Daylight Savings Time
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Daylight Saving Time (DST) was first utilized 100 years ago in Germany on April 30th 1916. The modern model of daylight saving time was proposed by an Englishman: William Willet. Around the turn of the 20th century, time development was striding forward. DST was first proposed & accepted fairly soon after GMT was well established. Recently was the 100th anniversary of Daylight Savings Time (DST), & the inarguable proof of its durable success & popularity. Please note that DST can stand for either Daylight Saving Time or Daylight Savings Time, as either use is popular.
The 100th anniversary of daylight savings was at:
Saturday April 30th 22:59 (Central European Summer Time, CEST UTC +2)
In your time zone this time was at:
https://universaltimelink.com/20167GF1KW
Without any doubt DST has been an absolute roaring success around the globe. Billions of people look forward to the annual jump to DST to enhance & utilize their Summers. Parents & children are able to squeeze more out of the day at parks, beaches or just in the back yard. The general public are able to walk, ride or jog in parks, with the extended DST daylight. Farmers, gardeners, trades people, entertainers, tourism & builders are all able to push productivity during DST. Has there been draw-backs? Absolutely, & no system will suit everyone. Daylight Savings is clearly not suitable or wanted in some locations, but where it is wanted, it is democratically demanded & maintained by the respective government.
A vibrant happy young woman enjoying Daylight Savings Time – UTTP
You may ask “What’s the big deal with DST? We don’t have any more daylight than there would have been anyway?”. If there were no DST then everyone could indeed certainly schedule their own day to get more out of the increased daylight hours. However, everyone has to synchronize in one way or another with the schedule of the official world. Parenting, schooling, jobs, delivery, postage & the retail world would make a personal daylight savings time schedule difficult. The idea for a DST period for a country or state was a brilliant one, & it caught-on all around the world very quickly.
DST is about how we use the additional summer daylight hours. That is, whether we want to either sleep or be active with the extra sunlight. There is no doubt that DST improves outdoor leisure & health by encouraging exercise, picnics, barbecues, meet-ups, kiting, surfing, cricket, soccer, baseball or just sedentary relaxation.
Farmers are able to get more done because of Daylight Savings Time – UTTP
Brief History of Daylight Savings Time
Daylight Savings Time (DST) has been around for 100 years. April 2016 was the 100th anniversary of DST, which had its first use by German & Austrian governments in 1916. DST is seen by most as an enhancement for their lives. But there are still many people, entities & organizations that are opposed to DST. DST is not advantageous for businesses whose interests predominantly involve the night hours, such as casinos, night clubs, movie drive-ins, night-tours & a whole host of other examples. If anything, these sectors would like to see it become darker earlier.
DST involves the advancing of clocks forward in time for a season, in order to give people less time in bed in daylight hours, & more daylight hours at the end of the day. This DST advancement of time is controlled by local or state governments, or sometimes at a federal government level. UTTP does not take a specific view on DST. However, there is no doubt that DST directly produces both an economic saving as well as an economic cost. What the overall economic tally actually is, remains debatable.
Daylight Savings Time is about family – UTTP
Daylight Savings Time (DST) is obviously wanted by far too many people to ever abolish. However, under our current time zone model, which has worked for about 150 years & is unlikely to ever be changed, DST plays an enormous part in the world’s handling of time. Time zones themselves are easy to handle on the internet & in software, but it is DST that makes things so complicated. UTTP Universal World Time has succeeded in mastering world time, time zones & DST time dynamically via an encoded time token protocol.
Family enjoying Daylight Savings Time – Universal Time Link – UTTP
Time Zone DST Transitional Hours
The overall concept of daylight savings time is based on a time zone ‘borrowing’ an hour of time for several months & then paying the hour back. This ‘borrowing’ of an hour causes both software error & people confusion. But these problems mostly only occur on the changeover hour at the start & end of Daylight Savings Time for time zones. We have decided to officially label these three problematic hours as DST Transitional Hours.
Daylight Savings Time & computers aren’t a good mix! Depending on it’s function & mathematical requirement, most software handles DST extremely well. However, the DST curse for all software developers comes from designing a system to cope with the DST Transitional Hours. What are the DST transitional hours?
When a time zone begins DST, the clocks are set forward one hour at a pre-determined time, which reduces that day length from 24 hours to 23 hours, causing one omitted hour for a date, which is one significant (transitional) hour. When a time zone ends DST, the clocks are set back one hour, increasing that day length from 24 hours to 25 hours, causing two duplicate hours on the same date, which are two significant (transitional) hours. These three transitional hours are what cause all the problems with software as well as people confusion & time-based mistakes.
Universal Time Link adjusts for Daylight Savings Time – UTTP – Universal Time Link
The first hour of DST: one missed hour of time
The first hour for DST is one hour forward of your normal time, meaning that an hour has actually been skipped. In some time zones this occurs just after 1:59am, where the next second of time is 3:00am. That’s right, an entire hour in your time zone didn’t officially exist, and never will. In this example, the time 2:15am will never have existed. The paradox is that someone else from another time zone may refer to a time within that missing hour for that time zone, not knowing that they are referring to an hour that never existed. In other words, they just weren’t aware that the location that they’re referring to was switching to daylight savings.
Some software, as well as people, need to know the time/location for the first transitional hour for time zones. For example, if someone were to send out a meeting request or a reminder to a recipient for a time that didn’t exist (owing to a DST transitional hour) then the software may ‘crash’.
Productive Tradesmen during Daylight Savings Time – Universal Time Link – UTTP
The final hour of DST: one duplicated hour of time
The final hour of DST for a time zone is where things become very interesting. During this whole time of the DST period, your time zone has been literally on borrowed time – one hour of borrowed time. At the end of DST, it’s time to pay the hour back. So all clocks are put back one hour at the agreed time, usually at 3am or so, causing this hour to be repeated twice. This is called the End DST Transition hour.
Daylight Savings Time brings people together outside – Universal Time Link – UTTP
The first hour of Standard Daylight Time: one duplicated hour of time
The final hour of Daylight Savings Time, for any time zone, is immediately repeated again for the first hour of Standard Daylight Time. That’s right, every DST time zone has one day of the year that has one duplicate hour! UTTP Time Zone Intelligence (ETZI) considers both the final hour of Daylight Savings Time (DST) and the first hour of Standard Daylight Time (SDT) as transitional hours. Because UTTP accepts local time from a sender & then encodes it for use by other time zones, it must be absolutely certain of which of the DST transition duplicate hours are intended by the sender or computer. Just because the first Standard Time hour is out of DST mode, does not alter the fact that it is still a duplicate hour of the last DST hour for any given time zone.
Because of the nature of how UTTP Time works, it must know the senders intended hour, & so prompts the sender to make a choice in these rare situations. This can be really confusing to understand, & is just as difficult to explain within this article. But if it’s any comfort, understanding this theory is not needed to publish a Universal Time Link.
Daylight Savings Time is hugely popular everywhere – Universal Time Link – UTTP
Price of DST: Transitional Hours
Transition hours plague many software packages & time systems. However, UTTP Time is intelligent to DST transition. One of the jobs of the Enhanced Time Zone Intelligence (ETZI) agent is to interrogate the time zone where the UTTP Time has ‘landed’, to ascertain any DST transition status that will be applicable to its destination local time. In the case of composing & sending UTTP Time, ETZI does the same: it interrogates the sender’s time zone to ascertain if either of the three transitional hours in the year will intersect with the local time from which you are composing an UTTP Time.
DST Transition is one of those concepts that is complex to digest initially, & not something that most people have any interest in understanding either, mainly because most people are fast asleep during DST transition. ETZI has been developed to cope well with DST transition, & interrogates every time zone for DST status with every time request it sends or receives.
