TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Countdown to Confusion / Daylight Saving Time Comes Early

Countdown to Confusion / Daylight Saving Time Comes Early

Monty Solomon (monty@roscom.com)
Sun, 4 Mar 2007 20:53:13 -0500

Countdown to Confusion
Daylight Saving Time Comes Early This Year, But Will Your Computer
Know When to Switch?

By Charles Babington and Tomoeh Murakami Tse
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 3, 2007; D01

Perhaps the worst that will happen in millions of offices on the
second Monday in March is that caffeine-deprived workers will wonder
why their automatic coffeemakers failed to perk on schedule. In less
lucky workplaces, however, employees might miss meetings, overbook
conference rooms or inaccurately record the time or date of important
financial transactions.

For the first time in 20 years, daylight saving time will not start on
the first Sunday in April. Instead, it will begin three weeks earlier,
at 2 a.m. on the second Sunday in March, the 11th.

Devices from the tiniest BlackBerry to the largest mainframe computer
must be updated to ensure their internal clocks "spring forward" by
one hour at the right moment rather than on the old date, which has
been written into countless programs. Similarly, they must be
reprogrammed to revert to standard time a week later than usual, on
Nov. 4. Congress decided in 2005 to expand daylight saving time by
four weeks, starting this year, in hopes of conserving energy by
pushing more human activity into sunlit hours.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/02/AR2007030201346.html

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