road safety (apparently ignoring the fact that those of us who avoided walking home from school at dusk would still be leaving closer to dawn than before), or vaguely placing the blame on farmers (who had nothing to do with it at all).
DT was, and is, a fraud. In fact it actually costs more than the alternative. Besides the fact that more energy is expended by both lighting and heating in the early morning than at dusk, there is an enormous administrative price associated with the complicated, and ever shifting, periods during which DT is in force during a given year.
So why do we still use DT? In a word, momentum. The early advocates of DT bamboozled their audiences with arguments for its benefits those listening did not understand. Rather than admit their lack of mental acuity, leaders in business and government implemented DT. During the world wars it allowed governments and their citizens to "do something" to help the war effort (like the massive recycling and home garden campaigns undertaken at the same time). It didn't really matter if it didn't actually result in less energy usage. It made everyone feel good. In the 70's, politicians in the U.S. were especially vulnerable to the siren song of easy fixes to strangulation of the economy by foreign suppliers displeased with U.S. foreign policy. Implementing DT made it look like they were doing something in response, and had the added benefit of allowing citizen participation.
But why do we continue to use DT in the 21st century, when all this is known? Certainly even those who proposed its reintroduction in the 70's are long gone from public life, their reputations wouldn't be affected by its discontinuance now. The answer may be that their successors in office, who joined their predecessors in advancing the cause of DT over many generations, are also stuck on a treadmill driven by sheer momentum. They are unable to break free because they simply cannot admit that their previous support of DT, and the costs it carried with it was unreasonable and the result of weak minded deference to the sort of vacuous public policy that causes people to lack respect for their leaders.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
