Monday, February 05, 2007

Daylight Saving Time: When clocks spring forward this year, will IT fall down?

This is the title of an article from ComputerWorld indicating the problemns ahead (in a very short time, and the clock is ticking), due to the US Federal Energy Policy Act of 2005, signed into law on August 2005.

This law, to supposedly get some savings on energy, will kick in the switch to Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the USA on the second Sunday in March, instead of the usual first Sunday in April. This means potential software problems, maybe not as acute as Y2K but still troublesome.

Some vendors are issuing patches to their OS. For example Microsoft's Vista is ready from the box, and they are promising patches soon for Windows XP and others but there are some that have not yet announced anything of the sort. In our shop, besides Microsoft we use some Java Runtime Environment (JRE) which is placed in many different places. Is it all going to be patched and checked in time? The date is fast approaching, the clock is ticking. Do we need this law? They didn't ask us.

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