You'd have to be living under a rock to not know that President Bush signed an Energy Bill back in August of 2005  that lengthens the Daylight Savings Time by four weeks, effective this year (2007).  If you're interested in the details, you can find them here.

Those of us in the IT sector have been working hard to determine what needs to be patched, what's Ok to leave unpatched, and wondering what we'll probably miss patching, and what that impact will be to the systems we have to manage.

Microsoft has issued several automated patches, and for those of use that still use Windows 2000, they have several handy articles about how to patch these "unsupported" systems. (Or, if you really have diffculty you can always spring for the one-time $4,400 fee that Microsoft is more than willing to charge you for ;-) )

What I find interesting about this whole Daylight Savings Time change is - The concept is that by doing so "could" save us up to 100,000 barrels of oil per day.  Key on "could".

One has to wonder if the "possible" savings will offset the "actual" costs of making changes to all affected systems, and what other impact there may be on file and historical dates.  For example, What if you are in a court case and audit trails will factor in greatly as to the guilt or innocence of the accused, are the dates coming from a patched system, a non-patched system, or some strange combination of both?

Probably everything will work out fine.

I just find it interesting that to please some interest group sweeping changes are made that have more impact on something else than would have been overall had they just left it alone in the first place.

Oh well, just my current rant.  Don't even get me started on the Global Warming debacle.

BJ Williams
President / Chief Software Architect