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A new energy bill passed by the US Congress and due to be signed by President Bush today will bring daylight saving - the equivalent of the UK's British Summer Time - forward by three weeks in order to cut energy consumption.

Any programme or process that's set to begin at a certain time, may find itself running an hour late.

The change has already drawn comparisons with the Y2K furore. For those with short memories this was the worry that some software written in the 20th century that only used two digits to represent a year number would be totally thrown by the transition to 2000. As it happened, everyone was well prepared and the turn of the year passed without incident, although it did mean that thousands of sysadmin workers were sat by their servers at midnight instead of enjoying the fun and fireworks.