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Ironically I think it's just as likely that it was simplicity that caused the error rather than complexity: Older Microsoft Windows systems usually store only
by jmatt 18y ago
Ironically I think it's just as likely that it was simplicity that caused the error rather than complexity:
Older Microsoft Windows systems usually store only a single start and end rule for each zone^
If only they were forward thinking enough to know that laws change... and thus DST will eventually change too. A similar form of naive simplicity caused the Y2K mess. I think this falls in line with that incident.
I agree that Microsoft should have properly solved this problem on all OSes and pushed the solution back in 2006. It's ridiculous that this is still a problem on a recently installed recently patched box. Especially on XP which is currently their core market.
^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
- sanj 18y agoThat's not simplicity. That's simply being lazy and wrong. Timezones have been changing for over a hundred years.
- thwarted 18y agoYeah. And the changelog for the tzdata package is quite interesting in that regard. Usually changes in timezone information occur months or years before they actually need to occur (including recognizing leap seconds).