Some of you may be interested in the pending changes to U.S. daylight saving time.

http://blogs.msdn.com/karinm/archive...nightmare.aspx

thaibill

Internet Tablets should be OK

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/list...s/16967?#16967

While most of us will see this, and there could be some issues with servers that are time sensitive, the majority of home users should be fine as long as they're computers are up to date on all the patches.

I've been dealing with this at work for the last three weeks. Not just on the linux boxes I control, but also the windows boxes. You can get patches for almost everything. Some things microsoft won't have patches for until a couple of days before the change.

There are going to be some unsupported computers out there, like NT and 98, but I'm sure someone will come up with a patch on their own even if MS doesn't.

I'm sure you mean

"While most of us will see this in the US"

I suspect this won't be a problem for most of us (I'm taking a punt here that "most" of us aren't in the US of A!)

Yup, we on the other side like to make up our own problems ourselves :-)

No I mean most of us, how many sites do you visit on a daily basis have NON-US servers? There are other countries besides the US that are doing DST changes as well. I know Europe isn't, but Australia is.

Non-US servers? Most sites I visit are non-US based actually, and the time being slightly off on a thread posting is not unusual nor is it something I would be at all worried about. Really, a forum server using the wrong daylight saving setting wouldn't even register on my "Concerned" radar!

If the Aussies are making a DST change as well, I can only assume they're not making such a big song and dance about it.

It's like Y2K all over again...

A lot of people are making it out to be the new y2k, I read an article about that over the weekend. Forums no, not a big issue, but sites that involve money (amazon comes to mind)... Server logs that like to choke on time changes (they're rare, but they exist).

I do think that there are people out there that are making it a bigger mole-hill than it needs to be though ( I wasn't trying to be one of those when I said most of us would see it though, most likely as you said, we'll see it and say ok, have to fix that later). Oh and the Aussies did it last year too, they're just tweaking it this year.

Having worked for global financial organisations all my life you accept DST and BST (British Summer Time) changes as a fact of life - you build systems so that they don't fall over or even flinch whenever the time changes locally or in another part of the world. You build systems that carry on working whether the US is 4, 5 or 6 hours behind GMT (I typically use EDT/EST as a basis for US-time as NYC is the financial center for the US).

The time changing in the US a few weeks earlier this year shouldn't affect any reasonably well designed system, as long as all the relevant timezone patches have been applied (where necessary - this change has been know about for quite some time so new installs shouldn't need patching at all).

It's definately worth knowing that the time is changing so the publicity here and everywhere else is a good thing, but it really should turn out to be a total non-event if sys admins have done their job.