On August 8, 2005, President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This Act changed the time change dates for Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the U.S. Beginning in 2007, DST will begin on the second Sunday of March and end the first Sunday of November. The Secretary of Energy will report the impact of this change to Congress.Congress retains the right to revert the Daylight Saving Time back to the 2005 time schedule once the Department of Energy study is complete.
The effect of this on Java is significant. Time zone information is obtained from a set of files stored internally by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and applied to dates as required. Since this information is statically stored in the Java Runtime Environment, older versions of Java do not know about the changes and will display the wrong time for the USA throughout most of March 2007. Forward date information will already be wrong if it refers to dates in that period.
IMPACTED VERSIONS:
Java 5 update 5 and earlier
Java 1.4.2_10 and earlier
Java 1.3.x
NON IMPACTED VERSIONS:
Java 5 update 6 or later
Java 1.4.2_11 or later
Prior to Java Plug-in 5.0 Update 6 and later for Windows,an applet could specify the version of the JRE on which it would run. With 5.0 Update 6 and later installed on the Windows platform, all applets are executed with the latest version of the JRE. See Sun Alert ID: 102557. The 1.5_08 JRE will force applets to run using the new version regardless of previous specification.
The Sun Java 1.5_08 pilot package was released and made available September 2006. Pilot testing and code remediation will continue until January 2007 and product distribution to workstations will begin in February 2007.
- Ed
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