The Energy Losses in Varying Daylight Saving

The extension of daylight-saving time by a month in the United States is causing enormous grief for some IT administrators running Microsoft software, as many of the software programs running on their users' systems need to be individually patched to reflect the change.

This year, DST (daylight-saving time) starts on Sunday, March 11—three weeks earlier than usual—and ends a week later than usual on Nov. 4. The earlier start for Daylight Saving Time could cause glitches for people who own computers, VCRs, cell phones and other gadgets with clocks that may not automatically spring forward an hour on Sunday morning to follow the new date for the time change. What the legislators didn't anticipate was the complexity inherent in incorporating daylight saving changes where operating systems are embedded in devices. Microsoft's help-lines are approaching a meltdown status. Some customers say that Microsoft's phone support is so overwhelmed with callers trying to resolve their DST patch issues, that many users are being put on hold for hours before actually talking to someone, if they get through at all. Not only are the patches important but the order in which you apply them is also vital.

Microsoft's online DST chat room, which the company is currently staffing with technical experts 15 hours a day from 6 a.m. PST to 9 p.m. PST to facilitate the discussion and resolution of issues around DST, is inundated with customers experiencing a myriad of issues with the patches. But even outside the Redmond sphere of influence, many Legacy, bespoke and customer-specific programs will require custom code-patching. Amongst these are the programs used for scheduling aircraft maintenance and organizing and varying flight-crew and maint-crew rosters in real-time. If some of these remain out of kilter by an hour during that three week period, airline scheduling and slot mayhem may result. It's not known whether any onboard airliner systems themselves could be affected.

One of the problems of coping with the Daylight Savings three week sideways slide is that nobody wants to be amongst the harbingers of doom. Y2K and the largely non-existent and/or easily handled Millennium Bug proved to many IT experts that it was safer to languish on the side-lines rather than be a nay-sayer. At this point many, if not most, experts are simply unwilling to voice an opinion on the prospects for a data meltdown. But most assuredly, over the next three weeks many will be out of lockstep and looking quite laggard.