One Step Away from Changing Daylight Savings Time

An anonymous reader writes "Congressional leaders from both parties have signed off on a proposal that will change daylight savings time in the United States as early as this year. All that is left is a signoff by President Bush. If the proposed solution becomes law, DST will be extended two months, from March to November. With many IT applications relying on accurate time information and many having automatic adjustments for DST, how will the IT world handle this change? And with the proposal reportedly taking effect this year, is there enough time to implement change?"

Comments

Billing rates are going up!!!!

[lecithin]

It's Y2K all over again. :)

Hopefully the consulting companies will be able to sell the scare and raise the billing rates!

Jobs!!!! Jobs!!!!

How about we have our 'puters set for GMT?

Seriously-Many applications have DST deep in the code. I can see the folks that develop things like the Netbackup scheduler (and others) to be freaking. Didn't they just fix bpsched? (again?)

This is spectacular

[A Dafa Disciple]

"How will the IT world handle this change?"

I'll tell you how they'll handle it. They'll handle it the same way they handled Y2K, and that's by offering more jobs for people like me. The increase in demand for employees posessing the special skills needed to fix this problem will subsequently raise the expected salary for software engineers and IT professionals. Under these premises, I'd say this gives us something to toast and look forward to.

I hope that Bush doesn't screw this up by not signing off.

--
I'm not a troll; I'm just a skeptic.

Software yes, hardware no.

[fixer007]

I don't think it will be a huge deal to patch all of the software out there that relies on this. The main problem will be things like VCRs, TVs, watches and such that change the time for you automatically.

It's nice to see the American government coming up with a solution like this instead of concentrating on and suggesting alternate energies.

Really warms the ol' cockles of the heart.

No big deal in *nix

[TommydCat]

While doing work for some telecom companies down in Brazil I ran into this because evidently (depending on province) they pass a resolution each year determining when to start DST and when to come off, usually planning around holidays and the whims of people in those positions. They have suggested dates, but they sometimes vary from year to year.

For most *nix systems, look in /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo for zone definition files. If you're lucky (or have Solaris), there's a src directory in there.

You'll find a README file with a reference to a place with updated zone files.

On the other hand you could try to roll your own like I did for Belo Horizonte and edit the rules in one of the source files (I would think "northamerica" for the US ;)

Do a man zic for more info on compiling and then distributing to other systems.

Re:Why the IAFC is against the change

[ZorinLynx]

I think the issue is, some smoke detectors may fail silently, so it's at least a good idea to have folks mess with them once or twice a year to make sure they still work.

Personally, every couple of years I ignite some paper in a can and hold it under the detector to make sure it actually detects smoke. A test-button may test the alarm, but what about the smoke detecting part?

Just be careful not to burn your house down if you do this. }:)

-Z

Re:Abolish DST

[javaxman]

to be sure, I was joking. Really, I was pointing out the stupidity of time zones in general, as the parent post had.

Just because it ( usually! ) takes a while to cross a time zone now doesn't change the fact that your clock is no longer correct after flying cross-country, even though it has kept correct track of the number of seconds which have past since you left. A clock that just shows GMT is always correct for that locallity, it's the local time elsewhere that's been shifted so that, for whatever reason '8:00 AM" is always morning, even Australia.

That said, I understand why it's done, but it's a convention, and a completely arbitrary one at that.

The idea that there are several places where you can drive a half-mile down the road and have to change your clock to support such an arbitrary convention is more than illogical and annoying. It's downright stupid. I can't imagine what folks do who live near a time zone demarcation line do, although I know what large cities in such a position do- they arbitrarily choose one zone or the other, which just shows how dumb the whole thing is.

Horrible from a Jewish perspective

[thegameiam]

DST is already bad enough from an Orthodox Jewish perspective, because we our holidays and sabbaths start at nightfall, and this makes "night" exceedingly late for much of the year.

The specific case which shows the problem is the Passover Seder, which has to begin after nightfall, and there's about 2 hours of stuff before eating. Right now, about half the time, Passover falls during ST, and starts at a reasonable hour. With this change, it'll be much harder to keep children up to participate. :(

-David Barak

Re:Why the IAFC is against the change

[badasscat]

Just like how everybody laughs at our school systems due to the fact that zero of the American school systems teach any foreign languages until high school while other countries (actually nearly every) teach anywhere from 1 - 3 NEW and NOT FLUENTLY SPOKEN languages to their children right from the get-go (or nearly so).

Well, I went to public school in the US and I learned Spanish and German starting in the 4th grade.

This is the thing about the United States that people from other (smaller) countries don't seem to grasp... and as you illustrate, even a lot of Americans forget it. It's a huge country, and it's very regional. There are 50 states. There are tens of thousands of school districts within those states. Every district does things differently. Is it fair? No. But you can't generalize like this about the US, about almost anything.

I'd be willing to put money down that there are more fluent Spanish-speaking Americans than fluent English-speaking Spaniards, even as a percentage of the population.

Farmers *hate* DST

[billstewart]

Dairy Farmers have traditionally hated DST. Not only do the cows need milking in the morning (which is much easier after sunrise than in the dark), but lots of *real* farmers also have day jobs, either in factories or stores, so if the day job starts an hour earlier during DST, they've got to get up earlier to deal with the cows. Farmers without cows don't care as much.

DST is there to make factory workers get up an hour earlier, without the government having to admit that it's telling everybody to get up earlier in the morning. Rather than messing with the clocks, they *could* just tell the TV stations to run earlier schedules, and most Americans would obey....

There's no reason to set the clock to some other time - during Standard Time, the sun is at its highest at 12 Noon in the middle of the timezone area, and you could just as well leave it there.

Re:Why the IAFC is against the change

[blibbler]

As others have stated, the queen of Canada (and Australia, New Zealand, etc) is not defined as the Queen of England. They just happen to be following the same lineage at the moment.

If the current, shared royal family dies out, there is no reason Canada would adopt the same royal family as England.

Another situation where they could diverge is the sovereign of England is also the Head of the Church of England. In theory, if the Queen (or her successor) converted to Islam, or some other religion, then she would cease to be the Queen of England, but she would remain the Queen of Canada.