On August 8, 2005, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 was signed by the President of the United States. This Act changed the dates of Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the U.S. Beginning in 2007, DST will begin on the second Sunday of March and end the first Sunday of November. Congress retains the right to revert the Daylight Saving Time after a study of the Department of Energy is complete. Canada is likely to follow the change as well. In Australia, last April, the end date was postponed by one week because of the Commonwealth Games (got their priorities right down there). I haven't found any other upcoming changes like this elsewhere (complete list of worldwide DSTs).At first, this change seems to have all the ingredients of a Y2K Bug re-run and its expensive consequences. The main difference, in the DST case, is that the majority of applications relies on the operating system to provide the exact time instead of hard-coding it in the case of dates (YY format). After the signature of the new act, Sun made available a Solaris patch to address the new change of date. Like any other patch installation, this would require regression tests, but based on our previous experience, this date change can happen very smoothly as long as it is planned properly. Since Solaris is the de-facto carrier-grade operating system, our support teams are ready to assist our telco customers for this critical transition. I've created an alias to help answer questions regarding the DST change in the telecommunications industry.
