This new daylight savings time switch this year is so much worse than Y2K. I’m pretty sure that my meetings at work for the next few weeks will be screwed up by an hour or so, as some people have a patch installed, some don’t, and Outlook doesn’t deal well with changing time zones.
In any event, as a PSA, if you’re running Microsoft Windows or Outlook and don’t know if you’re patched, check out http://www.microsoft.com/dst2007 for patches to run before the end of the week.
I wondered if Congress bothered to do a cost-benefit analysis for the change. Apparently it is cost-effective, with a payback period of about a year, costing $350 million to adapt and saving about $300 million of evening electricity each year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05daylight.html?em&ex;=1173330000&en;=cf53c03ce99aa2d7&ei;=5087
That $350M estimate was just for the 7,000 U.S. public companies. It doesn’t count the work by the many-more private companies (such as the one I work for), and Random.User on Windows 2000 whose Outlook and PDA won’t work right without a call to Geek Squad or similar.
The cost of this change is enormous. I think there were arguments about the cost in the Congress debates, but I’m not sure.
I think it’d be a much better investment to have spent all this money on abolishing DST. I don’t care if we’re UTC-4 or UTC-5 year-round, I just want consistency.
I think it’d be a much better investment to have spent all this money on abolishing DST.
Amen.
The purpose of DST is that people are used to doing work first-thing in the morning, so to make good use of daylight the time that schools and businesses typically open (9 am) needs to adjust to follow dawn. The DST solution is to simply move 9am. An alternate approach would be to have each business adjust its opening times. This would be better in a way because times would sit still, but would be worse in a way because you’d never know when businesses were open. It’s nice to have a coordinated shift.
One could perhaps have no DST but have government offices all adjust their schedules on the same days, and hope other institutions adjust their hours on the same day. Sort of a voluntary DST.