Time Change a âMini-Y2Kâ in Tech Terms
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Companies are scrambling to reset computing devices as daylight saving time begins three weeks earlier.
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(InfoWorld) - A GoDaddy.com customer is seriously concerned that this domain registrar and hosting company may not be ready for the switch to DST (Daylight Saving Time) on Sunday. In a series of e-mail exchanges and phone calls, George Baltzell was told by GoDaddy.com's tech support team that the company is exempt from patching its servers because it is based in Arizona, which doesn't observe DST. "That's a silly response," Baltzell said. Baltzell, who lives in St. Louis, contacted GoDaddy.com's tech support after he crafted a short script using the PHP language to verify that the company's servers had been tuned for the DST switch, which comes earlier this year. His test showed that the GoDaddy.com servers are still acting according to the old DST rules, he said. "Thank you for contacting Online Support. As Daylight Savings [sic] does not apply to our servers, since we are on Arizona Time and our time zone does not change, our servers wouldn't update," reads one of the replies he received, and which he provided to IDG News Service. He wrote back to GoDaddy, saying that despite being in Arizona, their servers needed to be patched, otherwise timestamps would be wrong when communicating with computers in other areas. He even provided them with the code he used for his test, but didn't hear back. When informed of this situation by IDG News Service, GoDaddy sent a statement from Chief Information Security Officer Neil Warner. It said GoDaddy has conducted risk analysis on all its systems in preparation for the DST switch as well as contacted its vendors and received recommended patches. "Further, over the weekend, Go Daddy developers and quality assurance teams will be monitoring the transition process closely. As for our corporate headquarters being located in Scottsdale, Arizona, while the fact that we do not participate in DST minimizes potential impact, we are taking all precautionary steps to ensure our customers, located all over the world, are not impacted," the statement read. Told of GoDaddy's response, Baltzell was puzzled about the different message he got from the technical support team. At press time, his test continues to indicate the GoDaddy.com servers haven't been patched, he said. The main site he hosts with GoDaddy.com is St. Louis Places to See. He is particularly concerned for a page in which he tracks power outages in the St. Louis metro area because timestamps are an important part of it. Whatever ends up happening, Baltzell's opinion of GoDaddy.com has been soured by the experience. "Their tech support response is such a non sequitur, it has me wondering whether I should switch to another company," he said. In 2005, President Bush signed into law the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Among other things, it orders that, beginning in 2007, the start of DST be moved from the first Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March. It also shifts the return of standard time from the last Sunday in October to the first Sunday in November. On Sunday, people in zones impacted by DST must advance their clocks one hour. They must set clocks back one hour when DST ends this year on Nov. 4. The new DST dates have had a significant impact on the IT industry as vendors have had to issue patches for their systems and users, both consumers and enterprise IT professionals, have had to adjust their computers.
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Jet lag isn't just caused by time zone shifts.
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Since the starting and ending dates for daylight time are changing this year, do I need to adjust my computer system clock manually?
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Customers using Microsoft products that have entered their "Extended" support phase will need to fork over $4,000 for a patch that makes the software compatible with the new March 11 date for Daylight Saving Time (DST), according to Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley.
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On the Builder.com.au website today, there's a quick new tutorial on grabbing the correct time for a user's "home" rather than the server's time.   PHP comes with an extensive catalog of date and time functions, all designed to let you easily retrieve temporal information, massage it into a format you require, and either use it in a calculation or display it to the user. However, if you'd like to do something more complicated, things get much, much hairier   To make things easier, they enlist the service of the PEAR Date package to help bridge the gap between the time zones faster. They give some of the basics of using the package before actually getting into the time zone conversion. The code is pretty straight-forward and they even include other simple tips like how to calculate the GMT offset and how to add and subtract timespans.
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Geek chic of years gone by isn't so cool today, as technology races on.
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By Brian Neill, The Bradenton Herald, Fla.  Mar. 9--MANATEE -- As people get ready to set their clocks ahead one hour  this Sunday, local companies were scrambling this week to make sure computers  and servers remember to do the same.   Under a new U.S.
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By Mike Hughlett, Chicago Tribune  Mar. 9--You may be set to spring forward Sunday and enjoy more evening sunshine courtesy of daylight-saving time. But your computer might not be.
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Communicating can be tricky when a company or a government agency has workers in different locations and even different time zones.
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By The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio  Feb. 20--Many people will remember the Y2K anxiety spawned by fears that the world's computers would be unprepared to make the date change from 1999 to 2000.
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By BRIAN BERGSTEIN Normally the switch to daylight-saving time isn't a big deal, but this Sunday, Jeff Ronner has to put people on the case.
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At Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference, a large percentage of the attendees indicated that their companies are still working to prepare for next Sunday's earlier-than-usual start of daylight-saving time.
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Microsoft is set to change the way that organisations handle upgrades. The company has teamed up with Dell and Vintela in an attempt to cut the people-hours that are spent on software support.
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Move over, slackers. Generation Y is hitting the workforce, tech gadgets in hand and eyes firmly on their careers. Now, if only they had some people skills & or patience ... or &
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A last-minute scramble is on inside many companies as IT workers race to update systems so they can handle the earlier-than-usual start of daylight-saving time on March 11.
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Some physicists are creating a revolution in the arcane world of ultra-precise clocks. And among them is a researcher who has trouble getting anywhere on time. &quot;I do tend to be a little bit late,&quot; said Jim Bergquist, 58.