DST vs IT

Time Change a ‘Mini-Y2K’ in Tech Terms – New York Times:

For the roughly 7,000 public companies in the United States, Mr. Hammond estimates the total cost of making computer fixes to deal with the daylight saving time shift at more than $350 million. “It’s causing a lot of corporate technology people sleepless nights,” he said.

…

The 2005 energy bill gives Congress the option of repealing the daylight saving time extension, if energy savings are not achieved.

In my opinion, Congress repealing the DST extension would be another unnecessary headache. So, all you out there, lets save several billion in energry costs so that the extension will stay in place. Otherwise, next year we might be doing this again. 🙁

A disappointing aspect of this article is why IT is scrambling. Patches for several computer vendors were released very recently. So people in IT only have a several weeks to test, verify, and implement. We’ve found that after applying Sun’s Time Zone Updater, dates moved. Though the testing has been confusing as each test gave us different results (first only one set of dates moved, then everything moved, and lastly about hald dates moved – only for dates between March 11 and April 1).

This does feel like a bad early April Fool’s joke by Congress.