a website to double check what the time is?

Aussies won't care what time it is as long as beer is available!

I use my phone as an alarm-clock!

Should I tell work now I'll be late on Monday?

'Cause she could be my alarm-clock...

... on modern culture when people can't be relied upon to tell the time all by themselves. However did we manage before network-automated time updates?

In winter

New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania GMT+10 hours

South Australia, Northern Territory GMT+9.5 hours

South-Eastern Western Australia GMT+8.75 hours. (The little known Central Western time, so obscure that many people are aware that it exists. But it does).

The rest of Western Australia GMT +8 hours.

In summer

New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania GMT+11 hours

South Australa GMT +10.5 hours

Queensland GMT+10 hours

South-Eastern Western Australia GMT+9.75 hours.

Northern Territory GMT+9.5 hours

The rest of Western Australia GMT +9 hours.

All that for barely the population of Holland.

Daylight savings time is deeply controversial in both Queensland (which presently does not do it) and Western Australia (which presently does), so this may change. In addition (as this article indicates), starting times have been varied over the years, sometimes unilaterally by individual states, meaning that although Sydney and Melbourne theoretically use the same time in both winter and summer, there have been occasional periods in winter and automn where they don't.

And don't get me started on Australia's many railway gauges.

Just a note, the correct term is "Daylight Saving Time", a time when we "save" daylight (as opposed no doubt to wasting it in the morning before 6AM). Perhaps not a technically accurate term, but either way it's "Saving" not "Savings".

I expected the telstra page to just have a big clock on it

a website for when im confused about what time it is? PERFECT

along with ones to tell me If its christmas

www.isitchristmas.com

or if the LHC has destroyed the world yet ...

http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com

my useful website list just keeps growing

WHAT? Do they REALLY use that excuse? At least the US says something vaguely believable about saving power. Are they going to try to make pi equal to 4 next?

My boss hates daylight savings because I use it as an excuse to miss meetings (but I was there at 4! where was everybody else?? but he SAID "EST" - it's right here in the email)

Paris, because even she's not that dumb

It would be so lovely if everyone was on the same timezone. They're only numbers after all. People would just start and leave work at different numbered hours: who decreed 9:00 was the correct number to start work on? Changing the time in different seasons is completely pointless.

A friend of mine (with a PhD) became very upset at the thought of eating lunch at say 20:00. When questioned further he said it was just wrong and that's that...

Time I got my coat!

What's the big deal? So for a week or two the text and call record is an hour out. Hardly a crisis is it.

Bullshit. Make the change and tell people to keep up. If they can't, well, they need to relearn [learn?] third grade reasoning skills. Or whatever the Aussies might call it.

It's just an old American Indian witch doctor trick anyway: cut the bottom off a blanket and sew it on the top to make the blanket longer.

... summer needs to come three weeks earlier this year, got it? Get all that rain and cold gray overcast stuff overwith NOW, and make with the warm sunny beach weather ASAFP because we've already set our clocks. OK, now that's sorted, we just have to tell the millions of possible tourists that they need to book earlier in the year because we've arranged for a longer summer just for them.

Any resemblence to Frank Baum's "Oz" is strictly coincidental ... isn't that right, little man behind the curtain?

The correct term IS "Daylight SAVINGS Time". The "savings" in this case is being used as a noun, in which case the s-form is correct (as in "time savings" or "life savings"). This apparent adjustment seems to echo the modifications made in the United States in 2007 (in which DST was started three weeks earlier than before), only adjusted calendar-wise to account for Southern Hemisphere seasons.

Um, no.

Per...

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology: http://tf.nist.gov/general/history.htm

About.com: http://geography.about.com/cs/daylightsavings/a/dst.htm

The California Energy Commission: http://www.energy.ca.gov/daylightsaving.html (do a CTRL-F search on "not daylight)

The US Naval Observatory: http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/daylight_time.php

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#Terminology (Explains why)

and empirically - Google: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=daylight+savings+time

An awful lot of what I'd expect from the vitamin D starved northerners. The idea is, in order to promote tourism but not cramp our own magnificent social lives, to muck with the clocks so that by the time the pasty cheeked brits (or beetroot red ones, if they've been "sun bathing"*) have finished their two sipped shandies of an evening and slipped off to bed, there is still a good whack of daylight for the locals to enjoy unmolested and unmacarena'd.

We love you like odd cousins with speech impediments and corrective underwear, but your slightly-adulterated-soft-drink fueled drunken reveling gets a bit wearing after a while.

Honestly though, I wish they'd stop mucking around with daylight savings as it is a pain in the arse to keep fiddling with a whole lot of embedded or unnetworked systems and, in fact, I have only just managed to start getting up early so come monday my newfound mornings will be sucked into the abyss. Piss daylight savings off altogether.

* walking around the house in singlet and underpants

Don't forget that a lot of those devices are carried around by posturing PHB's who are barely capable of breathing and blinking at the same time. They have to make sure that they are not late for the myriad meetings to make them look more busy and therefore more important than the mere workers who's working lives are made a misery by those same PHBs. So having to do the menial and horrendous task of adjust a meeting time in their brains is just to much for their overloaded synapses to cope with.

If Telstra offer something for nothing, even if it is only the time of day, grab it before they find a way to charge for it.

Oh yeah, that's right...have to change time on the pc for this. well now i've done for it.

Paris, 'cuz she's always on vacation savings time.

As noted here (http://blogs.msdn.com/mthree/archive/2008/03/07/dst-arrives-030708.aspx) the Australia Eastern & Central 2008 Daylight Saving Changes page (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/bb887637.aspx) and the official Australian Government Time web site (http://www.australia.gov.au/Time) provide more information to prepare and educate end users and businesses on eth changes in Australia.

For more on Windows Mobile phones and updates for DST, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/downloads/microsoft/daylight-savings-update.mspx.

We went to DST (the TLA avoids the savings/saving argument above) last weekend and my phone didn't realise that it was now summer.

Easily fixed but it does make it a hassle to work out what the time is in other countries so I'm now just using t'internet for the next month as everything that it says is bound to be right.

If you want to "save" daylight, just do everything an hour earlier. The government (of whichever country) doesn't need to be involved.

I'm reminded of a political cartoon where the protaganist cuts off chunk of blanket on one end and sews it onto the other end. Then calls it daylight saving(s). It dates back to the early 70's when it was stretched out into winter.

Of course there are few countries that have more than ONE time zone. Unfortunately I live on one that has 4 big ones and a few minor ones.

"Aussies won't care what time it is as long as beer is available!"

I resemble that remark!

Queenslanders are proud that we can't be stuffed messing about with time zones at any time of the year. Its something that the Mexican states do - whatever. They can keep that terrible AFL game as well.

Messing about with the clocks means 2 minutes of drinking time being lost. Can't have that can we, especially with the drought.

Hello, Sheila? It's Bruce. What time is it with you? 3:10? Beaut! Put everything we have on Ocker's Ace in the 3:45. No worries, it's 4:10 here, I saw it win twenty minutes ago!

Michael Jennings forgets that the distance from Perth to Sydney is 3077 kilometers which is probably a bit wider than Holland. The sun rises a bit earlier in Sydney than in Perth or a few points in between.

"The time shift is all part of a plan to make summer longer ..."

I thought global warming was already doing that. (Have a google for "Spring arrives earlier".) The only thing that changing the clocks does is bugger stuff up.

"It's a sad indictment on modern culture when people can't be relied upon to tell the time all by themselves."

Telling the time *now* isn't the problem. Stuff gets buggered up because we don't know what the time-zones will be in a few years time. Not all hardware or software can be updated by "pointing it at a config file". It might be burnt into ROM and it might not be remotely accessible. For society's main infrastructure, *both* of those are actually pretty smart design decisions.

The solution of course is to just ignore the new law and specify times according to the old system. As long as you find a clear way of identifying the era of your daylight saving time adjustment (EST08, anyone?) everything is unambiguous. Are there any laws that forbid the use of historical calendars and timekeeping standards?

How would it help though.

For example instead of knowing that it is GMT +5 in somewhere, and therefore being able to work out what time they start work there, you'd have to remember work start times of countries around the world.

Getting rid of Timezones won't make it any easier as you'd still need to know what time people did things in other countries. The only way your plan would work would be to have everyone go to work at 9am GMT, whether it was day or night there. It works for me in the UK, not so sure the Aussies would be so chuffed though.

Daylight saving time is a heap of bollocks anyway.

At any given latitude, on any day except the two equinoxes, there will be unequal amounts of daylight and darkness (the minimum and maximum hours of daylight occurring at Midwinter and Midsummer, respectively). However, on any day including the equinoxes, the hours of daylight will be evenly distributed either side of midday (which is how it got the name). The timing of midday varies according to longitude.

The original "standard" working hours of 09:00 to 17:00 were chosen so that even on Midwinter's day, when the sun does not rise over London until 08:00 UTC, a man (for it was only men, in those days) would have some daylight by which to shave and dress for work.

Of course, at the vernal equinox, the sun rises over London at 06:00 UTC; and by Midsummer, the sun rises over London at 04:00 UTC and does not set until 20:00 UTC.

The logical thing to do, if one wished to make the best use of the available hours of daylight after work, would be to get up earlier in Summer in order to make use of the light evenings; perhaps altering business hours to, say, 08:00 to 16:00 (or maybe even 07:00 to 15:00 in latitudes closer to the equator), between the Vernal and Autumnal equinoxes.

Forcing everyone to adjust their clocks for the summer and pretend that it is 13:00 when it is midday was probably the bloody stupidest idea any idiot could have come up with.

"The logical thing to do, if one wished to make the best use of the available hours of daylight after work, would be to get up earlier in Summer in order to make use of the light evenings; perhaps altering business hours to, say, 08:00 to 16:00..."

Yes, that's called Daylight Saving Time (or Summer Time in the UK).

The only difference between individual businesses (or individuals within businesses) choosing to go to work earlier on a case by case basis and the organised rolling back of the nation's clocks is that the former produces a chaotic condition where no one can reliably predict which business has changed it's opening/closing times, and which has not (or by how much), and the latter coordinates everything into one organised transition.

I like your idea, but they already thought of it ;)

The reason we change from summer to winter time in the UK is for the farmers. Or more specifically in East Anglia it provides the winter sugar beet crop with an extra hour of daylight in the mornings. Do they have sugar beet problems in AZ?

Mines the scruffy barbour with the bailer string coming out of the pockets.

"The original "standard" working hours of 09:00 to 17:00 were chosen so that even on Midwinter's day, when the sun does not rise over London until 08:00 UTC, a man (for it was only men, in those days) would have some daylight by which to shave and dress for work."

Fine for London, what about Edinburgh, or Belfast? Don't forget that until the coming of the railways and the need for standard time, each part of the country kept it's own time based on local midday, and if that meant that Old Amos had to get up at 4am to milk t'cows, so what.

The best thing about all this modern computer stuff is flexible working hours, which translates nicely into "go to work when it isn't rush hour"

As well as the distance from Perth to Sydney being about 3000km (as Luke Speer pointed out), the eastern states cover a longitudinal distance of around 3500km (south Tasmania to the north point of Cape York in Queensland). This is why Queensland doesn't have DST and Tasmania has historically (but not at the moment) started DST earlier and finished it later.

The people closer to the equator would prefer it to be later in the physical day when they get home, so that it isn't so bloody hot. The people further away (Tassie) would prefer it to be light in the evening for their activities, rather than the sun to start coming up so early - the official sunrise in Hobart would be at 4:30am without DST, but in practice it gets light quite a while before the official sunrise due to the long twilight.