Official Real Time

"Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ..." — er, to Official Real Time, upon this day when we do violence once again to our circadian clocks.

You know what I want to know?  Has anyone ever checked to see if there's more traffic accidents the Monday morning after DST begins?

More on Circadian Disruption Day

My basic contention:  While the rationale for DST is energy savings, I suggest that in today's lifestyles and home/work environments, any actual energy savings are negligible if present at all; further, that the disruption of schedules is not only frustrating, but dangerous, as people who have just gotten used to driving to work in daylight are suddenly not only doing it in the dark again, but doing so while their body's circadian rhythm says they should still be asleep.

( Findings (cut for length) ... )

Overall, we appear to have the following to work with:

• Currently, and increasingly as we shift to more energy-efficient lighting technologies, there appears to be little or no net reduction of power consumption associated with DST, and some evidence indicates there is fact a net increase in consumption several times greater than the Department of Energy's claimed energy savings.
• There appears to be a well-documented spike in both traffic fatalities and other accidental fatalities associated with the disruption of sleep patterns at the beginning of DST.  This spike does not appear to be balanced by any corresponding dip at the end of DST, indicating that it is related to sleep deprivation, not to sudden loss of morning daylight.
• The sudden loss of evening daylight at the end of DST, however, does appear to be related to a significant spike in pedestrian fatalities, which is only partially countered by a dip in fatalities associated with the beginning of DST.
• Implementation of DST, and adaptation of business operations and industrial systems to DST, causes significant additional complexity and economic cost, and even more so when DST schedule are changed.  This effect is considerably greater when coordination across multiple time zones with different DST schedules is involved.

Conclusion

"Your mileage may vary", but personally I find the evidence strongly supportive of a conclusion that the costs of implementing daylight savings time outweigh its claimed benefits.  Kazakhstan, for one, apparently came to the same conclusion, and ceased observing daylight savings time in 2005.  Maybe the rest of the world should consider following their lead.

Simon Haynes on DRM

(via a pointer from james_nicoll er ... excuse my brainfart, I meant davefreer)

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and it's a fancy term for copyright protection.

Electronic gadgets are released at a staggering pace, and there have been situations where encrypted files purchased a few years ago are no longer supported by new and improved devices.  I have hundreds of paperbacks which were published thirty and forty years ago, and somehow they don't seem to suffer from the same flaw.

Ebooks should be like paperbacks.  Once you've bought them they should be readable on whichever computer program or ebook device you own now, or in the future.  They shouldn't be locked to EbookReaderWidget 2000 when you really want to read them on EbookWidgetPlus 2008.  (You may have no intention of upgrading, but what if your ancient but workable ERW 2000 falls in the bath?)

In which 3Ware can bite me

Last May or so, I acquired a shiny new-to-me dual-Xeon rackmount box with an array of twelve 300GB SATA disks on a 3Ware 9500 SATA RAIDcontroller. (Thanks, darthgeek.)  By June, I'd added a mirrored pair of 40GB (the smallest I could find) 2.5" SATA boot disks, and was starting to install Solaris 10 on it, intending to manage the array with ZFS and thus learn Solaris 10 and ZFS.  Except Solaris 10 couldn't see the 9500 card.

Last June, 3Ware told me they were working on a Solaris 10 driver for 9500-series controllers, and that it'd be released late July to early August.  July came and went.  So did August, and September.  In September, they said "Real soon now."  October came and went.  And November, and December.  In January they told me, "We have a roadmap for releasing the drivers by the end of first quarter."  February came with no release, then finally late last week came a driver release announcement in the mail.  For 9650SE and 9690SA series controllers only.  For OpenSolaris only.

I just called them.  Yes, that's the only driver they're releasing.  And at no point during the past eight months did it occur to anybody at 3Ware, as I kept asking about the progress of 9500-series controller drivers for Solaris 10, to inform me that they'd end-of-lifed the 9500 series last July.

I'm going to query whether there's any kind of an upgrade path from the 9500, but I don't expect much beyond "Well, you could buy a new 9650 or 9690 at full price."

Blow it out your ass, 3Ware.  The least you could have done was told me this eight months ago instead of continuing to just string me along.