Here in Australia, Sydney we are in Daylight Savings time so while I write this at 14:15 it is really 15:15. This is not the case across the whole country as through our different time zones we have different state Daylight Savings policies.

I was wondering if anybody had thaught about this in ref. embeded chips and servers/computers. Many places such as banks, powers stations and gov. department servers do not observe daylight savings. I have also been told that embeded chips which cycle to calculate time do not really recognise daylight savings.

This means that when we count down the last 10 seconds or so of the century and everybody breaths a deep sigh of releaf because the ligths are still on we actually have an hour to go before the real rollover occurs.

This is why we have a the trains stopped from 11:45 to 1:15 to cover both rollovers.

Anybody else in this situation?

-- praxis (fake@fake.com), December 12, 1999

Answers

Why are you so impatient? It seems unlikely that embeds with a hidden time function are tailored to LOCAL time zones (never mind standard or daylight time). Sigh of relief comes WHEN? Not minutes after midnight! Give it a day. Or at least until the date change has gone around the globe. After that, REAL factual news will take DAYS? WEEKS? MONTHS? At least, let it go across Australia and see if the lights stay on. That would be a positive sign!

News will be SPUN! Only training you have to GUESS at what's real, is by remembering what you have read and heard so far. If you were able to separate the spin from the real stuff so far, you might have some idea of the magnitude of the event by the middle of January. The embeds failure "curve" I have seen is a spike decaying quickly into 2000.

-- W (me@home.now), December 12, 1999.

Ooops, I really didn't get to the core of your question! Leave that to the computer/server geeks, as I would get hammmered into the ground on that.

-- W (me@home.now), December 12, 1999.

praxis,

Thanks for the post. Here in the U.S. of A, as you well know, we're on 'winter standard time' - at least for we poor slobs in the middlewest. I said to the better half today, that we have so many silent contributors on this forum from around the globe, I just wish I knew where you all lived. Your perspectives are so important, but without knowing your geographical location, we lose the flavor of your country's atttempts to deal with this Y2K thing.

Since it is later here in the U.S. and we've spent the whole day on Y2K preps, would you mind if I told the terrible old story (I just can't resist) about the queer Australian who left his wife and went back to Sydney. Ouch! I know. If you were a ham radio operator it would be my hope that we could laugh mutually over bad jokes like that.

We all hope you will be well through the 'transition'.

Keep the faith.

-- TruthSeeker (truthseeker@ seektruth.always), December 12, 1999.

P.R.China, the entire country is on the same time zone (at least it was recently). 5am in Canton means it is 5am at the western edge of the country also.

-- maid upname (noid@ihope.com), December 12, 1999.

Here in NZ we are also on Daylight saving time, which means local time rolls over 13 hrs before GMT.

The power station here has all of its network and SCADA systems running on local (ie daylight saving time), however we do have some embedded systems running on standard time. If there are any embedded systems with hidden RTCs that we dont know about, then we must assume that the time was set either when they were made or when they were first powered up. As no one knows when that was, and as we don't know the degree of accuracy of their time keeping, such systems, if they exist at all, could fail anytime within the next 2 to 3 years.

-- Malcolm Taylor (taylorm@es.co.nz), December 13, 1999.