Back when Congress brought the Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling to new heights in the form of extending Daylight Saving Time, I asked the following:
We all know the obvious cost of Daylight Savings Time: the physical exertion of having to change all our clocks twice a year. What are some of the other costs of the program or, more importantly, of changing it? I can think of one: computer operating systems such as Microsoft Windows will have to be updated to change the scheduling of DST. Who can think of others?
Well, this guy thought of some others:
Cameron Haight, a Gartner Inc. analyst who has studied the potential effects of the daylight-saving bug, said it might force transactions occurring within one hour of midnight to be recorded on the wrong day. Computers might serve up erroneous information about multinational teleconference times and physical-world appointments.
…
Further confounding matters, there are lots of old computer programs whose original vendors don’t support them anymore, meaning there’s no repair available. Some gadgets, such as VCR clocks, may not have any mechanism to update their software.Also, the change originated in the United States and is being followed in Canada, but not most other nations. That could befuddle conferencing systems and other applications that run in multiple countries at once.
I, meanwhile, wasn’t creative enough to anticipate much else other than Windows:
Microsoft planned to send its daylight-saving patch to Windows PCs with the “automatic update” feature Tuesday. Users with automatic updates turned off should download the patch from Microsoft. (New machines running Windows Vista are immune, since Vista was finalized after the 2005 law passed.)However, computers running anything older than the most recent version of Windows XP, known as Service Pack 2, no longer get this level of tech support.
All to save, at most, 1/120 of 1% of our annual oil consumption.
“Energy independence will never be more urgent than “politician independence.”
More thoughts from EclectEcon.
2 responses so far ↓
Link Chris // Feb 15, 2007 at 12:49 am
Y2K was a yawn – DST is causing me more headaches than I will ever admit.
Link Tom Chatt // Feb 15, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Um, VCR clocks? The VCR DST adjustment mechanism will work exactly as it always does: when I read in the Sunday paper that the clocks changed, then I will plod over and manually adjust the VCR (and the oven and the microwave). Sorry, but this Gartner guy is getting a little overblown.