New Daylight Savings Dates - Thank Christ or WTF?

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Matterhorn Fan

Why would my (or anyone's) computer "freak out"? I understand why it'd be off by an hour for a few weeks, but that's no big deal--I can fix it or ignore it.

For most people it probably won't be a big deal (unless you do something where it is important that two systems agree on what time it is and they don't), but it has non-trivial repercussions.

They installed a patch for this at work over the last weekend. You can tell who didn't reboot their computers like they were supposed to since they've been showing up at meetings an hour early.

We also have some systems where cutoff times for certain activities aren't going to be correct for a few weeks (the patch didn't get done in time for a thorough enough review for us to roll it into production). Not so big of a deal in the spring since this helps the customers but if it isn't fixed by fall it would be bad since it will prevent them from doing things they otherwise should be able to do (for an hour).

It also will create a small (almost completely insignificant but not zero) risk of fraud where datestamps are important (since technically it would be March 26 while for an hour the system still thinks it is March 25).

But yeah, mini-Y2K. Mini amount of development work anyway, the actual impacts couldn't get much minier.