IT and New Zealand Daylight Savings update
Like the U.S. did this year with its Energy Policy Act of 2005, New Zealand is also changing the DST, according to the Department of Internal Affairs:
New Zealanders will have three weeks more daylight saving from 30 September this year following the decision by the Labour-led Government to extend the period to 27 weeks, Internal Affairs Minister Rick Barker announced today.
Clocks will go forward an hour a week earlier than usual - on the last Sunday in September- and back an hour on the first Sunday in April, instead of the third Sunday in March. This is the first change in daylight saving since 1990.
“The earlier start will also avoid clashing with the start of the fourth school term, which has caused disruptions for schools and families in the past. However more broadly over the longer term we will also be monitoring the effects on other parts of the economy, such as the energy sector, to see if there are long term sustainable benefits.
“Part of this ongoing monitoring will include the Department of Internal Affairs actively engaging in research that identifies potential positive and sustainable impacts experienced by other territories that have extended their daylight saving regimes,” said Rick Barker.
Rick Barker directed the Department of Internal Affairs to review daylight saving following public debate generated by Nelson City Councillor Mark Holmes in March 2006. Mr Holmes and United Future leader Peter Dunne recently presented a petition to Parliament on this issue.
“The Department of Internal Affairs will now work with computer companies and industries to update operating systems incorporating the time changes before the start of daylight saving,” Rick Barker said.Daylight saving for 2007-08 will start at 2am on 30 September 2007 and end at 3am on 6 April 2008.
Now, "include the Department of Internal Affairs actively engaging in research that identifies potential positive and sustainable impacts experienced by other territories that have extended their daylight saving regimes" should really include reading the conclusions that extending the U.S. DST did not provide any benefit in terms of energy savings (Ars Technica, Reuters):
As it turns out, the US Department of Energy (and almost everyone else except members of Congress) was correct when they predicted that there would be little energy savings. This echoed concerns voiced after a similar experiment was attempted in Australia. Critics pointed out a basic fact: the gains in the morning will be offset by the losses at night, and vice-versa, at both ends of the switch. That appears to be exactly what happened.
Reuters spoke with Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co. power, who said it plainly: "We haven't seen any measurable impact." New Jersey's Public Service Enterprise Group said the same thing: "no impact" on their business.
There's an economical impact though, and this comes from all those technology-based businesses and tools that need to have their processes, computers, instruments adapted with all the potential for trouble.
For example, is anyone from Microsoft on the ball working on this update for all their operating systems? Remember, as I posted before, ANZ still uses Windows 2000 Professional.
And what about people using Windows Mobile devices? They never got the New Zealand DST right anyway, and I received e-mails from people at Telecom who had CxO level people missing flights because the timezone on their Pocket PCs were not changing on time with their Exchange Servers (and no this is not a Telecom problem, it happens with any Windows Mobile when synchronising with Exchange Servers during the first and last week of New Zealand DST).
This problem was reported to Microsoft many times, but I've never seem a fix - impossible they said. But when the U.S. changed their DST a fix came for them. Very convenient, right?
Do you run Java applications in your infrastructure? Check out Sun's explanation on how Java applications can be affected byt DST:
The United States has planned a change to its DST observance beginning in 2007. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandates that DST will start on the second Sunday in March and end on the first Sunday in November. In 2007, the start and stop dates will be March 11 and November 4, respectively. These dates are different from previous DST start and stop dates. In 2006, the dates were the first Sunday in April (April 2, 2006) and the last Sunday in October (October 29, 2006).
Some countries are still evaluating whether they will adopt the new rules for themselves. You should anticipate more changes in DST and time zone rules for countries that typically align with U.S. DST rules.
The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) stores rules about DST observance all around the globe. Older JREs will have outdated rules that will be superseded by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. As a result, applications running on an older JRE may report incorrect time from March 11, 2007 through April 2, 2007 and from October 29, 2007 through November 4, 2007.
So, did the New Zealand government take in consideration the monumental task IT departments have ahead of them now? Analysing, coding, testing, deploying, testing DST changes?
What sectors would be impacted? Tourism, telecommunications, broadcasting, distribution channels. Anything with a computer.
Let's just hope people have already started working on this, because September 2007 is just around the corner from now.
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Comment by dariuswey, on 18-May-2007 14:04
Sigh. Considering nobody likes their PIM data going out of sync, it's sad to see Windows Mobile get pushed aside again. If there's enough interest, I can offer some assistance by writing an unofficial DST patch for New Zealand, similar to the one I wrote for Western Australia earlier this year.
http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/articles.php?action=expand,53751
- Darius
Comment by KevDaly, on 18-May-2007 15:38
Oh great.
All the more motivation to get another job overseas.
This is the sort of thing that mindless functionaries dream up all the time without giving any serious thought to the consequences.
Comment by Bill Moses, on 26-Jul-2007 19:23
Does anyone know of any urgency to get these changes done around NZ? My experience hasn't shown many organisations in a hurry to apply patches (which are coming or are here already).
You get the impression that the cool down after Y2K has made people a little wary of 'mass panic'. This is a real threat to some time dependent companies though.
Also, the media is conspicuous in their silence on this issue...
Comment by asianbro, on 23-Aug-2007 15:52
I thought Australia was stupid to introduce a change to their daylight saving few years ago. And now NZ follow suit ...
Comment by AK, on 13-Sep-2007 11:49
For all the whingers - there is a bit more to the world than computers. So the clocks are going to be out of whack for a few days, big deal. It's not like anyone's going to die because of it.
I for one welcome an extra four weeks of more daylight.
Comment by alex, on 13-Sep-2007 18:07
AK - I can't speak for the others, but for many of us it is not a question of whinging. Some of us look after computers that do billing... so the computer tells the customer that they made a bank transaction, or a phone call, or used some other billable service at 10:23 on a certain day.
If customers dispute the bill, because they can prove they did not use that service at that time, then the company has a real problem.
As for the extra four weeks of more daylight... I think you will find the days will be exactly the same length as they would have been without this rule change. :-)
Comment by ak, on 19-Sep-2007 14:58
Alex,
You're right, there's going to be the same amount of daylight regardless of the time. However there are more hours of usable daylight. Rather than have the sun come up at 4am and go down at 7, we get light until 8 which enables us to do more with our evenings - for an extra four weeks a year.
With regards to billing systems, surely any system out there already handles DST? So it's just a matter of changing the dates when DST kicks in. It's not like something completely new is being introduced here. To compare this with the Y2K issue seems a bit extreme.
And in case anyone is interested, Australia is extending DST by four weeks starting next year.
Comment by alex, on 29-Sep-2007 10:30
AK - all hours of daylight are usable daylight... it's a question of how we manage our hours to make best use of them. I concede that for many people, they need the government to tell them how to do this.
Yes all systems out there already handle DST in one way or another. Windows stores the rules in it's registry, Linux and *BSD have compiled zone files, HP-UX has an ascii file (/usr/lib/tztab), Java has it's own rules - also stored in compiled zone files and you often have multiple versions of Java on the one machine.
Oracle (both server and client) has it's own patches to apply and Oracle often provides it's own Java, then there is middleware like Weblogic and WebSphere... and your mail/scheduling systems... Outlook/Exchange, Lotus Notes....
These systems all already handle DST... that is precisely the problem.
Unless they have been patched, they still follow the old DST rules.
In the end, most systems will be patched... no it's not as bad as Y2K... in the end it's only money, it helps keep IT people in a job and the costs will be passed on to customers in their Internet accounts, phone bills, and bank fees... I hope you never complain about those.
If this DST change had been had done with more warning, those patches could have been rolled out in future planned software updates and had far less impact.
By the way I highly doubt *Australia* is extending DST by four weeks. Australia has multiple time zones each with their own rules... e.g. Tasmania follows different rules from Victoria, in Western Australia they are doing a daylight saving trial and Queensland and the Northern Territory have no daylight saving at all and probably never will.
Enjoy your extra usable daylight. :-)
Comment by James Nisbet, on 30-Sep-2007 13:52
Hiya
For those of us on Windows Vista without Automatic Updating enabled, I've created the following registry patch to fix the daylight saving changes;
http://blog.bandit.co.nz/post/13631380
Cheers
James
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Comment by sbiddle, on 18-May-2007 11:26
I couldn't believe the NZ government were stupid enough to introduce the change this year. Unlike Y2K which was all hype this is guaranteed to cause significant issues for a lot of people and organisations and it's obvious that they didn't bother (or simply chose to ignore) any advice given to them to suggest otherwise.
I think changing is a crazy idea anyway - comparing the number of weeks NZ's running in NZDT vs a country such as the UK is meaningless due to the different latitude! There was nothing wrong with out existing dates.