09/28/2007, 3:55pm, EDT
Friday, September 28th
New Zealand Mac users missing DST patch
Apple has yet to issue a patch adjusting to a change in New Zealand's seasonal times, Mac users from the country complain. New Zealand's government has decided to shift its daylight savings switch ahead a week, moving from the previous date of October 1st; but without some sort of fix for Mac OS X, this will result in many computers displaying an inaccurate hour in the week between the old switchover and the new one. This in turn may throw off time-sensitive programs, such as iCal, producing inaccurate schedules and badly-timed application launches.
Apple has issued other timeshift patches well in advance of deadlines, such as one that corrected for an American schedule change earlier in the year. Anecdotes suggest however that New Zealand is not the only Pacific country to have had troubles, since while western Australia received a patch for its change, the upgrade was reportedly badly publicized and may not have been distributed through Software Update.
New Zealand coder Glenn Anderson has developed an unofficial patch for Mac OS X 10.3.9 and 10.4.10, although it is warned that the code cannot reach all parts of the Mac OS, such as any Java or WebObjects material. Should Apple release an official patch, the Anderson solution should successfully be overwritten.
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See that's the advantage of a mac, it just works....
except in NZ )-:
Of course, if you people understood the whole concept of time on computers, you'd know that by setting it manually causes the date/time to be wrong in GMT standards.
And why should they have to do it manually. Is it that hard to fix?
Current Mac OS X versions appear to still indicate Oct 7, as dronkert indicated. Horribly-confusing article; but the intent behind it (the OS is wrong) is correct.
However, the manual "fix" is to change the time offset - which isn't as easy as selecting "GMT +11" (or whatever is correct) on a Mac, you have to select a city that's in the timezone you want to be in.
ie, some of my machines are in Freetown, Sierra Leone, because I want them to be on GMT all the time.
And, what I really want to know is: how do you save daylight anyway!?
i'm doubly surprised as i always though sir steve was NOT a 'close enough is good enough' kinda guy - alas, i guess that's what happens when you pitch your product to the windoze audience
*as much as i love 'em, they're starting to need it more and more : (