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Prepared for Next Year's Time Change?
wohlford puts forth this query: "Next year, daylight saving time will be extended another four weeks. Slashdot has covered the time change proposal and its estimated impact, already. Since then it has been signed into law. Looking around on the Net I don't see anyone taking this seriously. Will this become the next tech doomsday or just another joke like Y2K?"
It's only the US, who cares?
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
Changes to daylight savings time start and end times are hardly a big deal. In Australia it happens all the time. Just this year, daylight savings time was extended by a week in March, and no planes fell out of the sky. About half the computers I used updated and showed the real time, and the other half (including some apparently independent clocks that were set by some remote mechanism) switched back early and were an hour slow. Everyone coped just fine.
Most people know what hour it is anyway, so it's only important computer systems that matter. And if Microsoft can have a patch for two states and one territory in a relatively small country, then they can have a patch for the vast majority of their home country...
Absolutely nothing to worry about. Just enjoy the extra daylight in the evening!
Look out!
Quick: the current local time when I made this post was 00:30 -- how long ago was that? If I scheduled a conference call at my local time 11:00 that ends at my local time 12:00, what your-local-time time will you have lunch? If I don't live in the Western Hemisphere and am online starting at 16:00 until 2:00, can you make a profile for my corporate intranet data page that (in a non-confusing way) makes it obvious to my global co-workers that, while I log on on Monday (my time) and stay online continuously until Tuesday (my time), that I'm actually only online for ten hours?
They are two different systems, and each has its advantages. They both require some additional information to get the full picture: one needs extra info (amount of sunlight) to determine local time of day, and one needs extra info (location) to determine amount of time lapsed.
I'm not trying to make a case for or against either, I'm just saying calm down.
The original Win98, as I recall, came with a timezone editor on the original CD although it didn't install by default. I'm not sure whether it was included on the Win98SE CD, but if not the older one would probably still work. The program you're looking for is tzedit.exe and a quick search of the CD should show whether or not it is there.
Otherwise, Googling "timezone editor" came up with what looked like several alternatives and a link to a Microsoft KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317211 which doesn't address this specific problem but does talk about using the timezone editor for another purpose, implicitly stating that there is a timezone editor available for many versions of Windows, and presumable also Win98SE.
It should be pretty simple to make the appropriate changes. It should be pretty simple for someone to automate the process too. I might even have a go at it myself even though the change doesn't affect me at all (being in the UK).
Most atomic clocks don't have rules for when to switch to DST. They just use the code from the time from NIST, which includes a flag to indicate whether DST is in effect or not. As long as NIST changes when they include the DST flag, Atomic clocks should switch to DST on the correct day.