Repeat after me. This is not another Y2K problem. Ok. Now get ready to do some manual time adjustments when daylight saving time starts because your software might not do it for you. Read this (MSNBC).
Daylight saving time arrives a little earlier — March 11 — and stays a little later — Nov. 4 — this year. And it’s bringing a problem along with it that could affect everything from stock trades to airline schedules to your BlackBerry.
Software created before the law mandating the change passed in 2005 is set to automatically advance its timekeeping by one hour on the first Sunday in April, not the second Sunday in March. Congress decided that more early evening daylight would translate into energy savings.
My hunch tells me that UNIX systems will take care of this easily since UNIX counts seconds since the UNIX epoch (Jan. 1, 1970) and that there should be a simple software patch to fix this at the operating system level. (A quick Google search reveals that my hunch appears to be correct.) Microsoft will release a patch soon according to the article. That will fix anything that depends on Windows' time keeping functions. So this is an operating system issue, which means it should be easy to fix on the vast majority of systems that handle important operations for businesses. UNIX folks have a lot more to worry about in 2038, but let's not go there.
So how about those energy savings? Don't count on it.
Re UNIX systems - if you're running Java, that will have to be patched separately. There's lots of flavors of Java, and not all have the DST fix.
Good point, Ben. So, do you think that the most commonly used versions will have the fix by next month?
If you are a UNIX expert, I'd be interested in your take on the 2038 problem.
Thanks for commenting.
The 2038 problem will be made obsolete by 64bit systems. The big nuisance is all the consumer electronics that can't be patched like vcrs, dvrs, and the like. Yet more clocks to set.
That is true. One would expect that in the next 30 years most of the "mission critical" systems for banking, finance, etc. will make the move to 64 bit. There will, of course, be a few that slip through the cracks. I expect to see a scramble to find and replace those systems at the last minute, but ultimately it probably will not cause much disruption to anyone in the general public.