March madness continues in U.S., Canada, etc.

Paul Eggert eggert at CS.UCLA.EDU
Tue Mar 6 20:57:40 UTC 2007


For the next week or so we can expect to see a lot more publicity
about the impending daylight-saving change in the U.S., Canada,
etc., which first hits our clocks Sunday (typically at 02:00).
Google News currently lists about 1700 news articles on the
subject of "daylight saving", and we can expect that number to
climb.

Nobody has time to read all this stuff, but here are a few
selected items, if you care for this sort of thing.  (Disclaimer:
I contributed to some of them.)


Lists of vendor advisories:

   http://www.calconnect.org/dstlinks.html
   http://www.reganfamily.ca/dst/


There is now a Wikipedia page just for this event, which contains
more vendor advisories (one for the tz database itself!):

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y2K7#Zoneinfo


A good summary of Y2K7, suitable for non-techies, is:

  Steve Lohr, "Time change a 'mini-Y2K in tech terms", New York Times
  <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05daylight.html?em&ex=1173330000&en=cf53c03ce99aa2d7&ei=5087%0A>
  (2007-03-05).


Gartner has estimated IT costs between $500 million and $1 billion; see

  Ben Arnoldy, "Latest computer glitch: daylight saving time",
  Christian Science Monitor
  <http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0307/p02s01-stct.html> (2007-03-07).


In an informal poll taken yesterday at a Computerworld IT
conference, 52% of respondents said that they were done with
upgrading, 39% said they're not done yet, 4% said they hadn't even
started (!), and 4% said they didn't know the change was coming
(!!).  The related story said that Microsoft is still issuing
patches.

   Todd R. Weiss, "Premier 100: Conference attendees deal with
   daylight-saving time fixes from afar", Computerworld
   <http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9012363&intsrc=hm_list>
   (2007-03-06).


PG&E, the main utility in northern California, estimated that it'd
take $38 million for them to upgrade their meters to account for
daylight-saving time.  Instead, they got permission from the
California Public Utilities Commission to change their billing
algorithm during the affected period -- i.e., they changed the
rules rather than fixing their clocks.

  Paul McDougall, "PG&E Says Patching Meters For An Early
  Daylight-Saving Time Will Cost $38 Million", InformationWeek
  <http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197700487>
  (2007-03-01)



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