Lustratus LiteBytes

This year the software industry should be hanging its head in embarrassment as somehow we have walked ourselves into another time related mess.

For those of you who don’t know, in August 2005 the US Federal government passed the “Energy Policy Act” which increased the number of days in the year during which the US will use Daylight Saving Time. It is supposed to save 100,000 barrels of oil for each of the 28 extra days according to the article last year in searchCIO. Nobody can argue against that I guess.

However, it now appears that the software industry had assumed that US DST dates were never going to change, even though the last change was only in the late 1980s! (I guess we should be grateful that leap years were covered.) Which means – here we go again – every Java system and every operating system will need to be patched. To quote from Sonic Software’s page who to their credit are strongly highlighting the issue:

The changes being made to the Java SDK/JRE for time zone adjustments are independent of those necessary for Operating Systems (OS). However, for customers to be sure that their applications will work successfully after the DST change-over in March 2007, they must have both OS fixes and the Java fixes applied on their systems.

And the real blow against sanity:

If you are using Microsoft Windows, you should be aware that the Microsoft supplied timezone.exe tool can cause problems with IBM Java JRE/SDKs. See Additional guidance for IBM products on Microsoft Windows for more information.

Having not so long ago muddled through the Y2K mess, the software industry has clearly learnt little. Not only was this one missed when all the Y2K reviews happened but the main vendors can’t even make sure their patches work together! I know that it isn’t of the scale of problem as Y2K but it is an unnecessary cost. The only thing more surprising than this happening is that there haven’t been any class actions (yet) to cover the cost of all of these upgrades.

Ronan

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