Daylight Savings Change Could Spell Doom For The World (Well, For An Hour, Anyway)
from the come-on dept
As predicted a few weeks ago, stories of doom-and-gloom about the forthcoming Daylight Savings Time changes causing all sorts of computer chaos are starting to pile up. All the stories compare the potential for damage to the Y2K bug, which turned out to be largely overblown, and if anything, it's hard to imagine anything too earth-destroying coming from some computers' clocks running an hour slow. Indeed, the real problem here appears that it will be little more than one of annoyance, such as people forgetting about the time change, then turning up somewhere an hour late, realizing the problem, then changing the time on their watch or PDA or PC or whatever. But, somehow, if the scare stories started last month and are stacking up now, we imagine they'll just get worse and worse in the run-up to the change in March.
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Arctic Daylight
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Re: Arctic Daylight
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Re: Re: Arctic Daylight
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Re: Arctic Daylight
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Re: Re: Arctic Daylight
Since when does Alabama use Metric?
They don't, the dorpus is just a crank.
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Re: Arctic Daylight
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In case you don't believe me
http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=35211
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A TINY bit bigger than it's put here...
It's them being wrong an hour for a few weeks.
Time is money...
*idly wonders if DST is the answer to inflation, shrugs*
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Re: A TINY bit bigger than it's put here...
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"The computers change automatically" do they? How do you think that happens, moron? That's what the article is about...!
The Y2K bug (y3k is still 993 years away) didn't hit as hard as it could have, because a lot of people spent a lot of time preparing for it.
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Re: Y2K
JP wrote:
The next chance for the bug to occur is 2100, not 3000. It was a century bug, not a millennium bug.
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Daylight SAVING time
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Re: Daylight SAVING time
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Re:
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I remember y2k...
There were a few amusing glitches; Auckland airport announced (after waiting a few hours to be sure) that Midnight had passed without incident. The posting was dated "02:58 1 Jan 100"
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dorpus
but now that i have your attention...i propose that since we can save daylight, why not go all out?.. save temperature...we raise the thermometer reading by ten degrees in late fall.....a freezing day in january becomes an almost balmy 42 degress. then come spring we subtract ten degrees.. the 98 degree july day would be lowered to a comfortable 88...im going to call Bush.
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Re: dorpus
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Farmers
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Billing
Whilst the issue is WELL known in areas where the change is occuring, it is NOT well known in other areas.
The issue will come with international time based billing services, and I can be almost certain that issues will occur, and it will cost people money.
Furthermore, there isn't such a good fix for this problem - time servers have fixed slotted time zones, they will not be aware of the change, and with many time dependant services out there, one will have to:
- patch the time server, and client
- stop time correction services
- correct all interactions with all other proprietary systems
I know of at least 20 telecommunications networks globally that due to lack of support for the networks (X.25 based paknet, some Smartzone systems and many others) these software issues will not be fixed, and I also know of at least a few areas where major billing mistakes could arise as a product of the time alterations.
The biggest issue will occur in the instances where 'automatic time correction' occurs, as it is more like to become 'automatic time mis-correction' from now on - leading to a loss of 'base-truth' in the logs - which means the billing information cannot be reliably recovered.
In this event the carriers loose legal standing to bill for that usage, as most would require 'base-truth' proof that calls occured, which is now no longer held to be reliable.
Life or death issue? I hope not...
Expensive? Most probably.
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Extended DST Effects
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Early Time Change
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Y2K overblown!?
Just letting you know that Y2K was only "overblown" because we were able to fix it in time. The same thing goes for this DST thing: it's already been fixed (for several months in some cases) in many affected areas such as the C library (GNU libc for example, as well as uClibc (used in embedded devices usually) and even Microsoft's C library in some more recent versions of Windows) where the timezone files are maintained (see /usr/share/zoneinfo/ on Debian-based systems at least) and even Sun's Java libraries (which also implement the timezones independently of libc).
Once we hit daylight saving time this year, most things will continue to work without a problem, and people will wonder why this got "blown out of proportion". Sure, fixing the timezone issue this time around is far easier than maintaining decades-old code and updating their use of year values (along with all the data associated with it in some cases, ugh), but the general public doesn't know that...
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Those that comment on the Y2K issue being overblown probably have not thought through all of the issues either. Most companies didn't even have an inventory of all of their systems before Y2K. When 911 happened, the work that was done for Y2K was invaluable in the recovery after 911. Companies had upgraded their systems, mapped out their architecture, improved their networks. Had that Y2K work not been done, recovering in the aftermath of 911 would have been much harder and taken a lot longer.
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It would have been bad, if not for all that work.
Annoys me to no end when people say "Y2K was overblown" as a blanket statement. Certainly there were fear-mongering greedy scam artists out there... and there was a LOT of very good work to make it a non-event.
Is early DST as much risk as Y2K? I think not. Some risk? Yeah...
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Re: Y2K overblown!?
1. Y2K wasn't a century problem, it wasn't a millenium problem, it was an epoch transition problem. My favorite demo was -- and still is -- showing all the flaws in Microsoft Excel in handling transitions across epochs.
2. Y2K was, as several have pointed out, a nonevent because of lots of hard work by lots of folks to make up for shortcomings in their forebears, the invariable charlatanage notwithstanding. We did our jobs well: by Sat PM, Jan 1, 2000, customer was racing to me begging for "at least one failure" to prove that the massive expenditures had been worthwhile. Fortunately, we'd obliged, in the form of a 286-based Sync Research X.25 PAD (R.I.P.) that had been soft-disconnected from the network and replaced online but not physically removed as the planned site visit on Dec 31 busted when the local contact with the TELCO closet keys was out sick. Said PAD failed hard at roughly 2am, but subsequent forensics were unable to discern the cause of that failure: the logs were complete gibberish. Yes, I suppose it _could_ have been coincidence. Right.
3. Y2K was a big deal because it wasn't just an hour, it was a year, a day, all time forever (pick one). We saved folks' houses from sheriff's seizures that would've happened had preforeclosure payments not been properly recorded the fact that liens coming due had been satisfied. Etc.
4. "A non-event"? Would you consider a bunch of your checks' bouncing because your deposit timestamp was off by an hour a non-event? There was (in Y2K) and is (with DST) lots of potentials like that, and more (some have been noted above in previous postings to this thread). One key area is that many of the patches only apply to current or very recent versions of software; anyone running the old stuff (e.g., earlier PeopleSoft versions) may well be on their own.
There IS a positive side of a sort to EDST. Those planning certain nefarious schemes (e.g., visiting the mistress, slaying the MIL) get a bonus hour to cover their butts with alibis, as long as the deed's done on March 11. "That tollbooth timestamp showing my client was on the LIE right before his dear departed mother-in-law was murdered, your Honor, is a baldfaced lie, as it's a fact that no computer system can have been trusted with correct timestamps on March 11 because of the confusion surrounding the early conversion to Daylight Savings Time. My client was home in bed. I move for dismissal with prejudice."
QED
Where
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dst
really care?
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