In other "incorrect calendars" bugs, there's the Rockchip RK808 RTC, where the engineers thought that November had 31 days, needing a Linux kernel patch to this day that translates between Gregorian and Rockchip calendars (which are gradually diverging over time).
To be fair, that's nowhere near as daft as september, october, november, december. Latin for seven, eight, nine, and ten is: septem, octem, novem, decem. Those are the nineth, 10th, 11th and 12th months.
Which wouldn't be that weird, except that the earliest Roman calendar started in March and ended in December, having only 10 months!
The Romans were of course well aware that this left a gap of about two months between the end of one year in December, and the beginning of the next year in March. But they just didn't bother counting this period as part of the calendar year. Presumably because there was no agricultural reason to need accurate dates during winter.
> If this behavior were to be corrected, many problems would arise, including:
> Almost all dates in current Microsoft Excel worksheets and other documents would be decreased by one day.
Unless your fix adds a day to make them stay the same??
And these silly "compatibility" excuses are begins bugs affecting more and more unsuspecting users like that gene import conversion bug affecting a quarter of all published gene research papers.
> Applies to: Microsoft Excel for Mac 2011, Excel for Microsoft 365 for Mac, Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Excel 2010, Excel 2013, Excel 2016
I learned about this from my Macintosh back in The Day™, when a dead Parameter RAM battery would reset the system date to January 1st, 1904 at every boot:
> “The date and time setting is also copied at system startup from the clock chip into its own low-memory location. It’s stored as a number of seconds since midnight, January 1, 1904, and is updated every second. The maximum value, $FFFFFFFF, corresponds to 6:28:15 AM, February 6, 2040; after that, it wraps around to midnight, January 1, 1904.”
I was developing an interface to read a .xslx file to import a table within a Qt/C++ program, and this detailed showed up in my conversions to Unix time. It turns out Claude was amazing and brought up this issue as soon as Excel was mentioned, but terrible at actually fixing up the calculations.
I'd prefer using a .csv with dates already converted to Unix time, but no luck convincing the other people involved.
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Also one of my favourite kernel patch messages: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin....
Edit: Whoops, correct eng -> latin nums
The Romans were of course well aware that this left a gap of about two months between the end of one year in December, and the beginning of the next year in March. But they just didn't bother counting this period as part of the calendar year. Presumably because there was no agricultural reason to need accurate dates during winter.
"Whoever f---ed this up should be stabbed."
"I have excellent news for you."
>The Latin word for "eight" is octō. [0]
[0] asked google
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...
> If this behavior were to be corrected, many problems would arise, including: > Almost all dates in current Microsoft Excel worksheets and other documents would be decreased by one day.
Unless your fix adds a day to make them stay the same??
And these silly "compatibility" excuses are begins bugs affecting more and more unsuspecting users like that gene import conversion bug affecting a quarter of all published gene research papers.
> Applies to: Microsoft Excel for Mac 2011, Excel for Microsoft 365 for Mac, Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Excel 2010, Excel 2013, Excel 2016
- https://spinsidemacintosh.neocities.org/im202#im033-001
> “The date and time setting is also copied at system startup from the clock chip into its own low-memory location. It’s stored as a number of seconds since midnight, January 1, 1904, and is updated every second. The maximum value, $FFFFFFFF, corresponds to 6:28:15 AM, February 6, 2040; after that, it wraps around to midnight, January 1, 1904.”
- https://archive.org/details/mac_Macworld_Mac_Secrets_5th_Edi...
- http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_26/minow....
- https://preterhuman.net/macstuff/qa/ops/ops23.html
I'd prefer using a .csv with dates already converted to Unix time, but no luck convincing the other people involved.
Reminds me of the good old "Falsehoods programmers believe about time": https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...