[SlugLUG] Daylight Savings Time

[Peter Belew]

When Unix and MS-DOS were created, 2038 sounded like a REALLY
long time away. Now even I might live that long (I'll be 97 then, but
my mom just made it to 98!)

I'm confident that there will be a smooth transition to a longer date
variable, and that we will still be using the same time units, which
have been used for many centuries. And bits will survive. :)

The lesson one has to have learned by now, is not to have to access
system variables directly, but to use functions to access the information
(as class variables if you will). Use access functions!! That, by the way,
has been something that MS-Windows has done fairly well, but the
old Mac systems didn't do well (haven written lots of Windows 1-2-3
code, and looked at a little pre-X Mac code - with horror - in the past).
It goes without saying that Unix has been very good at that.

Peter

On 2/23/07, Karl Young <karly at kipshouse.org> wrote:
> Thinking about date and time oddities, and having to dredge up the date -r for the
> BSD-like Mac reminds me of the next impending Doomsday, Mon Jan 18 19:14:07 PST 2038,
> when "seconds since the epoch" overflows.
>
> I'd like to take this opportunity to coin the term "S2G bug."
>
> I first became aware of it in about 1996, when I had a customer who had to certify
> an application out to 2070 or so.  He tried setting the system date out there and
> it went to a wayback date.
>
> At the time the developers I was working with said that by 2038 we would be using
> 64-bit ints, and could track time in Mitcorseconds for nearly 300K years.
>
> Another suggested that by 2038 we may not be using years, seconds, or bits.
>
> -karl
>
>
> Peter Belew(abcruzww at gmail.com)@2007.02.22 12:22:42 -0800:
> > If you haven't noticed, Daylight Savings Time starts early and ends
> > late this year - starting on March 11.
> >
> > Linux users should have already had an update which fixes this (via
> > your distro's favorite update program). To test it, do
> >
> >   date -d '27 March'
> >
> > You should see
> >
> >   Tue Mar 27 00:00:00 PDT 2007
> >
> > If you see 'PST', you should update your system.
> >
> > (I already posted this on the SMAUG list)
> >
> > Actually Daylight Savings time begins at this time:
> >
> > date -d 'March 11 03:00:00'
> > Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 PDT 2007
> >
> > Times between 02:00:00 and 02:59:59 are invalid on that date - as soon
> > as the time increments to 2 AM, it "springs forward" to 3 AM.
> >
> > MS Windows updates will have fixed this recently, too.
> >
> > - Peter
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