Twice a year, Windows pops up a little window informing me that Daylight Savings Time has gone into effect (or lapsed) and would I like it to update the clock for me? Now that Congress has extended DST, is Windows going to be screwed up, or does it get the DST information from a time server somewhere or something?
No, because the mandated change to daylight savings time doesn’t take place this year but next. This will be corrected by a fairly trivial patch.
“August 8, 2005 Update: President Bush signed into law the Energy Policy Act, which extends Daylight Saving Time (DST) by four weeks from the second Sunday of March to end on the first Sunday of November. Extended Daylight Saving Time will begin in March 2007. See below for the new “spring forward, fall back” dates for the next few years”
However, it sounds to me like you’re running Windows 95/98/Me, yes? At least, I don’t think that Windows 2000/XP have that popup. If that’s the case, I’m not sure if Microsoft will still be patching the OS by then.
It will also cause problems for Canadians (or South Americans running an English version of Windows). They’re going to have to be sure that Windows knows they are not in the U.S., so that they don’t get the new DST change dates.
Microsoft will have to jigger up a patch to add Canadian time zones since they’ll presumably stay with the current schedule. If they can already cope with the eccentricities of Arizona and some parts of Indiana, making a GMT-8:00 US Pacific Time and a GMT-8:00 Canada Pacific split should be trivial.
The whammy will be everything else that’s Daylight Savings-aware. Thermostats, VCRs, traffic signals, elevators, fax machines, etc. Essentially, this will be a pico-Y2K, (not a mini-, not even a micro-Y2K) but this time, the threat will be trivial. About the worst will be faxes going out with the timestamp off by an hour, or elevator systems not “homing” enough elevators to the lobby to handle everyone going to their offices in the morning for a couple of weeks. Really, really minor stuff.
Banks should be entirely unaffected - we run our servers on CUT (coordinated universal time, formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time) so they’re unaffected by Daylight Savings or time zones.
Microsoft already has three Canada-specific time zones - Newfoundland, Atlantic, and CST-Saskatchewan. They’ll need to add 4 more though, assuming that Canadian governments don’t harmonize with the new US policy.
It’s a hell of a thing when someone fucks with the clocks, isn’t it?
I’m honestly interested to see if this new law survives to March 2007 unchanged. If the DST rules can be changed by Congress, they can be changed back by Congress just as easily.
As for patches: Here is the official MS lifecycle page.
How about our VCRs? Do we all have to disable the auto DST feature?
[grammar nazi]
Windows doesn’t do anything “wrong”.
Wrongly, almost certainly. Incorrectly, definitely.
Minor nit, but Indiana now observes daylight savings time, or at least NPR told me the legislation finally passed. On the other hand, Hawaii does not observe dst and from what I’ve read, Maine is looking to change its time zone to be the Atlantic Time Zone (1 hour later than Eastern).
No, you could most certainly argue that it’s a noun.
“Did you do something wrongly?” That doesn’t work; the question isn’t asking if something you did was done in a wrong manner. You did wrong. Windows, then, does lots of things wrongly, but it also does a lot of things wrong.
It’s true that the law passed, but it hasn’t taken effect yet. To make things a little more complicated, the part of the US Dept. of Transportation that actually has the authority to make the change has not yet held a hearing on the matter. We will almost certainly go on DST, but some of the details are still up in the air. Our governor (who recently also gained the title of Shogun) wants to have DOT time hearings in each county, but the DOT says there won’t be that many. The political show in Indiana may not be as entertaining as some other states, but it isn’t dull. 
[grammar nazi] It’s daylight saving time. [/grammar nazi]
Another nitpick - Coordinated Universal Time is abbreviated as “UTC.”
And while I’m at it, UTC is not “formerly known as GMT,” it’s what replaced GMT. The technical details are very different, and GMT can vary from UTC by as much as one second either direction.
What, you mean a whole second?