03.07
While Benjamin Franklin may have been first to suggest saving daylight in
1784, he made no mention Daylight Saving Time (DST). It was William Willett
who first officially proposed DST to the British government, though he was
unable to convince Parliment to adopt it. Though often referred to as “summer
time” in British English, it was the Germans (during World War One, no less)
who first put DST into practice, choosing the initial dates of April 30th,
1916, through October 1st, 1916. Not to be outdone, the Brits followed suit,
first adopting it between May 21st and October 1st, 1916. Newfoundland lead
North America in the charge, and in March of 1918, the U.S. Congress
established DST from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October,
only to have Congress repeal it in 1919. President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the
repeal, but Congress overrode it. Despite the very American proverb, “Early
to bed, early to rise,” American’s don’t like to be told to get out of bed
any earlier than they have to…
Everything ticked right along until August 8, 2005, when President George W.
Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This Act changed the time change
dates for Daylight Saving Time in the US. Beginning this year, DST will begin
on the second Sunday in March and end the first Sunday in November.
This gives us a new term: Y2K7
Y2K7 refers to the Year 2007 problem, caused by this US-mandated change to
Daylight Saving Time, which could have widespread repercussions in the
computer industry.
Any device that automatically corrects its clock to match the time changes to
Daylight Saving Time, such as a personal computers or VCR, now needs to be
updated so that the device knows of the new rules. If the devices are not
updated, they will show an incorrect time for three weeks in March and one
week in November, and cause a number of problems including having e-mail with
incorrect timestamps, events in calendaring software being displayed
incorrectly and some authentication software, such as Kerberos in Mac OS, not
behaving properly.[1] To avoid these problems users either have to update
their devices manually when Daylight Saving Time changes, or update their
software to newer versions.
If you want to know how to do that, wikipedia has a fairly exhaustive list of
updates for various Operating systems, from i5/OS to Mac OS 10.5. You can
find this page by googling for y2k7 and wikipedia.
Incidentally, the band Coldplay’s song “Clocks” was co-written by Chris
Martin, great-great grandson of DST inventor William Willett.
That’s it for your dose of DST deliverance and thats that for BarretTime.
