Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Charging Businesses $4K for DST Fix
eldavojohn writes "Microsoft has slashed the price it's going to charge users on the daylight saving time fixes. As you know, the federal law that moves the date for DST goes into effect this month. Although the price of $4000 is 1/10 of the original estimate Microsoft made, it seems a bit pricey for a patch to a product you've already paid for. From the article: 'Among the titles in that extended support category are Windows 2000, Exchange Server 2000 and Outlook 2000, the e-mail and calendar client included with Office 2000. For users running that software, Microsoft charges $4,000 per product for DST fixes. For that amount, customers can apply the patches to all systems in their organizations, including branch offices and affiliate.' The only thing they can't do, said a Microsoft rep, is redistribute them."
Manually adjust the clock. Just write a small script to take care of it for logins or as a scheduled task for servers.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I wonder what would happen if you looked up which congresscritters Microsoft has given money to and correlated it with the ones who voted for the DST change?
It's hard to say this without sounding like a zealot, but these kinds of things are nothing but good for Free Software. This patch should be nothing more than an edit to a single configuration file (and if it's not, then that's another problem), but you can't download that change freely or give it to your friends? I can understand - even if I disagree - with not giving away your applications. I cannot be made to understand, though, not giving away trivial bugfixes.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
We are using this patch at my organization for all our Win2k and Win2k Server boxes out there (running legacy apps that we don't need to upgrade). http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2007/01/unofficia l-windows-2000-daylight.html
It's not $4000 per product, it's $4000 for ALL the products
i al-windows-2000-daylight.html)
They also provide a variety of workarounds (registry files you can apply, and scripts to apply to a large number of machines remotely) for Windows 2000. If you don't like that, there's unofficial patches as well (http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2007/01/unoffic
Yay for overblown stories!
$4000 for a patch that modifies one line in the registry? That's gotta be the slickest scam ever, especially since there are a ton of manual fixes out there on the innurnet if you care to google a bit. People who are worried can always hire a computer professional to do it for a tenth of the price, I'm sure.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
This is just for Windows 2000 and products from that same era. XP and stuff for it shouldn't be a problem.
No, the real, real question is: why are you so desperate to drag political bullshit into every story? Love him or hate him, GWB has absolutely nothing to do with how much Microsoft charges for a patch.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
You may think it's fun to write code to handle dates, but really you should use GMT internally and rely on OS libraries to convert to and from local time. That way if there's a change, only the OS libraries have to change. Obviously that's not how Microsoft did it and now they (we?) are paying for it.
What's wrong with amnually changing the clock?
Registry fix? What the hell for? I don't get it...
Because IT staffs across the U.S. and Canada (imagine the rest of the world that does business here also) have to certify millions of servers and workstations for a feel good piece of legislation. Instead of real efforts to wean us off foreign oil, we settle for this joke. And a significant percentage of my coworkers think it is great -- keeps them employed.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Why are they charging that amount for a patch? What gives them the right to charge that price to fix a problem with a product that a consumer has already bought and should have support for. Why is this not just distributed on windows update as a patch/fix ? Am I missing something here ?
It would be nice if Microsoft could get their current products to work correctly with the DST for any amount of money.
Outlook 2003 requires all your meetings to be cancelled and recreated. Even if patched.
I for one think that $4000 for innovation like this is a small price to pay.
That was one expensive piece of pointless legislation.
I've always felt that if we could harness all of the time and energy software developers and IT departments have spent over the years working on DST-related issues in software and apply it to some other purpose of good, we'd all be driving around in flying cars and taking vacations on the moon by now. It is 2007, after all. You know, the future?
That's right. I'm blaming the state of the world on DST.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
Maybe I don't read enough /., but I don't know why that's the case. Logic would say that all products released before this law was put into place would be affected. XP was released before this law (the law is really recent, right?). By what mechanism (Windows update maybe?) is XP not affected?
"That's left companies scrambling for software fixes that change the pre-set DST changes hard-coded in operating systems and applications, including every version of Windows except for the just-released Vista."
You would think that programmers that hard code (Bad Thing(TM)) would have a hard time getting/staying hired...
Go figure...
Shakespeare poems - infinite monkeys with infinite time.Computer tech support - a few trained ones working from 9 to 5.
all products releast post windows XP SP1 are already for the DST change, the only products that need to be patched are those released at or before the change was announced... aslong as you stick with XP (or god forbid VISTA) than you wont be double tax'ed by microsoft..... Also, as others have mentioned, there are sevral "unofficial" patches that should work just fine, as a it guy, you should be able to test them aganst they system's your planning on implimenting (if they are pre XP) to make sure they wont cause any problems...
Noone writes jokes in base 13!
Windows XP is still a fully supported system, while Windows 2000 isn't.
(MS only releases security-related fixes)
There's a free patcher here that I've used on a few 2k machines and one NT4 machine and nothing has blown up thus far.
First link under "freeware downloads".
XP was released about the same time they considerd changing DST im not sure if XP (orignal unpatched version) was DST compliant, however by the time SP1 was released, they had already decided to change DST in 2007, so many companies have had tons of time to prepair, and now that its upon up, people are just NOW rushing to patch (which could have been done YEARS ago) and making a scene about not being able to get patches, products prior to XP are out of the "primary support" cycle from Microsoft, and as such patches are no longer provided, MS has said they will patch previous products for a price, which is what they are doing (cheeper than they orignally stated too!) none the less, this is a good point for open sorce software, as another poster here said, it should be a simple config file change, easy to patch, if it isnt thats MS's bad coding practices, and as such im sure pretty much all OSS software still being activly developed already has patches avalable...
Noone writes jokes in base 13!
I know in Soviet Russia that work was done for free for the betterment of ones comrades, but this isn't Soviet Russia quite yet. Companies charge you when they provide a service for you.
My employer, which I shall not mention, has several hundred Win 2000 machines and we're just patching the registries to include the updated DST information. A few hundred dollars in man-hours makes more sense than $4k to Microsoft.
I understand that they're charging $4000 for all of the patches, and on all of an enterprise's machines. I also understand that they're choosing to not offer the patch to private users for a nominal fee, nor are they offering the option to buy just this one patch for a lesser price. My response is that this is what you get when you have a monopoly: they can offer whatever they wish -- or, to not put too fine a point on it, choose to NOT offer whatever they wish -- and charge however many limbs they want for it. It's disgusting, and to me particularly offensive. I'm sure there will be rants about the evils of capitalism and such here -- this IS Slashdot, after all -- and I can't really disagree here. I'm about as far to the right as they come and as rabid a capitalist as you'll ever see but this just makes us look bad. Capitalism REQUIRES adequate levels of competition to function properly and what you're seeing here is what happens when that competition is absent.
I've been using tzedit.exe (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914387) for manually updating a few old pc's
If you want them to update Solaris 7 or earlier, it'll cost you $10,000/server with a cap of $150,000. Highway robbery if you ask me.
We're just modifying the timezone files with zic.
As much as I dislike MS, they're not alone in the highway robbery department here.
I know this is Slashdot and all, but you might want to mention this 'fix' is only needed for products that came out in the 2000 batch. So for people running XP, 2003 stuff, this is no issue at all. $4000 is still alot for a product that hasn't reached his end of life status though...
I'm Rocco. I'm the +5 Funny man.
The question here is not if they should charge for this patch; it is reasonable to do so. The issue is how much? Clearly there are costs involved with opening up old development branches, recreating build environments, developing fixes, doing test, and then distribution. Additionally this is for a relatively small segment of the market who are primarily running old software who haven't paid anything to Microsoft in years. From that perspective their argument that 'if you want a non-security fix you must pay good $$ for it' kinda makes sense. I suspect they're trying to push smaller organizations with 10s or 100s of machines to consider an upgrade to a newer, supported, operating system.
Of course this isn't a totally solid argument. Clearly they do already have some infrastructure in place for doing fixes; because they're still turning out security patches. And who could honestly argue there aren't security issues in these older products? So, why aren't they charging for security patches? Is a time issue no less important?
This is a grey area and my personal opinion is that a more 'customer focused' organization would do this fix for free or for a minimal fee. The original $40K charge was clearly highway robbery and this $4k still seems inflated; especially since they know it will be amortized across every user of the older systems. I think this behavior is yet another sign that Microsoft is complacent in their monopoly status; much the same way they've embraced DRM. They assume everybody will, of course, use their products and therefore their primary focus is about making the most of their monopoly. In this case keeping people locked into the current product and/or charging them for using older products; in the DRM case forcing DRM on people so they can woo the content providers.
Historically they've done well with these tradeoffs. Even mostly running linux & mac systems I still find myself occasionally needing windows (currently via parallels). It will be interesting to see how if their focus shifts over the years. It takes a long time to change a large organization.
- max
This is for OS that are out of support.
If you bought an extended support contract, at the time of expiration, you get this for free.
If you thought "I won't have any W2K in 6 months, so why bother" and 24 months later, the DST issue caught you - well, pay up.
Or what value did those who paid for extended support get?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I personally think that businesses should be able to write off the time and money they spend on DST patching. It was the government that wants this DST change.
The amount of downtime we've endured in our company is horrendeous because of this DST change. We have no choice but to install these poorly tested patches.
Although the price of $4000 is 1/10 of the original estimate Microsoft made, it seems a bit pricey for a patch to a product you've already paid for.
Well, it's not a bug fix. The products work to spec and have done so throughout their product life and general support, and right now they're in a "security/critical fix only" extended support. If I had to put programmers to update anything else, I'd want to get paid. I don't know how many takers they'll have on this offer, but to a large corporation $4000 for the whole company is a pittance so it hardly sounds like a big money maker...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Save your company the money, use OpenBSD's OpenNTP and sync your windows server(s)/client(s) to it and you're set... Simple as that - same with Cisco, why use it when there's OpenBSD.
This fee is all inclusive. That means any product in extended support, and any DST related patch.
So that includes:
Windows 2000 Server straight DST patch
Windows 2000 CRT DST patch (Never heard of that one? See here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932955/en-us/ and here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932590/en-us/
Exchange running on W2K
Visual Studio 6.0 patches (I believe...)
So $4000 to cover *all* unsupported systems, and to have a human to call and say "Your patch screwed up my server" and have them fix it, is to be cliche, Priceless
www.christopherlewis.com
This is absurd. Just go here and follow the instructions.
.reg file by copy/pasting from that page. .vbs file by copy/pasting from that page. .reg file to all Win2k machines and apply fix.
Three steps.
1. Create
2. Create
3a. Create GPO to import reg key and run VBScript on Win2k machines at Startup.
or
3b. In absence of AD, modify script to copy itself and
If you're such a small organization that you don't have an I.T. group.. then.. it's probably simple to use TZEdit to update your piddly network.
For fun, you can trick out the script to make sure it only runs once.
What timezone you are in is purely a cosmetic feature (or it should be).
One should be able to change my timezone/dst settings at will, without affecting any behavior of a system:
calendar/appointments, emails, servers, should all be running effectively independent of local time zone/daylight settings.
It is a bug of Microsoft that defaults to using Local time in the bios.
There is an unsupported option in Win2K and WinXP to change to GMT...
Only GMT/UTC times should be used it these cases:
- over networks.
- in files.
- in databases.
- in hardware.
Otherwise, your stored dates could be at error when:
- you move your computer
- when you change your timezone.
- when you talk to another computer in another timezone.
- when the government changes DST.
Yes, Email uses local time, but an UTC offset is given, so UTC is effectively given too.
I know of no real reason to use localtime in hardware.
Someone said "but users may get confused editing BIOS".
1. what beginner users edit the BIOS.
2. the time should be set from the OS, not in the bios config.
3. you could store timezone in bios too, if you really want it idiot proof.
I was really hoping this DST change would cause Microsoft to fix the bug, but apparently not.
Is that the sound of a Southerner making a mistake?
You do know that the law (final conference report) passed the House 275-156, the Senate 74-26, right? Not exactly party-line votes.
What you say may be valid, but it doesn't change the fact that many MS products are significantly cheaper than the competition. I'm getting ready to move my small business to MS Dynamics because even with all of the fees, and ongoing support, their product is much cheaper (and better) than comparable competing products. So, while sure, it's not free, I know that many companies, large and small, still look at the bottom line, and aren't just buying MS products because they're Microsoft.
The whole "lock-in" thing is really just a straw man. Data is data. If you don't like whatever product you're using for whatever application, just move the damn data to a new product. MS is certainly not holding guns to anybody's head to keep them using their products, and they don't hold data hostage. Heck, another part of the major software move I'm about to do is because MS Dynamics actually provides much easier, more transparent access to the raw data than competitors products allow.
I don't respond to AC's.
It's affected, but it's covered. Microsoft isn't covering W2K because it's a legacy product.
I, for one, welcome our Microsoft DST-changing overlords!
I bet it's cheaper to upgrade to the next version!
Oh snap...
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
all Linux had to do was update its zone info stuff. Why is Windows so much harder? Didnt they do it properly?
As an end user, it was even easier. All I did was apt-get update/upgrade.
The difference between the free and non free worlds is never more glaring than when you "upgrade". Because non free companies don't trust each other or their users, they can't really co-operate. When they have to co-operate, things get sticky. Mechanisms, like the Windows registry, are so bad that it's easier to wipe and reload than it is to actually update software. What's a pain for individual users is multiplied by thousands for businesses and then compounded by the number of applications updated. A whole industry exists to help banks and other businesses do trivial things like change out versions of text editors and mail clients on ordinary workstations. It's a process that's excruciatingly manual, bandwith intensive and slow, with each person able to do less than ten machines a night. Add some smoke an mirrors timing "security"* into the mix and you have something even worse.
*-there is no security on a platform with a one in four botnet ownership. The pain and expense are all for nothing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Am I missing something here ?
Yes, you're missing Four Million Dollars for every thousand businesses who figure they ought to get these for 'good measure'.
Microsoft isn't.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Remember the batch of F-22 stealth fighters the lost everything but their flight-control computers when they crossed over the international dateline earlier this month?
Well, that's certainly not the first time F-22's have flown across the pacific, and they never had that problem before. It was because of the DST patch to their systems, the engineers skipped the regression tests that involved the dateline because it was just a patch for the US timezones. Look what happened.
So, while it may seem simple enough to change the DST handling in MS Windows, don't count on it.
Whenever you mess around with time, it is easy to create unexpected results. (cue time-travel jokes)
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Hey Apple-lovers. Why no negative press about Apple not providing any "fixes" at all for its older OS's?
5 056/
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=30
Of course, my "karma" will cause this to have a score of 0 so who knows who actually see (let alone respond to) this reply.
Please don't feed the troll.
He's obviously a moron.
So why not run NTP?
My first language is portuguese, and the portuguese acronym for STD-Sexually Transmitted Disease is DST. For one moment, I though that Microsoft has infected some of their users with some Sexually Transmitted Disease and was going to charge them for the cure
But what is really impressive, is that I'd just found this as something natural for microsoft, and it took me a whole 5 seconds to realize that the english acronym is different. It really says a lot about my perceptions on Microsoft. Any other portuguese speaker here got the same feeling upon reading the headline?
Your ad could be here!
Always worth a try!
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
The source for all of the patches is the timezone data published through the US NIH ftp site. (why National Institutes of Health - no idea, but this is the authoritative source). This data is published in System V zonedata format, ready to compile with your Unix's zic(1) command.
You're done.
If your server runs a timezone other than a North American one, maybe you want to untar the whole thing and glance at the README.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Cost of transition: -$2 billion ... campaign contributions to Congress-creatures: $1 million (not as cheap as crack-whores, but close).
Lost sales due to implementation problems -$1.2 Billion
Lost wages due to bumble-fucked transition -$2.3 Billion
Injuries, lawsuits etc: -$2.7 billion
Bribes er
Energy Savings +$2.1 Billion
Net savings: -$6.101 Billion. For Congress, that's good. =/
[Note: all numbers conjured out of "thin air" which is to say made up -just like the government's numbers]
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
I still use 2K, so am I basically screwed on getting the DST right on my system? Or will there be a free patch for end users? I'm sure if I asked someone at M$ that, I'd get the response "Upgrade to VISTA"; which is NOT going to happen; my system doesn't need to be any slower thank you, it's already 5 years old. I'm not too concerned (Hell, I don't even keep a firewall active on my home system; but that's) cause I don't do ANYTHING of value on it. Just wondering.
On one hand, time keeping is a very basic function and the price to fix it is simply outrageous. On the other hand, how long should they be required to support their products? Should they issue a patch for Windows 9x / NT 4.0? Windows 3.x / NT 3.x? DOS 6.22? What if somebody was willing to pay $50,000 for a DST fix for Windows 3.1? I personally think that all of the products mentioned are somewhat past their prime, but they are all still in VERY wide use today. Windows 2000 has only been out for like 8 years! It seems unreasonable to me that they are charging so much (even if it is all-inclusive) after a relatively short time. Of course it's hard to figure out where that cut-off line should be...
I'd love to see someone total up the dollars lost because Congress decided to change DST without giving 5-10 years' head start.
By the way, a LOT of VCRs and other embedded-systems clocks will never again pick up DST correctly. I've told people to turn DST off on clocks and older PCs and just change the clocks manually.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Sounds like they shoulda just had their apps use UTC.
Suddenly, Apple charging a few bucks for 802.11n doesn't seem so bad. But I've got a bunch of DST updates sitting in my System Update. For free. Are they charging commercial clients?
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hickup
I just downloaded the patches for nothing and I did not even have to pay a thing or verify that my OS was legit or not. SO this article about charging is full of it. I used it for several win2k servers and win2k3 servers.
thank you, Brian M. http://www.masonfamilytree.com http://www.thefederation.us http://www.patriciaannmason.com http
If you have contracted extended support then no, that should be free. Thats what 'extended support' should mean.. they support you.
Now, if you want a patch for a product that is OUT of support ( like NT4, or exchange 5.5 ), then a resonable fee should apply.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I agree wholeheartedly, blaming MS is pure idiocy. Here in Australia we had DST well before we had computers plugged into everything. Didin't stop the bullshit though, the main complaints were...
1. Dairy cows will require milking at the "wrong time" and will suffer from overfull udders.
2. Drapes will fade quicker due to the "extra" UV light.
BTW: This DST "calamity" is not restricted to MS software, I mean how the hell does someone with a traditional diary get around the problem, I have never seen a diary that has a 23 or 25 hour day on the change over date. Will receptionists in small offices all across the US go into meltdown? Will the publishers responsible for the "defective" diaries be issuing page updates? - Nah, but hopefull it will convince the remaining ludites to dump Win2000 and look for something better.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Umm not if you paid for extended support.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Anyone notice that Apple fixed this in a small patch a week or two ago? For free I might add.
Get me a meat pie floater!
From TFA: "Unlike Y2K, which was a bug, many companies and parts of the government just didn't blow the horn on the impact the changes would have," said M3 Sweatt, the chief of staff of the Windows core development group. What kind of name is M3 Sweatt, unless he... it... is an android?!
Chances are, since they have the code already for DST, modifying it to accomodate this recent change would be a minimal effort. Charging for this is nothing more than MS trying to milk every penny they can. For this, they should be brought up on charges.
For MS you can apply the patch to all systems. For Solaris before 8 the cost is $400 _per server_ or _$150K_ for more than 375 servers. See
a ris_dst_addendum.jsp
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/techtips/sol
At 40K or even 4K per customer there appears to be a LOT of money to be made to fix this problem.
Which lobby group convinced the Government that this was a good idea?? Just curious...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
We have a problem with appointments on our Judges outlook calendars that were made prior to the "patch" if those appointments fall in the new daylight savings time. The appointments are shifted by one hour. We found that deleting them and recreating them didn't help. Weird.
I wish it were as easy as writing a couple scripts.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Storing '07' in a database is bad idea right?
Well using "Local Time" for critical events is also quite a software error.
If you don't know why, Then you should think about it a bit.
Once you see why using local time is such an error, someone please tell Microsoft not to assume the hardware clock is local time.
All of the bugs that this person is talking about are because Microsoft is basing events or clocks on local time.
If the hardware time is universal, and all software only uses universal time for calculations, then the DST thing is just a display setting. It doesn't matter if you fly to japan and adjust your timezone to there, or if California gets rid of DST.
I still use OS/2 on several server boxes (never crashed, no viruses, trojans etc.) & was a bit concerned that I might need to migrate them to the "roll your own" version of Linux that we use on our other machines, thanks to the new DST idiocy (thanks congressional bottom feeding pigs). Imagine my surprise when I went to the software updates site (IBM/ECS) and found a fix (free for all users) for all versions of OS/2. So, Billy barf-bag, what exactly is your excuse for charging folks for this rather elementary fix?
BILK it for ALL IT'S WORTH!!!
Only Microsoft could POSSIBLY have the stones to charge their users for a fix that their own system programming fails to address!
Bravo, Redmond! You have, once again, shown the World a NEW WAY into the wallets of the businesses OF the world!
Kudos!
This isn't a bug fix it's a change that happpened long after the OS was releaesed. They cannot be expected to know the future.
I was going to post that XP Home might not be eligible for a free upgrade, but on checking the page I notice that not only is it supported, but it has acquired a 5-year "extended support" period since last I looked. It used to be deemed ineligible for extended support because it wasn't a "Business product" but that seems to have changed since the last time I checked, just before Christmas. Weird.
If shrub didn't feel like playing god and changing our very system of keeping time.
I hate sigs.
FTA:
Windows Vista and Outlook 2007, released in January to retail customers and in November to business, do not need to be updated, since they were coded after Congress passed the 2005 Energy Policy Act that revised DST's start and stop dates.
Why did it take 2 years to get this done (during lapses of contracts). If it was that important; why didn't they make it available in 2005. Yes, all work forces were shifted towards Vista and it wasn't a priority for 2 years. These are rhetorical questions. Its about money and priorities.
What the hell does bastages mean?
that'll change the clock for MS OSs automatically. I grabbed one, installed it on the Windows VM running in my copy of VMware Server, problem solved. Find out how to get it and set it up here
Tech Public Policy stuff
It's a bird, it's a ship, no, it's getting your software up to date being cheaper than patching a leaky boat !
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
People knew then exactly what the support stakes were:
Microsoft is not ending support for Windows 2000. During the Extended Support phase, Microsoft continues to provide security hot fixes and paid support but no longer provides complimentary support options, design change requests, and non-security hotfixes.*
Everyone had 18 months to update to XP and WS2003 and didn't do it. Of course, this is Slashdot, it must always be Microsoft's fault!
What the hell does proofof mean?
Thanks!
^[:q!
If you have a car thats 10 years old and the government mandates a change, the consume doesn't have to pay for it.
MS is clearly gouging.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Watch the movie Johnny Dangerously sometime.
It's full of fargin bastages.
Why can't people just use the internet time update thingy and be done with it?
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
Bah! You purchased a piece of software, not support. I don't want to hear a bunch of bitching about a copmany *offering* a small limited support package to extend the support contract on a product to encompass hundreds of products for one fee.
For $4,000 you're getting someone willing to say "this will work". If you don't find that worth $4,000 then use one of a gazillion free options or just change it manually. Hell even microsoft offers a free solution! All you have to do is get off your lazy ass download it and install it. Done! If it fucks up your system, well then I hope it costs you less that $4,000 to rectify.
The whole thing is a load of fud if you ask me.
Congress rescheduled all our meetings from, e.g., noon PST to noon PDT. They're literally happening at a different time now, from the perspective of UTC. Local time is what users care about (that's what determines when people will actually try to show up) so not storing it is in fact the cause of the problem this time around.
...not to mention fargin iceholes!
NTP only synchronizes UTC. Your timezone is an offset from that, which has nothing to do with NTP.
If you run NTP, you still need a patch, or your clock will be wrong, by precisely one hour.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
because the Internet time update generally will update the GMT value on your system. Then, it will convert it to local time. Can you see the problem here?
Proof (The evidence or argument that compels the mind to accept an assertion as true.-answers.com) of Chaos Actually, Prof. Chaos and Professor Chaos were already taken. ...And I was kind of drunk.
Oh no, an hour! How will we now live?
I laugh at the Robber Barron of our times fleecing pigeons once again (and again...). My system was updated a long time ago with the button push that activates a small script which executes the commands "apt-get update;apt-get upgrade;". Four thousand bucks for the fix otherwise? Isn't that a bit steep? I mean they send a Jr. grade intern from the community college to change the date that daylight savings kicks in. A 2 minute job (finding the line may take a search or two). Considering its microsoft, they might have it embedded in several dozen places, in several dozen files (instead of just one), so the job may actually take up to 5 minutes. Save the file(s), test and you are done. Perhaps 20 minutes including writing up a report. The intern got minimum wage for Washington State (or perhaps, just some honorarium). But Microsoft gets to charge its hapless pigeons four thousand bucks for what is a trivial adjustment. Considering a million businesses will take the hook (no bait required), thats 4 billion bucks for microsoft, for 20 minutes work by an intern. Thats 200 million dollars per second microsoft is making from the work of the intern. I remember that the time server on microsoft operating systems has been broken for a long time on a lot of systems. That they are charging for a fix is galling. That businesses keep going back to them is laughable (in a sad and pathetic way). As for me, I'm good to go, and my fix cost 1.7 tenths of a cent (cost of high speed internet per month divided by the time to download).
Originally we were quoted $190,000 for just the Exchange 5.5 patch -- and this is a global company with enterprise MS licenses. And yes, the patch situation from MS is ridiculous -- the free ones just came out two weeks ago, then got revised just about every day last week. Why did it take them 2 years to create it?
OSS is not likely to have this kind of problem since there are many many options for who's going to fix the 'problem'.
So pass the word, along with no BSA worries, OSS frees you from paying Microsoft for tweaks to older software.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Old troll Bungi doubts me:
"It's a process that's excruciatingly manual ... with each person able to do less than ten machines a night "
Bullshit. Do you even *believe* this crap you write? You've never had a job in a real company with more than 100 machines, so do us all a favor and just don't share your opinion on things like these. OK? Thanks.
Yes, Bungi, I've actually been on a Windoze upgrade slave gang for a fortune 100 bank and what I describe is how I remember it. They had some of the automated upgrade tools you mentioned, but they did not work. Instead, they wiped and reloaded with boot floppies that grabbed images from a server running linux. Most of the programs had to be installed anyway so that the registry would be consistent.
Did you really? You're so leet. By any chance would you happen to be running an eight-year old version of Linux?
Ha ha, I'm a normal desktop user and no, I don't have to run eight year old versions of software that have been continually upgraded and improved. The longest chain of upgrading I can remember is potato to woody to sarge. It got tricky once but everything usually worked. Mostly, it's easier to install binaries fresh. Leet is a concept that only applies in the non free world of secrets and bullshit.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That patch will be out on bittorrent in no time. 4K so your crap software keeps working. Sounds like another year 2000 scam to me. All the computers will crash, ahhh, ahhh, ahhh.
"We, uh, have to charge $4000 for, uh, accounting purposes. Yeah, that's it." - Steve Ballmer
XP and stuff for it shouldn't be a problem.
Except that MS already has a hotfix for the DST patch. That's info is from one of the administrators telling me about it at work a couple days ago but I didn't ask if the hotfix was for XP or Win Server 2003 or both (those are the only ones we use at work from Microsoft).
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
$4K? How about this?
o l\TimeZoneInformation
Open up regedit and go to the following location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr
Change DaylightStart to the following
00 00 03 00 02 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
(Simply we're changing 04 to 03 and 01 to 02)
Change StandardStart to the following
00 00 0b 00 01 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
(Simply we're changing 0a to 0b and 05 to 01)
Why those changes?
DaylightStart rules:
04 becomes 03 because we're going from "April" (04) to "March" (03). 01 becomes 02 because we're going from the 1st Sunday (in April) to the 2nd Sunday (in March).
StandardStart rules:
0a becomes 0b because we're going from "October" (0a) to "November" (0b). 05 becomes 01 because we're going from the Last Sunday (in October) to the 1st Sunday (in November).
Consider that one on the house. It works for Windows 2000 at least.
"Build a man a fire warm him for a day, set a man on fire and warm him for the rest of his life."
Using local time in storage (file or hardware/bios ) or calculations is a bug as bad as storing 2 digit years in a database.
...
You could excuse Y99/Y2K bugs written in 1995 with your logic.
It worked at the time it was sold...
Bugs from using local time could manifest themselves even without a DST change.
If you were running Windows on a plane and you manuuallly or automatically changed timezone as you flew, then applications relying on local times may give you alarms at the wrong time, files may be stamped incorrectly, programs may crash at the time of timezone change,
A change in DST should have been a help for Microsoft to fix the Hardware-time-is-local-time-bug, but they did not.
Love him or hate him, GWB has absolutely nothing to do with how much Microsoft charges for a patch.
The DOJ dropped its prosecution of Microsoft (for anti-trust legal violations) when Bush came to power.
For many businesses IT outsourcing agreements are a way of life, with a good contract manager any contractual agreement or metric not met will be dealt with according to contractual agreements. $4000 is cheap compared to what most contractual penalties are, if the lunch meeting for hooha big wig #3 with big new potential client is ruined by said outsourcing company $4000 is the least to be worrying about (see CYA). my .02$
If you thought "I won't have any W2K in 6 months, so why bother" and 24 months later, the DST issue caught you - well, pay up.
Or, alternatively, migrate before next Sunday.... which is what I did with a couple of our legacy Win2K machines. I'm having more problems with the migration of the surviving pre-firewire Macintoshes onto Linux-PPC. I think one may end up just being reformatted with a flask of liquid oxygen, a jar of aluminum filings, and a magnesium flare.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
MS already has published an unautomatted fix for Windows 2000. See KB914387.
In short, you have two choices. use the tzedit utility to modify the dates and times of when the OS thinks the clocks should change, or apply the suggested reg changes mentioned in the KB article to modify the settings for you.
You can automate this process yourself in about 2 minutes. I wrote a script that we pushed out via group policy to about 25 Windows 200 servers just this week. In fact, did it during production hours while everything was running. If pushing this via GP is not an option for you, you could automate and deploy this yourself many different ways.
demanded more from where I work. I spent 2 days redoing inventory/DST updates on my companies computers. I wrote my own .reg files and a script to merge them into the registries. If I wasn't needing an annual inventory, i'd have just tacked it to a log on script and called it a day. TY microsoft for giving me even MORE job security.
I'm hoping that this pointless change just means DST is in its death throes. Corporations do more business online internationally now, and will soon find it more convenient to just use GMT rather than continue to do conversions for a meeting in 4 time zones. This is just another nail on the coffin of local US time zones.
And as everyone on Slashdot surely knows, setting you BIOS clock to GMT and your Windows timezone to GMT is the only way to prevent your system from doing something stupid when dual-booting Linux around DST-changing time.
Anyway, I'm waking up at 1300 GMT tomorrow, dammit.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914387
...provided without warranty, responsibility, or any representations of any particular function, do not use, sacrifice a chicken in the name of FSM, etc., etc.... please don't smite the server and get me fired...
or you can use ours...
ftp://ftp.prophetsys.com/Drivers/DST/DSTtool.exe
Bear in mind that it does nothing whatsoever to resolve issues arising from programs scheduling things during the whole transition, or networks that require a central timekeeping source, or anything else mentioned in other posts. It just and only fixes your daylight savings database and current timezone settings. No restart needed, how nice.
By the way, radio automation is one of those time-sensitive systems that get really finniky about DST. This tool plays nice with our systems (because they are already designed to read DST from windows), but it might just break yours.
-1 raving lunatic; +6 subGenius... Things even out...
So if I point them to a RIGGED UTP server, then I can have the 'correct' info?
yet another rehash of bought in 'product' in a bright new shiny package ..
..
Hi, Steve
Re:Still cheaper
davecb5620@gmail.com
I downloaded the patch for Win2003 on my linux machine!, the patch for WinXP-SP2 (and only SP2) required "genuine advantage" to download. I did that on the wife's machine and forgot to use IE, so microsoft graciously offered to install a plug-in to Firefox. I declined, letting microsoft install firefox plug-ins seemed like letting your baby sister organize your porn collection.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
And since this is federal legislation, any refusal of payment is clearly unpatriotic!
No, because then anything that uses UTC will be wrong, which might be worse than having the displayed time be wrong.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Oh yeah, and also, by default ntpd won't accept a one-hour jump; it will assume something has gone wrong and won't accept the new time.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
This whole thing has been a brainless mess since it was proposed by the Ohio Representative who didn't want his kiddies to out trick-or-treating in the dark. SEND A BILL TO YOUR CONGRESSIONAL REPRESENTATIVES! They are the ones who made this mess. Let them pay for it.
Bill B
hmm, you should research how much Sun is charging. If you think Microsoft is bad, I think your brain is going to kersplode when you see what Sun is doing.
oh you silly boy, this ain't no stinking fix this is just a cover-up! Apply the patches and all the time in the pre2007 DST period change too! Imagine telling the DOJ that you can't tell what time is actually in the logs when they are trying to catch some terrorist child pornographers downloading Britney Spears music, because Microsoft deployed a half-assed patch that change all the times in the computer; oh the humanity!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The patches haven't been out very long, and MS has been constantly changing their procedure for dealing with the DST problem. Literally, you could read their DST page and hit refresh and it would be completely different several times in the same day just two weeks ago. Exchange and Outlook are effected. WindowsCE is affected and didn't even have a patch available as recently as 2 weeks ago. This whole DST change is a complete clusterfuck.
Um, why is there any need to have a fix at all? Has anyone heard of tzedit? It's been around for a very long time and allows you to manually control when the change from standard to daylight savings occurs. Hello????
What is with windows users that they are willing to take all this crap and keep paying for it??
5 056
It's free for us Apple users.
Apple - http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=30
ZOMG!!!! Teh evil M$ monopoly is charging for software and support again!!!! How evil!!!! The time and energy of creating and supporting software is worthless, and thus it's evil to actually charge money for it! Look at Lunix: they know how to exploit the time and energy of their serf programmers, and wouldn't dream of charging. (Please note: As good Slashdotters, we must ignore Apple's yearly $150 service pack: they are not Microsoft, and thus do not qualify as an "evil" monopoly)
Slavery benefits society!! Your software longs to be free!!! Slavery is Freedom! War is Peace! Slashdot's Open Source Newspeak Dictionaries for everyone!!
Your post makes no sense, whatsoever
..
.. :)
It's how Microsoft usually innovates. Buy in a product and repackage it as MS whatever.
was Re:insert free ad for MS Dynamics here
Please go to my pet supply store
davecb5620@gmail.com
Has anyone gotten a patch for the exchange 2000 part of it yet? The w2k one is pointless, why would anyone pay the 4k when microsoft themselves gives you a way to run it through active directory, and the code to go with. Yes we only have about 15 servers and about 75 users, but it worked perfectly fine for the timezone portion. The bad thing is that microsoft themselves are having problems on turning out actual patches for the exchange/outlook portion. if you've been following it like we have been for the past month they go between saying dont update your OS before the patch to update before it, right back to dont do it. Has anyone gotten something decent to work out with the CDO's yet?
There is a claim on MS's site that the registry hack works for Windows 2000 and that the patch for Windows XP only works on SP2. Can't I just use the same registry hack for 2000 and XP, any service pack? I don't see why not, as if I do the hack on Windows XP and then run TZEdit (downloaded for Windows 2000), my time zone shows up properly adjusted for the new rules.
Why don't I just upgrade to SP2? Well, I have an entire load of new PCs to deploy, but I'm not going to get them done by this weekend. Once they are in place, this is a complete non-issue, but for now, I need to get this working.
...for the entire mess.
It's AN EXPERIMENT, seriously.
If it "saves no energy", which it won't, WE GO BACK TO THE OLD DST RULES, and we do it all over again next year!!!!
You allowed YOUR dumb-ass lawmakers to do this by YOUR neglect!!!!
Why *not* penalize them for this?
BWilde
While you can, and I did, patch Windows 2000 servers by hand by editing the registry, there is no such fix for Exchange 2000. It requires a new version of the CDO DLLs. If you use OWA or any application that uses CDO, such as Blackberry Enterprise Server, for scheduling, you are stuck.
When I called Microsoft to get the $4000 patch, I was told that I couldn't get it "after the fact" because I didn't already have a extended support contract. However, if I we were planning to upgrade in the next year and I was willing to talk to a sales representative about doing so, they would wave the fee. We are planning to upgrade, so I agreed and was given the link to the Exchange 2000 and Windows 2000 patches.
No one, including Microsoft, seems to be sure what the impact of all this will be. Next week is going to be interesting.
Edit the registry? How about this?
# apt-get install tzdata
Consider that one on the house. It works for all my servers at least.