Aug 2, 2005

Impending Daylight Savings Change

I'm very surprised to not be hearing rumblings anywhere about the impending daylight savings change that is included in the Energy Bill that is expected to be signed into law soon (or may already have been). The bill extends daylight savings from mid March to mid November.

Does anyone else see a huge problem with this technologically speaking? How many programs and technologies do you use in a day that have algorithms to figure out daylight savings? I would venture to say that the majority of these algorithms will need to be changed in order to be compatible with the new schedule.

My gut tells me that this issue was grossly overlooked and this *could* (at most) turn out to be another Y2k to the industry. Do you think I'm blowing smoke? I would love to see your comments.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This will certainly cause a great bother as all of the various OS vendors and distributors have to release updates to /usr/share/zoneinfo, or whatever system they use to calculate time zone differentials and DST. I don't see anything quite on the scale of Y2K, though: different countries already use different dates for their switch to DST, or don't switch at all. So, the operating systems already have to accomodate the differences. Changes in the dates amount, essentially, to updating the time zone database.

That doesn't change the fact that all those poor unfortunates running Windows are going to have to deal with Yet Another Service Pack, though...