Daylight waste of time

I wish governments didn’t have the audacity to mess with time itself. Just finished doing timezone file updates for a number of older Linux-style servers to get them to work with the new daylight savings time. Here’s a helpful page of instructions for anyone looking to update an old OS in this family. Newer ones (post-2005) shouldn’t require updating.

And here is a patch for anyone still using Windows 98 or 2000 who wants to update their operating system to handle the new daylight savings time. Microsoft no longer supports these operating systems. I assume it has already updated the operating systems it does still support.

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote of GE planning to create a more energy efficient incandescent bulb, and speculated that they might be motivated by legislation pending in California to ban the incandescent in favour of compact fluorescent (CFL). It turns out that it’s much bigger than that. The EU, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (1,2 ) are all at least considering similar legislation. In Cuba and Venezuala, hundreds of thousands of CFLs have already been distributed, and Change One’s Project Porchlight is distributing tens of thousands of free CFLs in Canada.

But you might wonder how this would necessarily motivate GE, given that they produce energy- efficient compact fluorescent bulbs as well. It may have something to do with price. CFLs have come down in cost considerably since their inception, but it’s likely that they’ll always be more expensive than incandescent. Every CFL requires its own ballast. Given that incandescents have fewer parts, if GE can really create one that is just as energy efficient, they will likely be able to sell them more cheaply.

The question then would be: how long do they last? Would the new incandescents also be able to match the longevity of a CFL? Currently not only are CFLs more energy efficient than incandescent, but they last longer before burning out.

In any event, GE had better be able to demonstrate a more energy efficient incandescent soon, if only to ensure that legislation uses terms and measures which do not refer to specific technologies such as “incandescent” or “CFL.” Otherwise their energy efficient incandescent may have something of an uphill battle changing laws that specifically outlaw them.