For example Windows Azure suffered outages in February because the programmers did not anticipate a leap year happening.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/02/29/microsoft-...
Remember when android would lose text messages? Or Amazon's supposedly redundant system went down all at once?
Don't point a finger at MS for what wasn't even a complete outage.
And not taking the biggest and most successful software company in the world seriously makes you look like a complete fanboi tool.
When I want to eat a really nice meal with friends or family, I rule out McDonalds. Does this make me a "fanboi tool"?
Microsoft have a pretty long history of date related bugs in their software and products stretching back years. They do not seem to understand how leap years work.
Windows 98: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/150947.stm Zune: http://bit-player.org/2009/the-zune-bug Excel: "Excel 2000 incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year" Exchange 2007: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/04/microsoft_admits_to_...
etc etc
I bought a Kinect. I used it for a couple of days. It had a novelty value, but no staying power. I don't think I'm alone there.
In any event, my original point was that trusting your hosting to a company which had an outage due to not foreseeing a leap year, may not be a good decision.
Outages due to particularly hairy code related to redundancy and failover etc, I can forgive. But an outage caused by a leap year? No way.
And about the bug being a leap year bug is really a nonissue, a bug is a bug. An year ago, Github nuked their whole production database, because of a deployment glitch. We all create softwares with bugs, it's the response to that which matters. And, Microsoft does a stellar job at that.
Some of you need to be treated for Microsoft Derangement Syndrome.
The do-ers get work done like Linus, while the talk-ers spend their time talking about how shitty other platforms are on Slashdot and HN and flag positive articles about Microsoft (so much so that http://winsupersite.com is hellbanned on HN).
Dates are actually really, really hard to get right. They've been a problem for everyone for decades. When I started programming professionally about 10 years ago you'd be lucky if most programmers had even heard of UTC, let alone knew what it meant. Date bugs happen to everyone.
These days the higher order languages hide all the big problems from you. But when you get closer to the metal and you've not got someone else's library to help you it's very easy to make a mistake.
Hmm dates... It's almost as if you'd want to just count the number of seconds/ms since some point in time. Then you can do arithmetic easily, don't have to worry about calendars, leap years, etc... :/
Converting a date to a human readable form is hard. There is no way on earth that computers should be storing dates in human calendar readable forms. They should only ever be converted to that format for display purposes. That is the lesson MS don't ever seem to learn.
No, converting a date to human readable form is the easy part.
The hard part is converting the number of seconds from some epoch into a date.
The number of seconds from some reference point is not the same as a date.
And Apple can't even handle regular years or daylight time: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/01/01/apple_admits_n...
And handling this in a phone or game device should be about as difficult as on a clock... A cloud on the other hand is much more difficult, as google points out: http://googleblog.blogspot.se/2011/09/time-technology-and-le...
Claiming that Microsofts progammers didn't even anticipate a leap year is kind of pathetic. Sure, it might have been an unnecessary bug (whether it was or not is not possible to decide from that article), but most bugs are...
The consequences of your hosting being down are larger than not getting an alarm on your iphone or being able to connect to PSN.
While I'm not excusing either, it isn't necessarily symptomatic of widespread failure.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/222029/iphones_daylight_savin...