The 2007 Daylight Savings change was described in an email to me as “legislative ass hattery.” I have to agree with this assessment.

I’ve just spend an hour and a half tracking down things that did not update properly when the time changed. It seems that the worst offender was Windows 2000, but we have discovered some of the custom software we run has issues as well, both stuff developed in-house and provided to us by our customers.

Microsoft has stopped supporting Windows 2000, and has not released an update patch for it. You have to use a timezone tool to edit the timezone you care about, or use a complicated and messy knowledge base article to update your registry to get all the timezones. I’ve read that if you want to pay Microsoft $4000, they’ll give you a program to update all your Win2K systems, with a heavily restricted license that says you can’t let anyone else use it. Windows 2000 is still heavily used by businesses, so that program is likely to give them millions in revenue.

I was doing technical support for Cisco when Y2K hit. That was a total non-event, all hands on deck, most of them earning vacation plus time and a half.

This probably could have been a non-event too, except that unlike Y2K, there was no big banner telling everyone that something big is imminent. Congress passed the law rather quietly in August 2005. That gave everyone a year and a half to get their stuff fixed. The problem is that for many devices and programs, the updates were not available until 1-2 months ago. In the world of IT, that is very little time to prepare.

For many consumer hardware devices, there are no updates available at all, other than replacing the unit.

—
After fixing the Y2K bug in an application:
WELCOME TO <censored>
DATE: MONDAK, JANUARK 1, 1900