What’s the Deal with Daylight Savings Time?

Lots of reporters hoping that the Daylight Savings Time issue (starting/ending on different dates) will really hurt. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what the big deal is, and how it could ever compare to Y2k. Here’s why:

  1. There is a big difference between being off by 100 years and off by an hour. Like 99yrs 23hrs.
  2. If an hour matters to your apps, you should already know. These are going to typically be transaction-intensive apps or scheduled SENSITIVE control systems, etc. (Hint: if you don’t know of apps like this in your organization, then you are fairly safe).
  3. It is self-correcting. Sort of ;-)

The most interesting thing about the DST "issue" is that it brings time into the limelight. We really don’t work too hard to ensure the validity of our entire time infrastructure on the Internet anyway. In the same way that we can spoof email addresses and "electronic" signatures, we can also spoof time.

Don’t worry about an hour here or there, worry about the integrity of your entire time infrastructure.