The Politics of Time

[orangelamp]

Okay, so I'm probably making too much out of this.

It bugs the living crap out of me that almost every province across the country, has changed their laws, to accommodate the American "Energy Policy Act [2005]" By moving the dates that Daylight Savings Time is changed

Comments

[zastrazzi]

There seems to be a great deal of noise about something that is largely a non-issue in most of Canada

[_social_retard_]

Why? What could possibly go wrong if Canada did not follow suit with daylight savings?

[zastrazzi]

The downside to not making the switch however is a lot more significant. There are a lot of companies in Canada that deal with the US. There are a lot of companies that straddle the border and have operations in Canada and the US.

There are numerous regulations in place that require companies to accurately record a great deal of information which must withstand audits. To only patch systems on the US side and not on the Canadian side of operations would be a bloody nightmare. Particularly in instances where there are shared network resources such as Exchange that deals with calendaring and meetings etc.

There is also the issue of travel, particularly for business travellers who use laptops and smart devices like the blackberry and Moto Q that don't just pick up their time from the provider, but run an OS that has to be patched for DST. Works fine on one side of the border but not the other for 5-6 weeks a year? Not good.

[_social_retard_]

Okay thats rude man, I obviously allready erad what you wrote. No need to cut and paste. Anyways you don't say WHY it would be bad. All yuo say is that it would be bad, because there aer buinesses that operate in both countires and people that travel between the two and that thies people use laptops. Uhm...kay? Plenty of buinesses operate between Canada and other countries with time differentials, plenty of companies operate between PROVINCES with time differentials, as do buinesmen, laptops and cellphones. You name it. Why would the states hcanging thier dayight huors and us not following suit have any adverse affect on anything? True people would have to update thier personal organizers and whatnot but the same is true now that we ARE following suit. So what would the big deal be?

[zastrazzi]

Actually it wasn't obvious at all that you'd read it. Perhaps I took too high level a view of the problem when I responded and assumed readers would make the same connections I have.

It's not just a matter of a straight time differential. Those are previously existing and allowed for time differentials in business and technology. Those time differentials are already 'in the system'.

The change made by the US requires a LOT of patching of existing technology. Everything from medical equipment that automagically doses a patient to mail servers, intrusion prevention systems, mobile devices, desktops...

This is patching that has to be done. When it is necessary to keep systems synchronized (ldap, kerberos, Active Directory etc ad nauseum) you have to patch system wide. Ergo, you can't just patch your systems/equipment on the US side to account for the change and not those on the Canadian side. They break.

[_social_retard_]

So your saying that patching equipment so that it changes daylight savings time is hard but not imposible but changing it so that it changes daylight savings in the US but NOT Canada is even more difficult? Well.. I can't argue with you because I don't know anything about programing but that seems kinda silly. I would think that it would be about the same.

[zastrazzi]

It's more difficult for staffing reasons, not technical ones. Much to my own horror, some vendors were pushing out DST patches as late as last month.

No way would they have managed two different patches, some barely got *one* out on time. And that's in time for the vendor... it doesn't allow the companies who actually have to implement these patches much of a test cycle to ensure their patch doesn't break/break something.

[zastrazzi]

And as a perfect example of the staffing issue and lack of testing, Sun just released a patch *yesterday* to patch one of their own DST patches...

Sun patches patch at last minute

That link goes to my blog, as the SunSolve site appears to have gone down in a flurry of panicked admins clicking to find out if they are affected by it.