source:

For three weeks this March and April, Microsoft Corp. warns that users of its calendar programs "should view any appointments ... as suspect until they communicate with all meeting invitees."

Wow, that's sort of jarring -- is something treacherous afoot?

Actually, it's a potential problem in any software that was programmed before a 2005 law decreed that daylight-saving time would start three weeks earlier and end one week later, beginning this year. Congress decided that more early evening daylight would translate into energy savings.

Software created earlier is set to automatically advance its timekeeping by one hour on the first Sunday in April, not the second Sunday in March (that's March 11 this year).

The result is a glitch reminiscent of the Y2K bug, when cataclysmic crashes were feared if computers interpreted the year 2000 as 1900 and couldn't reconcile time appearing to move backward. This bug is much less threatening, but it could cause head-scratching episodes when some computers are an hour off.

The problem won't show up only in computers, of course. It will affect plenty of non-networked devices that store the time and automatically adjust for daylight saving, like some digital watches and clocks. But in those instances the result will be a nuisance (adjust the time manually or wait three weeks) rather than something that might throw a wrench in the works.

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.

"Organizations could face significant losses if they are not prepared," the Information Technology Association of America cautioned this week.

Dave Thewlis, who directs CalConnect, a consortium that develops technology standards for calendar and scheduling software, said it is hard to know how widespread the problem will be.

That's because the world is full of computer systems that have particular methods for accounting for time of day. In many, changing the rules around daylight saving is a snap, but in others, it may be more complex.

"There's no rule that says you have to represent time in a certain way if you write a program," Thewlis said. "How complicated it is to implement the change has to do with the original design, where code is located."

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.

In our hyper-networked age with data synchronizing on the fly _ each year, it seems, there are fewer clocks that we have to manually change for daylight-saving time -- it might be hard to imagine that computers' time could fall out of whack. After all, computers seamlessly keep their clocks in line by occasionally checking with "time servers" run by the government and other parties.

But what those time servers provide is "Universal Time" or Greenwich Mean Time. You tell your computer where in the world it is, and it performs the requisite adjustment to Universal Time. PCs on Eastern Standard Time now are subtracting five hours from Universal Time, but in daylight-saving time they will subtract four.

A common fix is a "patch" that reprograms systems with the updated start and end dates for daylight-saving time. Some of these updates are targeted at specific systems, while others have wider implications -- such as one from Sun Microsystems Inc. for older versions of the Java Runtime Environment, which often fuels applications on computers and Web pages.

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.

Owners of those PCs should go into the control panel and unclick the setting that tells the machine to automatically change the clock for daylight-saving time. They have to make the change themselves when the moment arrives. (This is a sizable population; according to Gartner, Windows 2000 alone was still running 14 percent of PCs worldwide last year.)

For people who store their appointments in Microsoft Outlook or other desktop-based calendar programs -- rather than dynamic, Web-based programs such as Google Calendar -- the situation gets trickier. Patches for calendar programs are available, but appointments entered before a patch was applied might still be registered in standard time rather than daylight time -- off by an hour.

Microsoft advises heavy calendar users to go online and download a small program known as "tzmove" -- Time Zone Move -- that can retrofit all previously booked appointments to the new daylight-saving rules. Other vendors offer similar tools for their systems.

Of course, it's likely not everyone would take that step, said Rich Kaplan, a Microsoft customer service vice president who oversaw the company's Y2K efforts and heads daylight-saving preparations. Hence Microsoft's advice to be cautious about meetings between March 11 and April 1.

"Because if one person applied the update, and one person didn't," he said, "you could end up there at the wrong time."

---

Also see Changing Windows 2000 Timezone Configuration on Pirates.

---

Just awful...
DST from March to November in the USA.
The Daylight Saving Time breaks Human Rights and does not save any energy.

---

Which human rights are broken by it?

It certainly does save energy, as most people who have the choice don't get up at daybreak and do stay up late enough to need electric lighting. Summer Time reduces the number of hours in the evening when electric light is required.

In Spain they're an hour ahead in Winter and 2 hours ahead in Summer, which enables lots of people to fit in a whole day's work before a very late lunch. Very useful for a hot climate. Moving to live and work there is extremely popular.

---

It certainly does save energy, as most people who have the choice don't get up at daybreak and do stay up late enough to need electric lighting. Summer Time reduces the number of hours in the evening when electric light is required.

But most people have no choice when to get up, so they need electric light in the morning, exspecially at the begin and the end of DST. Take me for an example: I have to get up at 6 AM CET. In march, when the sun rises earlier, our European DST starts, so I have to get up at 6 AM CEST = 5 AM CET. At that time it's still dark outside, so I need light.

Everyone, who likes the DST, can get up earlier on his/her own and go to bed an hour earlier, too, without a clock showing one hour later. But those, who dislike the DST, have not this choice in most cases.

btw: The 3/4 of the French population voted against the DST, but they're forced to accept it.

---

Hi.
On the Messages tab of my Boinc 5.8.15, the DST change isn't effective.
The time is lagging an hour now.
Any ideas?
My system is correctly configured under DST.
(Win2000 pro SP4 french canadian)

Regards,
François

---

Have you tried to exit BOINC and restarting it? That may well fix it.

BOINC is reading your system time, not using its own clock.

---

Yes.
I even rebooted a few times, to no avail.
Thanks for answering though.

---

Small question, last time you rebooted, did you check in the BIOS if your time had changed there as well? For all I know, Windows is putting a shell on the clock until the "real" change to DST and therefore the system time is lagging as well. (Just guessing here, really ;))

---

Small question, last time you rebooted, did you check in the BIOS if your time had changed there as well? For all I know, Windows is putting a shell on the clock until the "real" change to DST and therefore the system time is lagging as well. (Just guessing here, really ;))

The time is correct in the BIOS.
FWIW, it's a COMPAQ machine, with a strange, proprietary BIOS.
There's nothing about Timezone in the BIOS.

---

There's nothing about Timezone in the BIOS.

Well no, that's normal. The clock crystals don't do timezones, that's something for the OS to figure out.

OK, so Windows time shows the correct time. Only BOINC is behind one hour, no matter what you do, right? How did you change the time, by hand or using that little program that Microsoft had handy? (Since Win2k wouldn't do it by itself).

---

There's nothing about Timezone in the BIOS.

Well no, that's normal. The clock crystals don't do timezones, that's something for the OS to figure out.
OK, so Windows time shows the correct time. Only BOINC is behind one hour, no matter what you do, right? How did you change the time, by hand or using that little program that Microsoft had handy? (Since Win2k wouldn't do it by itself).

I used Microsoft's TZEDIT.EXE utility.
But I found the culprit: I had a TZ statement in autoexec.bat.
Removed it and bingo!

Thanks again for the help!
François

---

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.

Owners of those PCs should go into the control panel and unclick the setting that tells the machine to automatically change the clock for daylight-saving time. They have to make the change themselves when the moment arrives. (This is a sizable population; according to Gartner, Windows 2000 alone was still running 14 percent of PCs worldwide last year.)

That's the most stupid part by far. Is it THAT hard for Microsoft to make a patch for all versions of Windows?

I used Microsoft's TZEDIT.EXE utility.
But I found the culprit: I had a TZ statement in autoexec.bat.
Removed it and bingo!

Thanks again for the help!
François

You're welcome, François. Although I didn't do much, just asked questions. :)

---

An additional note for making the change with TZEDIT.EXE....


I have windows 2000 - and found the microsoft support page at:
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst

BUT, I missed a step....

TZEDIT changes the rule - BUT for the rule to take effect, I had to change
the timezone to some, other TZ - and then change it back to the original TZ.
THEN, the time was correct.

(Rebooting did not work for me either..)

Thanks to all for the great support!!

TZEDIT changes the rule - BUT for the rule to take effect, I had to change
the timezone to some, other TZ - and then change it back to the original TZ.
THEN, the time was correct.

Microsoft logic... :-P

---

Microsoft logic... :-P

Isn't that a contradiction in terms???

:o)

---

Kathryn :o)