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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.
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!
This is just for Windows 2000 and products from that same era. XP and stuff for it shouldn't be a problem.
Hey - I don't have to believe in conspiracies in order to spread rumors about them. ;-)
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?
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!
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.
It's a little different. You're comparing a fix for a defective product to a patch to change behavior to fit an unforseeable change in timekeeping logic. And, please note that these products aren't even officially being supported anymore (thus, the service charge).
I'm not trying to defend MS, but there's no need to make dodgy comparisons... One can surmise that open-source users will likely have an easier time making this change, seeing as they don't have to rely on a corporation to update their binaries.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
That congress-Microsoft DST conspiracy theory seems a tad... overboard, to me at least. They do plenty of corrupt things we know about, theorizing about something as odd as this is unnecessary.
As for the summary saying "it seems a bit pricey for a patch to a product you've already paid for." - well, no, that isn't true. Customers paid for a product and for support for it; the support for Windows 2000 is over, as per the original agreements. They got what they paid for. This is the same issue with any proprietary, closed-source software - the client is left to depend on a single vendor for patches once the official support is over, and can effectively be taken hostage (I wouldn't trust patches from anyone who doesn't have access to all the source code). Microsoft isn't doing anything 'special' here beyond typical closed-source tactics. But those are enough to show the importance of using FOSS.
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
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.
Is that the sound of a Southerner making a mistake?
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.
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.
I would be willing to bet big money that if MS did anything it lobbied against this change. It is a Really Big Deal, and not something that is easy to just modify.
Also, by the US doing this it created more time zones. How? Mexico is choosing not to go along with the DST updates, therefore anywhere in Mexico using PST effectively isn't anymore.
Random Musings
Talk about tinfoil hats, how paranoid do you have to be to tie a daylight savings change to the Iraq war?
The daylight savings time change is one tiny paragraph of a huge energy policy bill, and by the way provides for a study in 9 months to see if it actually helped, and a potential of reverting back to the 2005 schedule if it didn't help. You may not agree with the policies put forth in the bill, but it certainly wasn't prompted by a desire to avoid appropriating money --- my senators and representative (all republicans) voted against it for anti-pork reasons.
This space intentionally left blank.
Actually this wasn't unforeseeable, it was announced back in 2005. Why the vendors only recently got around to addressing this issue is a mystery. The countless e-mails I have gotten from consulting companies about it have gotten real old too. Here's some legendary support for ya: ADIC (now Quantum) told my storage engineer that they are too busy to deal with the change until after it has already occurred! It will be a cold day in hell before I buy something from these guys again.
Always worth a try!
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
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.
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.
Allow me to dance upon the grave of this particular party line here and now -- bullshit, MS is still actively selling this operating system if you happen to be the right customer.
My gripe isn't that they want to charge for an update to a (now) 2-gen-old version of a product. My gripe is what they want to charge, even the new bargain-basement price. I could see a "nominal charge" up to the original sticker price, but I just can't swallow that a relatively simple change to the OS incurs a 40x higher cost than the original development of the entire OS, especially considering its a change they have to come up with anyway, because they are still actively selling it.
"Hey, the third matrix movie would have been good except for the plot,story, and acting." --AC
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.
$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."