I just came across a blog post from Charlie Wood about the Energy Policy Act of 2005 causing pretty significant problems with enterprise applications. Apparently this act moves the weekend in which the States move to Daylight Saving Time (DST) from the 1st Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March (I thought the states where actually in sync with Europe since a couple of years, but I must have been wrong here).

Of course, desktop operating systems will be okay as Windows for example just issues another update. And even if a user does not accept it, the problems with a desktop computer not displaying the correct time will be pretty limited (except for people leaving office early maybe ).

Some other systems or platforms however like the Sun JRE and IBM WebSphere are also affected this change.

Phew, am I glad I’m living in Europe :). By the way, as noted by Charlie, Vinnie Mirchandani has pretty funny view on timezones too.

p.s. I was wondering, is this the US’ final attempt to put a halt to all the critics that are saying it should ratify the Kyoto Protocol…? Errrrr, maybe I should not try to mix political discussions with the impact of such an act on the correct workings of our applications ;-).