Posted on 10/25/2025 12:37:58 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
LONDON (AP) — For a week every October, people organizing international catch-ups and meetings on both sides of the Atlantic may be briefly confused: Did I just miss that conference call? Why is my grandmother calling me so early?
Most people quickly remember: It’s that strange time each fall when Europe and the United States are out of sync as they switch from daylight saving time to standard time.
Most countries do not observe daylight saving time. And for those that do — mostly in Europe and North America — the date of the clock change varies, partly because of how time-related laws were developed in difference places.
In countries that observe the practice, clocks are set forward one hour from standard time in March to make the most of increased summer daylight hours in the northern hemisphere.
Clocks “fall back” again in the autumn to standard time.
In the U.K. and Europe, this takes place at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday in October.
But in the U.S. and Canada, clocks go back one hour at 2 a.m on the first Sunday in November.
That in-between week means that the time difference between the two sides of the Atlantic — for example between London and New York — is one hour shorter than usual, potentially causing chaos for coordinating Zoom calls or other meetings.
The idea of daylight saving time had been floated for several hundred years, but didn’t become a standardized common practice written into law in many countries until the early 20th century.
Europe first adopted it during World War I as a wartime measure to conserve energy. Germany and Austria began moving their clocks by an hour in the summer of 1916. The U.K. and other countries involved in the war followed soon after, as...
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
Maybe we should take this opportunity to convert to UNIX time and be done with it.
Most important article of the last three decades.
I may protest Trump by setting my clocks the other way;
FORWARD!
;)
Duh, daylight savings time?
I went to the link to make sure this article wasn't written by 10 reporters.
“Why the time difference between the US and Europe will be one hour shorter this week?” I wish they would leave it alone, one or the other...it makes the cows confused.
Small potatoes.. The real test is to make sure you arrive at the right day for the Americas cup races in new Zealand in march 2000. When i got there i still wasn’t sure i wasn’t a day late. fun trip.
"UNIX time" is simply the world standard time reference, UTC (Coordinated Universal Time, a.k.a. "GMT" "Greenwich Mean Time", a.k.a. "Zulu", etc.).
Local time, which is just an offset from UTC based on local laws, standards, or public whim, is handy locally but produces madness when applied globally. There are countries who aren't even offset by integer hours -- India for instance is offset by a half hour. There are places that are offset by 45 minutes.
Madness.
Microsoft MSDOS/Windows used local time on their operating systems for many years, causing no end of trouble and headaches for IT personnel (I am one, I know). They eventually figured out how to do arithmetic and timezones, but it was like pulling teeth to get to that point.
UNIX has always been sane, but it's not alone in that. Most serious operating systems have always used 24-hour, UTC as their "time", and done offset calculations for displaying a convenient "local time" for the user.
It's even called "localtime" in the UNIX/Linux software libraries.
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