The Perils of Daylight Savings Time
Daylight Savings Time (DST) has been the under fierce debate since its inception at the Prime Meridian Conference of 1884. It was put into action by the United States government in 1966 after the bill known as the Uniform Time Act passed.
It seems that most do not understand the actual reason for using it in the first place. Energy savings is the most widely claimed benefit but published studies have negated the benefits of even this. DST has as many supporters as protesters. The long-held convention that farmers were among its biggest supporters is false — farmers have to rise with the sun no matter what the clock says. The state of Arizona, with exception of a few of its Indian reservations, does not use DST at all. Until last year, half of Indiana didn’t either. In 2007 DST is facing a new challenge.
For those of you who haven’t heard, this year DST will come 2 weeks earlier than usual; March 11th. This new date could cause havoc for time-sensitive processes in varying degrees — from minuscule problems like having your automatic coffee machine start an hour off for a few weeks, to large-scale problems like security, computer, and banking systems not registering the correct times.
Cell phones and computers with newer operating systems (XP Service Pack 2 or Vista) should have no problem with the change but any electronic device that is not updated automatically via the Internet or cell phone tower or is more than a few years old is potentially at risk.
Some are going as far a comparing this to the Y2K bug we faced at the new millennium. Many people are not even aware of the potential for disaster that looms only days away. Behind the scenes banks, schools, government agencies, and large corporations have been paying attention and hiring programmers left and right to make sure their systems do not falter.
Will March 11th be a day that goes down in infamy?
Mark your calendars. Daylight savings time will begin March 11th at 2 a.m.
For those of you who have an on-screen programming guide like that provided with digital cable or satellite, it is really fun to “travel back in time” by watching the clock go from 1:59 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. It gives you a kinda creepy feeling — like you can live an hour all over again. Oops: I guess in this case it will be rolling forward.
