CYBERSPACE – An energy bill signed by President George Bush on Monday may well spell chaos for some high tech users come 2007, when daylight-savings time starts three weeks earlier and ends one week later than usual.Bush hopes that the move will help save energy, but technologists are anticipating confusion for users of VCR and DVD recorders, as well as online calendars. Additionally, cell phone companies may find themselves handing out an extra hour of free weekend calls. The problem lies with a programming schedule that hasn’t changed since 1987 and has kept software and related gadgets in tune with daylight savings time during the past 18 years.
Although the situation dredges up shades of the Y2K hysteria that forced computer programmers to update software and systems so that they could recognize the 21st century, the fallout from this change is not expected to be particularly dire.
“It wouldn’t be a society-wide catastrophe,” Dave Thewlis, executive director for a group promoting standards for calendar software reassures, “but there would be a problem if nothing’s done about it or we try to move too quickly.”
The majority of problems could be relieved by manually setting built-in calendars to the new time. Users of Microsoft Windows operating systems will need to download updates and double check their calendars to make sure previously entered appointments get adjusted properly. Many VCRs are capable of synching their clocks with time signals sent via PBS broadcasts and electronic programming guides, and some Timex watches can adjust their times by using radio signals beamed from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, all of which should help soften the blow for tech awkward consumers.
In the hands of professionals, and not the average citizen, are adjustments that need to be made to electric utility meters and billing clocks for the telecommunications industry. Complicating this process is the fact that many software applications now treat the United States and Canada as possessing the same time zones. If the U.S. unilaterally adopts the new time, additional zones will need to be loaded onto pre-existing software. Digital clocks will be reset by their service provider’s network clock, and operating systems from Apple, Cisco, and Microsoft can me made to periodically check with internet time servers, although even those usually employ Greenwich Mean Time.
Although this may seem like a uniquely American hassle, some European nations changed dates as part of a European Union directive to standardize daylight time in 1996. Unfortunately, this led to difficulties with Finnish dates in at least one Windows release. To further complicate things, some nations change dates on a yearly basis. Israel uses a lunar Jewish calendar, for instance, and Palestinians will often change their clocks at different times as a sign of independence. Windows doesn’t even provide an auto-adjust option for Jerusalem’s time zone. Even within the U.S., not all states observe daylight savings time.
