The Invisible Library

Daylight Savings Time is three weeks earlier this year and Microsoft doesn’t much care:

For three weeks this March and April, Microsoft Corp. warns that users of its calendar programs “should view any appointments as suspect until they communicate with all meeting invitees.”Wow, that’s sort of jarring — is something treacherous afoot?

Actually, it’s a potential problem in any software that was programmed before a 2005 law decreed that daylight-saving time would start three weeks earlier and end one week later, beginning this year. Congress decided that more early evening daylight would translate into energy savings.

Software created earlier is set to automatically advance its timekeeping by one hour on the first Sunday in April, not the second Sunday in March (that’s March 11 this year).

How simple would it be to coble up a patch for this and offer it for download? Apple fixed it six months ago. I didn’t even know I had already downloaded the fix because they put it in a free security upgrade. And that right there is why Microsoft isn’t doing jack: They can’t find a way to make people pay for a minor computer glitch everyone else fixed for free. So, anyone on a Windows platform will just have to suck it up or run an hour late for most of March.

Everyone out there who got on my case for being a Firefox evangelist, take note. This is why IE7 is a piece of shit. Microsoft is counting on it’s users being too dumb to realize that IEs supposed innovations, like tabs and RSS and a functioning Web 2.0 interface, aren’t actually bonuses you have to pay for. They are free as is every other browser out there, and were available years before Microsoft bothered to throw out some half-assed piece of shit with a wildly inflated price tag on it.

Microsoft wants your money. Once they have it, you’re on your own.