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."

Comments

Re:Screw 'em

[cheater512]

But all Linux had to do was update its zone info stuff.

Why is Windows so much harder? Didnt they do it properly?

Re:Down with DST!

[theCoder]

Do what I do -- protest DST. I grew up in Indiana where they didn't participate in the DST silliness (Indiana recently caved to the peer pressure and now does do the switch). I've since moved to another state that does practice DST. For a few years, I went along with it, but last summer I decided to try not switching. I just got up earlier and mentally subtracted an hour from other people's times. It's a little confusing at times (especially when others send meeting notices that clearly say standard time but they mean daylight time), but otherwise it works very well. At work, I set my TZ variable correctly, and 90% of all the times I see on clocks are as I expect them. I plan on doing the same with this year's summer time.

The thing I learned most from my experiment, however, is that it takes a lot of will power to get up earlier. Most people simply do not have the will power to get up and be in bed an hour earlier. And sadly, that's the reason we spend so much time, money, and effort on DST. Just to trick lazy people into getting out of bed an hour earlier. It's also the reason why a permanent year round DST (which I've seen some people advocate) is doomed to fail. People would just adjust and do everything an hour later (and then we'd need a 2 hour DST). Only the constant switching keeps them in line.

So, while I personally despise DST as a ridiculous concept, it does have its uses.