Its not that hard to get right. I'm a software dev working in Vancouver and our team was able to track all our timezone dependencies and account for the new offset. The Microsoft team definitely has some organizational issues since they've had 7ish months to fix this.

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rjrjrjrj 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Describing it simply as "the new offset" seems like an oversimplification.

Just in BC there were multiple changes, some of which (eg Eastern Kootenays) were decided much more recently than 7 months ago. The MSTNO area didn't change, but in not changing its offset relative to the rest of the province did.

Displaying historical data, ranges that include the moment that the new definitions come into effect, temporal and/or spatial aggregations that span multiple timezone definitions... lots of tricky things can pop up.

That's not to excuse Microsoft. This isn't the first timezone change that has happened, and they should have the most robust change management process in the world for stuff like this.

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incrudible 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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hylaride 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

US timezones also get messed with. This isn't a Canadian problem (in fact, many Canadian jurisdictions have laws on the books to automatically get rid of the switchover when enough US jurisdictions in the same timezone do it). The only truly unique Canadian time zone is Newfoundland, which is in it's own timezone that's off by half an hour as anybody growing up watching Canadian TV knows (X show at 8PM, or 8:30 in Newfoundland...).

I remember the shitshow in the mid 2000s when the Bush administration moved the time change cutover dates by 2 weeks as an attempt to deal with high energy prices (it didn't do much as lighting was by then a small percentage of electricity use and this was before LEDs). All sorts of machines needed updating, from ancient mainframes to clocks and watches, many of which couldn't. We Canadians also did it for longer term practical reasons.

	▲	soperj 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Energy prices weren't even that high. Oil was in the the $50 range per barrel for the year, and the change didn't even go through until 2007. The main reason they did it was to make it so Halloween had longer daylight hours, so they could sell more candy.

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footy 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

ok tough guy

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stackghost 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I would've deleted all Canada timezones out of spite

Out of spite at what?

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incrudible 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Canada

	▲	stackghost 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Canada Why, specifically?