DST date changes

Last year our all-wise government went and changed the begin and end dates of daylight saving time and all the techies were complaining about the impact this is going to make on systems that either aren't upgradeable or are no longer maintained by the manufacturer. Seems now more people are realizing the issue (hopefully it's again for ISC even if it's a first for many readers). Of course nobody's gonna do anything about it now. I'm predicting that late-September/early-October most of the tech world will start freaking out about it, and it'll be all over the news every day the last week of October. Out of those who can get updates I wonder how many actually will do so.

With unix it'll probably just be a matter of copying the right /usr/share/zoneinfo files to old systems. Last I looked at the zone stuff in the registry it was interesting to say the least, and I think someone changing it in the GUI would wipe out any patches too.

I just hope people workaround by changing their timezones rather than the clock itself. Most inter system communication is based off GMT, most unix systems convert for display, Windows converts for communication. The fun that causes with Outlook and Exchange while changing timezones... As a side note, this is why Windows does the stupid confirmation of DST changes, as it's possible for it to get out of sync if it's gets confused as to whether it's changed the clock or not. Anyways, it could get interesting for a while...