This past weekend we once again endured the switch to Daylight-savings. Some of our computers and clocks automatically switched, but a great many time keeping things did not. On Sunday I got another petition email from change.org looking to end Daylight-savings time. I didn’t sign the petition. Not because I like the twice per year ritual or believe that in your wattage wasting Facebook/You-tube/movie-streaming lifestyle it would ever save energy. It used to save both energy and lives. Television stations used to go off the air at night too.
Oh, the kiddies reading this probably wish to challenge that whole life saving aspect. Challenge away. You didn’t grow up with the pathetic headlights vehicles had all the way through the 1970s and into the 1980s. Those round yellowish things which didn’t illuminate much even on high beam. You also didn’t grow up before pesticides were in large scale use. Night time driving left your windshield and headlights plastered with bug guts. Wee hours of the morning driving (after 3am) splattered a lot fewer bugs. Driving with headlights was safer when the bugs were going back to sleep for the day.
Why I didn’t sign it comes from the 30+ years I’ve spent in IT. Large scale computer systems were forced to leave the window from midnight to 2am open for maintenance. We rarely, if ever, scheduled nightly jobs to run in that window when using automated job schedulers. If actual breathing computer operators were manually releasing jobs then by all means, but automated schedulers rarely accounted for such things.
Along the same lines, many of you have a computer with a BIOS (Basic Input Output System) that controls the internal computer clock. These all have daylight savings built into them. Do you know how to flash the BIOS on your computer? I own a lot of computers and updating the BIOS on each can be tricky. While one might make the process more straight forward, a new BIOS or firmware version always seems to introduce bugs you didn’t have before. That’s why you see things like this.
It’s even worse if your computer is old or insecure enough to allow your Windows OS to insert a one off boot entry. This is where the boot loader is redirected to load a different, usually tiny, OS which does something then takes its entry out of the boot loader list. Such an insecurity is exactly how really bad viruses like to install themselves. They boot and write nasty little things to places they otherwise could not write while the OS was running. When the OS reboots these are now all trusted files and that new user account which cannot log in does not appear on your login menu so it can happily run background tasks with system privs.
True, many of you check the box to update system time from the internet but that rarely updates the BIOS clock. There was a great debate about allowing that. It used to happen back in the days of DOS, then it didn’t happen and I don’t know the current state of the debate. Not allowing the update means your system clock is way off so timestamps on files created between power on and the OS getting booted far enough to reach out to the Internet for update are wildly different. If you’ve never set the BIOS clock, it probably even has the wrong timezone.
Daylight savings does allow true 9-5 workers more daylight to engage in outdoor activities after work. Since most IT workers end up working 12-14 hours per day it doesn’t change much. Given the epidemic of genetic misfits all staring at idiot phones, it won’t change much in their brief lives. Daylight or dark they are going to walk out in traffic and die while intently surfing Facebook, playing angry birds or texting.
No, I didn’t sign the petition because the people looking to abolish daylight savings time aren’t asking the correct question.
Should Standard Time exist?
During fall and winter it’s dark. During summer we have more daylight. These two statements aren’t true for every spot on the globe though.
If Daylight-savings became the new Standard time, other than the electronic devices debacle, would anything substantially change?
We would have more daylight in the summer, more darkness in the winter and most of you wouldn’t look up from your idiot phone long enough to notice. Okay, “high noon” wouldn’t mean what it used to but that is true for most words and phrases in America. Dame in the U.K. is an honorary title, the female equivalent of a Kni
ght. In America many women consider it a slur. Interesting enough, many of those same women tuned in to watch Dame Maggie Smith in “Downton Abbey.” Even more grew up watching her in “Harry Potter.”
