Daylight Savings: Time After Time
I know it's silly, but one of the slickest features that I remember encountering during one of my many past Windows CE-based portable system (Handheld PC, Pocket PC, Smartphone) transitions is that my new widget auto-determined when Daylight Savings Time was in effect and, based on my location, appropriately altered the system time setting. Great feature….but it's about to break, courtesy of the Energy Policy Act of August 2005, which pushed back the start of DST to the second Sunday of March (March 11 this year, three weeks earlier than before) and pushed forward the end of DST to the first Sunday of November (November 4 this year, one week later than before), in the controversial hope that doing so would reduce the country's energy consumption. Canada has also instituted this DST extension, although Mexico has not.
A number of Microsoft operating systems are, perhaps obviously, affected by this shift. This document on the MS website is a good jumping-off point for the company's patch strategy, which covers Windows XP and Windows Vista, including their embedded and server O/S variants (note, Windows 9x, Windows ME and Windows NT are not being patched, nor is Windows 2000 except for folks with Extended Hotfix Support plans), along with Windows CE and its various Windows Mobile derivatives. I'm glad to see that Outlook 2000 (which I'm still running) is being patched, even though the office suite it comes from is many years old at this point. If you're still running an older Microsoft O/S, this Slashdot thread (along with, come to think of it, this one) may be of interest. Also see this previous Slashdot coverage for background.
DST transitions will be old news for Indiana residents (go Purdue!), most of whom began observing it for the first time last year. And they aren't unique to North American residents; western Australia began a three-year DST trial last month. Microsoft seems to have its act together, at least for recent operating system and application revisions. How do DST changes affect your in-development and already-in-the-field systems, and what are you doing about them? Less than two months to go until the first early DST start….tick tock….analogies to the Y2K bug are apt, although this time around I don't think the potential impact of the issue will be quite so severe. Or maybe I'm wrong….
On that note, and if it's any consolation, you're not the only one having time-related problems. Check out this series of links that describe why the NASA Space Shuttle doesn't fly through a New Year transition:
