Dear Microsoft...

nicholas on 2009-01-02T23:22:59

Dear Microsoft...

Thirtey days hath November,
Aprile, June, and September:
Of twyecescore-eightt is but eine,
And all the remnante be thrycescore-eine.
O´course Leap yare comes an´pynes,
Ev'rie foure yares, gote it ryghth.
An´twyecescore-eight is but twyecescore-nyne.

I realise it may come as breaking news to Redmond, but the recent adoption of the Gregorian Calendar means that 2008 is a "leap year" and will have 366 days, not 365.*

If they can't get that right, what hope have they for classless Internet domain routing? (Sorry, I don't have a link to the appropriate part of the ARM Linux list archive where the (in)ability of certain OSes to get to the new IP address of the server was collated.)

* I have this funny feeling that someone is going to add a comment correcting me, in that 2008 is also a leap year under the Julian calendar, so they've had nearly 2 millennia's warning on this one.


The code behind the bug...

Tony Finch on 2009-01-03T12:53:37

The code behind the bug can bee seen at http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/Classic-WTF-The-Bug-That-Shut-Down-Computers-Wor ldWide.aspx#237125

They did at least know about leap years, but didn't test them properly. (There are only 146097 days in the Gregorian calendar, so an exhaustive test is easy.)