It's Daylight Savings Time in the US
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I hate it. We only do it in the UK to keep the Scots happy apparently, so I was hoping that Scottish independence would mean we could abolish it.
How does it keep the Scots happy? It doesn't actually have any positive effect in any way.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't get this or get the difference between GMT and UTC? GMT doesn't switch with DST as far as I knew. In the UK we use GMT in the winter and BST (GMT+1) in the summer.
GMT is the designation for the "switching" time zone that goes between GMT and BST. BST is UTC +1. It "is" GMT. When you set your computer clock, for example, you don't set it to GMT then to BST then back. You set it to GMT and it switches back and forth for you.
It's the same in the US. Eastern Standard Time is what the US east cost uses for five months of the year (funny that we refer to it by the lesser of the two times.) The other seven months of the year it uses Eastern Daylight Time (EDT.) But EST is a "daylight time honoring zone". EST, like GMT, doesn't exist during the summer, it's summer time alternative does.
GMT and EST are living time zones - time zones as they are used. If you want to designate a rock solid time upon which those are based you use UTC, UTC + 1, UTC + 5, etc.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Perhaps slightly embarrassingly, I've never heard of UTC or double summer time. The latter sounds cool though, as I love summer - tell me more!
UTC. Coordinated Universal Time. Acronym is French, hence why the letters do not line up with the English term.
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@Dashrender said:
Similarly in the US, we use EST and EDT to indicate the change standard versus daylight. So I suppose one could argue that EST never changes.
Yeah, it gets weird. EST "never changes", it just disappears and does not exist when EDT exists. Using EST means you switch to EDT when EST goes away. Just like GMT goes away and BST replaces it.
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With lighting not being a significant user of power and heating being a trivial issue now while computing, televisions and air conditioning being such a big deal, I wonder if shifting the hours doesn't make us use more power, rather than less, today. And with international work, shifting the hours doesn't let us change when we work, things still have to happen at roughly the same time everywhere. So the negatives have gotten enormous and the benefits are a joke.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Just like GMT goes away and BST replaces it.
I think you're over-complicating it here. Where did you get this from? AFAIK, the UK uses BST in the summer, which is simply GMT+1. And GMT is the same as UTC. I'm no expert, but a quick Google says exactly the same thing on all the websites listed. You seem to have a different definition from pretty much the whole world.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Just like GMT goes away and BST replaces it.
I think you're over-complicating it here. Where did you get this from? AFAIK, the UK uses BST in the summer, which is simply GMT+1. And GMT is the same as UTC. I'm no expert, but a quick Google says exactly the same thing on all the websites listed. You seem to have a different definition from pretty much the whole world.
If this is true, all computing devices are incorrect. Look in Windows. GMT is time shifting, UTC is not. As an example.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
Perhaps slightly embarrassingly, I've never heard of UTC or double summer time. The latter sounds cool though, as I love summer - tell me more!
UTC. Coordinated Universal Time. Acronym is French, hence why the letters do not line up with the English term.
Not so fast sailor:
Just the french and english versions of the same thing, temps universel coordonné and coordinated universal time
It's neither french nor english, it's a sort of backronym as halfway point between the two. Why the hell would anyone bother to do that is beyond me.
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@scottalanmiller said:
If this is true, all computing devices are incorrect. Look in Windows. GMT is time shifting, UTC is not. As an example.
On my Windows, I can't set GMT as a timezone. The only options are UTC plus or minus n hours. Regardless, it has to be a fudge, since we're operating in two different times zones (GMT & BST) and Windows only allows you to set one (plus a tick box for Daylight Saving Time).
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Looks like I am wrong. GMT does not change, but place that use it normally do. But it is important that GMT is a time zone and UTC is not, still. But it becomes a much more complicated matter because under this terminology, places like London and NY cannot be said to be "in" any particular time zone but choose one to honor from time to time.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
On my Windows, I can't set GMT as a timezone. The only options are UTC plus or minus n hours. Regardless, it has to be a fudge, since we're operating in two different times zones (GMT & BST) and Windows only allows you to set one (plus a tick box for Daylight Saving Time).
That's bizarre. I can set (and have) GMT on my Windows. And on my Linux.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
On my Windows, I can't set GMT as a timezone. The only options are UTC plus or minus n hours. Regardless, it has to be a fudge, since we're operating in two different times zones (GMT & BST) and Windows only allows you to set one (plus a tick box for Daylight Saving Time).
That's bizarre. I can set (and have) GMT on my Windows. And on my Linux.
GMT is used interchangeably with UTC a lot, as evident even on this thread. However the main issue with GMT was the lack of leap seconds so it was slowly falling behind UTC, but not any more since they're now in some goofy balance I think.
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@scottalanmiller said:
That's bizarre. I can set (and have) GMT on my Windows. And on my Linux.
I thought I had. Otherwise I've been using UTC all these years and yet, as I mentioned earlier on this thread, I've apparently never heard of UTC. I thought maybe it was a Windows 8 change, but I've checked a Windows 7 PC and that's the same - no mention of GMT anywhere.
EDIT: Just checked a Windows 2003 Server machine, and that is GMT. So it must be a relatively new change.
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Here's my Windows 8.1 zone options.
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yaeh, that's what I remember.
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Is it bad that I love that fact that we are all so nerdy that we can make a 40-50 post discussion about TIME ZONES????
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That's how we roll!
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I've worked much of my career dealing with lots of time zones. Based in Eastern or Central, working for GMT or Pacific. And I'm about to be based in Europe, UTC + 1.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I've worked much of my career dealing with lots of time zones. Based in Eastern or Central, working for GMT or Pacific. And I'm about to be based in Europe, UTC + 1.
Oh, I think you mean Specific Time
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I hate it. We only do it in the UK to keep the Scots happy apparently, so I was hoping that Scottish independence would mean we could abolish it.
How does it keep the Scots happy? It doesn't actually have any positive effect in any way.
It's not so much daylight saving that the Scots don't like, it's British Summer Time. England wants to move to BST in the winter (aka Central European Time), which would fall into line with the rest of central Europe, but that would mean it stays dark in Scotland until 10am.
There's also talk of double summer time, which is basically just us adopting Central European Time - so UTC+1 in the winter and UTC+2 in the summer, but personally I'd just stick to UTC+1 all year round.
