Congress Changes Daylight Savings - More Code to be Written
As always, the Dreamhost Blog has a brilliantly funny post about the problems that Congress’s change in DST will have come 2007:
Now we can all sit back, have some fois gras, and laugh.
Or can we?
Not only is fois gras on the outs, maybe you’ve heard that Congress has recently legislated that starting in 2007, Daylight Saving Time will be extended for another four (or sometimes five) weeks!
POW! Just like that!
With less than two years warning, Congress decided to completely re-break what must again be millions of lines of time-related code across pretty much every computer in the world.
So it’s not *so* bad. But it does require a lot of wholesale code changes. The Dreamhost guys wonder why the world made such a huge deal about Y2K, when the coding issue is similar.
From Wikipedia on the changes to DST:
The bill amends the Uniform Time Act of 1966 by changing the start and end dates of daylight saving time starting in 2007. Clocks will be set ahead one hour on the second Sunday of March instead of the current first Sunday of April. Clocks will be set back one hour on the first Sunday in November, rather than the last Sunday of October. This will affect accuracy of electronic clocks that had pre-programmed dates for adjusting to daylight saving time. The date for the end of daylight saving time has the effect of increasing evening light on Halloween (October 31).
Again, one might ask, “Paul, what does this have to do with the law?” (And that’s because most people think of technology-related law as always IP. But it’s not.) The government made a change in DST, shortening the time our days are lengthened. This has energy policy ramifications–the obvious reasoning behind it–but it also shows how legislation, and not just regulation, has real impacts upon the business of operating technology.