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'Daylight Savings Bugs' Loom
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has front page coverage of the looming daylight savings changeover, and the bugs that may crop up this year. With the extension of daylight savings time by four weeks, some engineers and programmers are warning that unprepared companies will experience serious problems in March. While companies like Microsoft have already patched their software, Gartner is warning that bugs in the travel and banking sectors could have unforeseen consequences in the coming months. ' In addition, trading applications might execute purchases and sales at the wrong time, and cell phone-billing software could charge peak rates at off-peak hours. On top of that, the effect is expected to be felt around the world: Canada and Bermuda are conforming to the U.S.-mandated change, and time zone shifts have happened in other locales as well.'" Is this just more Y2K doomsaying, or do you think there's a serious problem here?
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/wiki/DST_Time_Chan ge_Issues
A year ago, after most of Indiana went through its first timezone change in 40+ years, we found out that it presented a few problems in Linux, I tried to post a story to Slashdot about it to warn other people in the US that they would be dealing with this problem later when the rest of the US changes to the new DST. I tried several times to post it and they were all rejected.
Basically, you need to make sure that if you change your timezone data on your system that you restart everything, otherwise when the time does change, some programs continue to use the old timezone data and are an hour off.
The reason y2k was such a letdown was because everybody took heed of the media hype and patched their stuff. If there had been no hype before, there might have been the problems that the hype was warning about. (or not, sensationalism is sensationalism)
Its like you're driving along and there's a huge backup for miles because of an accident in the middle of the road after a bend. Now this huge backup may have slowed you down and made you aware that there was a problem. If it was just you and the wreck, you may have plowed into it if you weren't paying attention.
Same thing with this hype. We should tolerate the hype because the heightened coverage will get bosses talking to programmers about fixing the software, and it'll turn out to be nothing.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
> date --date="Mar 10 15:00:00 UTC 2007"
Sat Mar 10 10:00:00 EST 2007
> date --date="Mar 11 15:00:00 UTC 2007"
Sun Mar 11 11:00:00 EDT 2007
This won't set your clock or anything, it just does the timezone conversion from UTC and displays the results according to the local timezone you have selected.