The article is wrong
The US delegation voted: Greenwich mean time is now to be called "English Winter Time". And March is now officially renamed October. And there are two winters per year now. You guys will have to adapt, as it's the next standard.
Microsoft Office Online falls into Halloween time vortex
Either Steve "Uncle Fester" Ballmer is preparing everyone for his star turn at Halloween very early this year, or there's something wrong over at Microsoft's Office Online site. The UK landing page for Microsoft's productivity apps is currently dishing out tips on how to "create scary crafts for Halloween", while cautioning: " …
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Monday 10th March 2008 19:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Stupid DST Changes
At the risk of injecting some rationality into this discussion, I suspect that the problem was triggered by the US time change this last weekend. Since the States now puts the clocks forward three weeks earlier than before, it may be that there might be a bug in Microsoft's software (is that even possible?) that misinterpreted the time change on the UK site.
I am curious whether other territories that change their clocks later than the US (which, I think, is all of them) saw the same bug.
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Monday 10th March 2008 19:48 GMT Jason Ward
Contact us
But we make no effort to contact you.
Anyone notice that if you give them feedback on the website, after typing in your feedback you are told "whilst we make every effort to reply personally..."
I normally don't believe statements like that at the best of times, but given that the feedback section never asks for nore provides for you to enter even the slightest bit of personal information you can certain that when they say "...we make every effort to reply personally..." they are without doubt lying.
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Monday 10th March 2008 19:48 GMT G2
M$ standards vs. real world standards
Microsoft must have started to implement 'correctly' the new almost-ISO OOXML standard, as has been voted (well...not really, but MS likes to think so) by the recently ended BRM meeting.
Unfortunately they are the only ones. We in the rest of the world still use the Gregorian Calendar (well, most of the world...). M$ must be preparing to activate some world domination device if they think they can dictate that Halloween is in March.
oh, and second, a more proper link would be: http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/
(without the tracking gibberish appended at the end)
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i'll take the coat that goes with my penguin hat.
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Monday 10th March 2008 19:56 GMT Paul Hurst
actually
i love the clock next to it, that says "make time work for you", yes, im bored of march, how about october?
Not forgetting that the clocks go back an hour on the 28th October and, apparently, forward seven and a half months in early march.
good advert!
would be quite amusing if it was tied to the same system that updates the windows system clock!.......evil plan.....
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Monday 10th March 2008 20:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
lol
I think you will find GMT no longer exists except as a quaint time zone, chaps (which I also thought were for riding a horse??) and its UTC Universal Time.
GMT is just the British Winter time, as apposed to BST British Summer Time .. which I note we manage not to turn into something else.
Its another argument but double summer time would suit me perfectly, then GMT can finally die a death .. hopefully taking the program of the same name down with it. Maybe we could call the time zone "Prime" .. which I like the sound of : )
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Monday 10th March 2008 22:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Bonfire night!
I wonder if its something else......
The date today, I believe is 10th March 08 or 10/03/08 (for us in the UK) :) in the US it would be 3rd October, I just wonder if tomorrow we will see Fireworks and burning guys for the 3rd of November (11/3/08), as if you change the site to the US version everthing seems fine. Are they just reading a US date in UK format for the UK site.......
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Tuesday 11th March 2008 09:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
If only they understood
This is obviously a date translation error. The date is UK but being read as US.
Maybe if the USians understood why we write dd/mm/yyyy then they might get it right, so here goes:
The date when written as 10/03/2008 is a short version of 10th March 2008, and the date written in this format is a modern shortened version of the old English way of expressing a date which was 'the 10th day of March in the year 2008'. Lots of expressions over time have been shortened, for example to eat your first meal after awakening from sleep was to break your fast which eventually became breakfast.
Putting the month before the day just doesn't make sense!
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Tuesday 11th March 2008 09:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
@date formats?
Oh, yeah. It's date formats alright. M$' programs always parse nn-nn-yyyy codes in two ways: If it finds the first nn pair less than 12, it assumes mm/dd/yyyy. I had a problem in SSIS that dates whose days are less than 12 are flipped. The solution: a painstaking derive column task that rearranges the format to yyyy-mm-dd. (Or maybe the setup of the server has something to do with it- Our office has this weird setup where all workstations must be set up for the Australian regional settings but the server is set up for the US regional settings).
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Thursday 13th March 2008 17:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
@AC "If only they understood "
Also remember that in the UK when asked the date we say "it's the 10th of March", whereas Americans say "it's March 10th". More economical / lazy I suppose!
Dunno if their date format follows the way they say it, or if the way they say it follows their date format (chicken/egg?).
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
