DST Updates Yielded no noticeable energy savings
As mandated by the Energy Savings Act of 2005, everyone updated their software to account for the new DST rules this year. Due to the success of Java, this was especially painful to IT departments around the nation as large corporations had to update tens of thousands of Java Virtual Machines across the enterprise. Due to the late arrival of updates by many vendors, there was a tiny window in which to do the updates. (Some vendors were still providing updates for DST weeks before the early DST window was to start!)
According to a USA Today article, there were no noticeable energy savings by extending the Daylight Savings Time window this year.
As I worked through the DST updates this year, I covered this topic several times: here, here and here.
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As a reminder, here are the links to the DST updates from each major Java vendor:
http://java.sun.com/javase/timezones/index.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/dst/index.html
http://edocs.bea.com/jrockit/geninfo/diagnos/tzupdate.html
http://www.hp.com/products1/unix/java/DST-US.html
Posted by: Brian Hayward