Slashdot Mirror
Preparing Your Datacenters for DST Changes?
Cheeze asks: "As I am sure some of you know, Daylight Saving Time is slated to change this year thanks to The Energy Policy Act of 2005. This means nothing to the large majority of the population except they will either sleep late one day or have to commute in the dark. To a select few, this is a crunch time akin to the Y2K fiasco, only there has been almost zero publicity recently. These select few are the ones responsible for updating the millions of computers, both servers and workstations, with the new time zone information. For newer servers, this usually means just install a patch and reboot (which is slightly more than mildly inconvenient). For older servers, this is basically an 'End of Life' declaration. Servers running software for which no patch is available will be unable to update their own clocks. This doesn't seem like such a big deal until you realize Microsoft is only offering patches for Windows XP and beyond, and Sun will not be supporting Solaris 7 and older. That should knock a large percentage of the computers 1 hour off for a few weeks this spring. What are you doing in your datacenters to prepare?"
In the US, move your servers to Arizona or eastern Indiana or Hawaii or Alaska, so you don't have to deal with time zone changes anymore.
-ez
I'm more concerning of a switch back to the old DST (the one we had in 2006) if they decide it's the energy saving isn't good enough. How difficult would it be to unpatch out systems?
I just got my servers switched over from the Julien to the Gregorian calender. Now this. When will it ever end.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Out of deference to the events in 2001, the number 911 should be reserved for unique use (in North America) of the emergency services telephone number, it's use in all other contexts... 13 could be included in the ban to standardize current practices. Most high rises do not have a thirteenth floor, and Friday the 13th would cease to be a problem. No price, by law, for any item will ever be 13 or 911 dollars, except on march 13th (except when that would fall on a friday, in which case it would be a slip year), and September 11th, when those prices will be allowed. No use of the numbers 13 or 911 will be permitted in architectural or engineering diagrams of any kind, for fear offending those who lost loved ones on that terrible day.
The impact on counting should be very minor, as I personally lived in an apartment on 12B for many years, and there was no cost to this. A few if statements here and there. Sure, there are some complications,
Look, for example at the daylight savings time, how simple it is to understand that on some days of the year, there are 23 hours, (where there is no 3:12 am.) and on others, there are 25 hours (where there are two 3:12 am's.) but only in some places, sometimes, depending on what the local government says.
It is great to change how people count... dollars, dimensions, hours, to serve political or societal goals. It makes life better for everyone. Much simpler than changing prices or opening hours to serve them. All we need to do is pass a law, and change the way we count. Simple and practical so that no one has to keep track.
You should have been around for the BC to AD conversion.
We thought we were going to be fine with that here, as we had some wise men who worked out when they were going to start. We were planning on just using an integer for number of years:positive for AD, negative for BC. However, some idiot politician somewhere decided to start labelling the years at 1 instead of 0, so now we've got an out-by-one bug every time you try to do a calculation that crosses the AD/BC boundary.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Obviously you're not a parent...
I am billdar, and I approve this message.