Daylight-Saving Switch May Cause Tech Woes (Mini Y2K?)

[RamboLiberal]

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/08/07/national/a134156D73.DTL&type=science

When daylight-saving time starts earlier than usual in the United States come 2007, your VCR or DVD recorder could start recording shows an hour late.

Cell phone companies could give you an extra hour of free weekend calls, and people who depend on online calendars may find themselves late for appointments.

An energy bill President Bush is to sign Monday would start daylight time three weeks earlier and end it a week later as an energy-saving measure.

And that has technologists worried about software and gadgets that now compensate for daylight time based on a schedule unchanged since 1987.

[ThoughtCriminal]

1. Maybe Congress should start READING

the stuff they pass.

[girl gone mad]

33. This is a good thing.

I'm all for extending daylight savings time. It will help make a dent in our energy consumption.

It seems like it's just a matter of getting the word out. I seriously doubt the change is going to cause any major problems.

[merwin]

2. Yes, it may/will affect existing devices, but it's not going to affect

phone companies, etc. It would be against the law for them to keep and/or give to customers phone records that are an hour late or early.

[RamboLiberal]

3. It's going to cost businesses and the phone company

$$$$$$ to change and test their software. Bet a lot of offshore software companies are celebrating!

[Ouabache]

4. They can hire a few hundred thousand Indian programmers

a few weeks before hand to fix it all. They will probably get a tax break from Bushco to pay for it too.

[dogman]

6. Do you know how much free standing equipment will be affected?

Many of these will require chip changes and some will be replaced. As noted we did a lot of this for Y2K.

[dogman]

5. As someone who works with time-based equipment, this was my first

thought. It will cost the public millions of dollars in software upgrades and equipment replacements. Also manpower to manually reset time. Before the recent standardization this was a common problem. Why were no impact statements prepared? Or were they?

[Massacure]

7. I'm glad all my clocks and software can be set manually!

[TrogL]

26. How about your operating system?

How about your digital watch? Mine switches over automatically.

[BiggJawn]

28. We're gonna have it hard enough here in Indiana

..Just trying to FIGURE OUT this Daylight Wasting Time bullshit...

I guess everyone will have to do the way we do when our gizmos try to go to DWT on us. We set 'em MANUALLY.

[UDenver20]

8. Actually...

Moving the parameters that define daylight savings time isn't that bad of an idea. In fact, I think its a pretty clever way to cut back on energy consumption.

I can't even begin to fathom how much energy (which is still, unfortunately, primarily drawn from non-renewable sources) that this will save.

I still hate the bastard, and I'm sure this wasn't his idea, but its an idea - a good idea - an idea from outside the box. Now if we could just get people to take the kind of measures that we need to take to make a noticable impact on our destruction of the environment.

[napi21]

12. You tell me just how this is going to save energy???

From a very personal view point, I get up in the morning in time to listen to WJ on cspan, I listen to CNN (mostly) all day, watch mostly sitcoms in the evening, and the Daily Show at 11PM. The entire time, my computer is on 24/7 and I stream AAR, all day and KGO starting at 1AM EST until I fall asleep around 3AM or later.

Most of my friends arise around 7 or 8 AM, also watch TV a lot during the day, and don't retire until the wee hours of the AM.

Just where is the advantage here????

[UDenver20]

20. Well, since you asked so nicely...

The savings would come by reducing energy usage during summer hours - specifically by reducing the average amount of energy used by every HVAC unit that is (1) set on a timer (2) set to maintain a constant temperature after or before a specific time.

One hour of energy conservation, over three weeks (on each end), will add up to be a huge number. You think the energy lobby didn't fight this one hard?

If the 9-5 work day started at what would now be considered 8:00 (before the outside temp. has begun to rise to its highest levels) and ended at what would now be considered 4:00, then that's one hour of "lighter" HVAC energy consumption in the AM and one hour of less HVAC energy consumption in the evening.

Expand it to larger public buildings, airports, malls, etc - the same theory holds true. It will only work for buildings set on a timer or set to maintain a specific temperature, but those numbers have got to be huge.

Here are some sights that may give you more info:

http://www.energy.ca.gov/daylightsaving.html

http://geography.about.com/cs/daylightsavings/a/dst.htm

http://encarta.msn.com/column_daylightsavingtime_marthahome/Daylight-Saving_Time_What's_the_Point.html

In the mean time, would you mind turning some of that stuff off when you're not using it?

[Mr. Peanut]

29. Congress sticks its finger in your clocks

In the name of business, Bush extends DST and doesn’t care who it hurts.

Write your congress people:

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/issuesaction/alertlist/?issue=16&submit.x=25&submit.y=6

It doesn’t take effect until 2007, so we must begin fighting now. Congress needs to start from scratch on a new energy plan and throw this wasteful, pork-ridden bill out the window.

Daylight Saving Time

The new bill extends Daylight Saving Time (DST) by four weeks - pushing the beginning date to the second Sunday in March and extending DST to the first Sunday in November, taking it beyond Halloween ....

Some groups, including children's safety advocates, are concerned about this change, however, citing safety risks related to children walking to school in darkness. "They would have trouble crossing the street, drivers might not see them, and abductions would be easier," said Anne Weselak, president of the National Parent Teacher Association. On the other hand, those in favor of the change are retailers and recreation groups, including the Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association and the National Golf Course Owners Association, which expect a boom in business and economic benefits from the four extra weeks a year of longer days.

Source: American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

http://petrochemical.ihs.com/news-05Q3/ansi-2005-energy-bill-standards.jsp

[all.of.me]

9. he can't sign anything!

he's on vacation! that's what he told cindy sheehan, anyway.... :crazy:

[Sgent]

10. Congress

new when the passed this that this was merely a "statement". Total oil savings for those two months is something like 1.2million barrels / yr. Sound like a lot until you relize that we use 20million/day.

Of course there was no impact statement. Why would there need to be an inpact statement -- this is the administration that doesn't like unfunded mandates (barf).

[BootinUp]

11. just a wee bit overblown. n/t

[karlrschneider]

13. Well, maybe but there are many many millions of Microsoft GUIs in place

that will have wrong times. All Windoze are based on the old date scheme...

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. Windows is relatively easy to fix

This would just be another time zone scheme, and Windows has to be able to cope with lots of those already, with different dates for switching to and from daylight savings. Windows also has well-tested and used methods of getting software updates.

It's free-standing electronics that aren't designed to be flexible around the world that will have a problem.

[htuttle]

18. I'm sure Microsoft would enjoy the profits

Too many people still running old versions of windows? What a great way to clear out the dead wood. Make millions of the machines obsolete in a in single stroke by having the government CONTROL TIME!!! Muwahawahahwha! What a brilliantly devious plan to make even more profit for Bill Gates!

I would bet my last dollar they are not going to release an update for anything but the newest version of Windows (certainly not for anything sold before the 'Genuine Windows Validation' scheme was built in).

This change will screw a LOT of people. There is a lot of hardware out there in the business world running in 'end of life' mode. In other words, stuff that's obsolete, but still running old sofware quite adequately until the hardware breaks down. And it doesn't break down fast enough for Gate's purposes (among others), so somehow it appears that Congress is going to help him out.

Not just Windows users are screwed by this. I have old Macs running OSX Server 1.2 that can't be upgraded due to the software I need to run it, but Windows users are screwed the worst. Luckily in my case, I have cron to help me out on this...

[muriel_volestrangler]

22. I'd have thought OS X would adapt to this easily

Maybe that version is based on a too-old UNIX, but all it should take is changing the TZ environment variable. Modern UNIXes (I think all of the major ones, anyway) allow you to specify the dates in the variable when you change too and from daylight savings, to override the default rules. You might be able to do it without anything from Apple at all. All times should internally be recorded as GMT in a UNIX-based system anyway - unless Apple have really screwed around with it. TZ is just used to decide how to display the time.

Since computers have to allow for different dates already (the EU already changes on different dates than the US, and tropical and southern hemisphere countries have a different requirement), this should be no more difficult than adding support for a different country. A refusal by Gates to do so would count as outrageous monopoly abuse. I would sincerely think that one Microsoft programmer could do the software change in an afternoon, and it would be a tiny change - you could distribute it on floppy disk, as well as via the net. They'd need to do a lot of testing on top of that, of course (though you sometimes wonder how much they do ...), but that will be largely automated anyway.

Also, there will be a six month window when you can pick any time you like to switch over, possibly without even having to reboot.

[htuttle]

23. That might work

If nothing else does, I can always have cron jump to the right time at the right time, as I mentioned. It's a pain, but fixable for me.

However, Microsoft put Windows 2000 into 'extended support' mode this summer. That means only the most crucial updates will be released from now on. I wouldn't be too surprised if they stopped supporting it with updates entirely by the time 2007 rolls around. As for anything earlier, forget it. It doesn't matter how easy the update would be to write -- there's no profit in fixing Win 95 and earlier, so they won't.

And since 2007 is right around when they'll be pushing 'Longhorn', I can't see them spending one iota of effort to help people out who don't (or can't) upgrade to at least XP. Especially when the machines they would be supporting would be ones that don't have the 'Genuine Windows Validation' copy protection built in (which just kicked in this summer, IIRC).

Outrageous monoply abuse? Microsoft's answer: Sure -- and whatta ya gonna go about it?

[Wabbajack]

15. This pisses me off

why the hell do we need daylight savings time at all? Just wake up earlier/later.

[cubschicago]

21. Farmers n/t

[Wabbajack]

25. If they want to wake with the sun.

They can take the 10 seconds it takes to find out what when sunrise is gonna be the next day. End of "problem".

[mopinko]

16. this is nothing like y2k

i am not that geeky, but y2k had to do with not actually having data fields for 2 extra digits, and not having those extra digits as part of calculations. this is not even that. it is a matter of changing a date. maybe a little inconvenient, but it is not going to take more that 15 minutes for most systems. how long does it take you to reset the time on your pc? how hard is it? very overblown.

[Toucano]

17. Planes will fall from the sky and Jesus will return, too. n/t

[Ilsa]

19. My husband and all the other computer programmers

were on call 12/31/99-1/1/00. They didn't get a single call. We wasted a perfectly good opportunity to get wasted.

[Xithras]

24. Won't cause nearly the problems because the backends are usually GMT

The real problem with Y2K wasn't the cellphones and VCR's, it was the backend services and databases that managed everything from your bank account balance to your telephone bill. In my experience, most of these systems already operate using GMT or the local standard time equivalent, and do their date conversions on the fly. Altering those conversions should be trivial.

What will be inevitably annoying, of course, is all of the buggy crap written in the "RAD"-era late 90's. Poorly written, poorly documented software that hardcodes things like DST conversions and fails to provide the user with the opportunity to correct any errors will certainly be a pain in the @55 for a few weeks.

[TankLV]

27. Well, with the REPUKES in control of everything, you can be sure this will

turn into one big clusterfuck with no "reach-around" either.

The DEMOCRATS made sure the Y2K episode came out pretty good.

The repukes will screw it all up, cost billions, and then charge more to "fix" it - with only repuke corporation somehow "qualified" and "experienced" (cooincidentally, don't ya know!) to do ALL of the work - no Democratic corps need apply.

[ramapo]

30. Stupid morons never learn

Extended DST was in force for a time as a response to the energy crisis' of the '70s. After a bunch of kids were run over in the morning darkness, the start/end dates of DST were adjusted. DST already starts earlier and runs later than it did previous to the 1970s.

How this is going to save any significant amount of energy is beyond me.
This is the lamest conservation policy anybody could dream up.

There will be extensive confusion amongst our software and gadgets, I'm sure with a corresponding economic cost.

Just another f..ing stupid piece of bullshit legislation.

[Psephos]

31. The effects will be EVERY BIT as catastrophic as Y2K lol

Plus, the extra hour of daylight will kill everyone's lawn. Heh.

Peace.

[bdot]

32. It's gonna cause depression woes for me.

I sleep in the day so less sunlight is better. Plus sunlight causes me to feel depressed. I'm more alive in the darkness.