Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?
So if you needed proof that the United States government is lost, clueless, or even mildly retarded when the subject of technology comes up, and Ted Steven's tubes were not enough for you, allow me to introduce you to the latest blunder our fine federal friends have now added to the list.
Because the government felt the appearance of doing something about energy consumption in the United States was preferable to actually doing something about energy consumption in the United States, we are about to suffer through a period of about three weeks during which no one will actually know if any clock, computer, or other device that uses and keeps track of the time is correct.
Daylight Saving Time was first experimented with during World War I, and since 1986, DST has come and gone in this country on the first Sunday in April and the last Sunday in October. Not every part of the country honors DST, but the vast majority of the land has lived by "Spring Forward, Fall Back." Now, in 2007, The Energy Policy Act of 2005 has mandated the first change in 20 years to DST, changing the start date to the second Sunday in March, and the end date to the first Sunday in November.
"So what," you say, "we've lived through changes in DST before, and the Energy Policy Act says that no later than nine months after the 2007 changes go into effect, the energy savings must be documented or the rules will revert to the older rules." Well, I say, we now live in a soup of gizmos that need to know the time, cell phones and PDAs and DVRs and computers and such. Many of these devices can get UTC time (Universal Coordinated Time, the reference standard time) from network or radio sources, but the timezone rules from which they determine the actual local time is hard coded into their built-in programming. Those rules have now changed, and we are now left with a situation in which some devices know about the new rules but many don't.
Here's a scenario in which this will be an issue:
Andrew in LA creates a meeting for a conference call on March 20th at 1:00PM (13:00) Pacific Daylight Time in Outlook and invites Betty in LA, and Charles and Donna in Chicago. Andrew and Donna, right-thinking nerds, have updated their computers with the latest DST patches, Betty and Charles, slackers both, have not. When Andrew enters the event, it is translated by the Exchange server into 20:00 UTC and transmitted to the invitees. When Donna receives the event, her computer knows that March 20th is now in DST, and correctly displays the event time at 3:00PM Central Daylight Time. However, Betty and Charles see the event as being in Standard Time, and so think they have signed up for a call at 12:00PM and 2:00PM, respectively.
This is just one case, using one common piece of software. Think about how many proprietary, poorly-maintained pieces of software there are out there, controlling everything we depend on from pipelines to traffic signals. As of now, Apple is not patching Mac OS X 10.2 or earlier, and Microsoft has not made patches available for Windows 2000 or XP SP1.
So the next question is, "what now?" I honestly don't know. I don't think this will be as big a deal as Y2K, but we started thinking about that problem years in advance. This one has kind of snuck up on people, and it has the potential to create annoyance, confusion, and even some real hardship (missed a plane lately?). And for no good reason. We did this to ourselves.
Links for further info:
http://www.calconnect.org/dstdocs.html
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_topissues
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305056
Photo by peevee@ds via Flickr