Remembering the time Windows accidentally sent Poland to the bottom of the sea
- Reference: 1700564469
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/11/21/remembering_the_time_windows_accidentally/
- Source link:
Speaking on the [1]Dave's Garage channel, run by former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer, Chen added some flourishes to a story [2]from decades ago regarding the neat time zone map that initially shipped with Windows 95.
Readers of a certain age might remember the original Windows 95 time zone map. It was a fun feature where a user could click on a region of a map to select a time zone or regional settings - something that engineers doubtless had a blast making before geopolitical realities hit home.
[3]
If you don't remember the time zone map working that way, don't worry. Microsoft had to pull the features after governments complained about where their borders were. In 2003, Chen explained: "In early 1995, a border war broke out between Peru and Ecuador, and the Peruvian government complained to Microsoft that the border was incorrectly placed.
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[5]
[6]Youtube Video
"Of course, if we complied and moved the border northward, we'd get an equally angry letter from the Ecuadorian government demanding that we move it back. So we removed the feature altogether."
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Talking to Plummer, Chen added some more detail: "There were even arguments from countries who were not engaged in a border conflict where a small European country would contact us and say, 'Hey, our country is kind of small, can you give us one of our neighbor's pixels to make it easier to click on?"
This triggered an angry response from another country demanding why one of their pixels had been given away, and so it went on.
Since making everyone happy was impossible, Chen said the solution was to rotate the map to put the selected zone in the center. All good? Not quite...
[8]
"There was a bug that we introduced when we did that though..."
Chen went on to explain how the updated time zone map worked. Choose a zone, and all the pixels of the same code were highlighted, and the rest dimmed. "We just took out all the coloring code," he said, "but the map was still there ... we just used the map to identify where land and ocean was."
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Which is where the problem happened. According to Chen, changes were made to the time zone information for Poland. The country's time zone was changed to match that of its neighbors, but unfortunately, the colors on the map were not updated accordingly.
"Poland's time-zone - the original 'exclusive to Poland' time zone disappeared ... as a result when you went to the world map - the time zone picker map - there was ocean where Poland is supposed to be."
The problem had been caused by the deletion of Poland from the list since nobody used the zone. However, Microsoft's engineers forgot about one thing that did use it… the map. The result was that Poland remained at the bottom of the sea instead of being highlighted with the rest of the zone.
Chen recalled that the issue was eventually fixed but said: "There was a period of time when if you went to the time zone map, instead of Poland, you saw, er, what we called 'The Great Polish Sea'." ®
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[1] https://youtu.be/3UCohRKY2ns?si=sjh_j_TkJX40Juld
[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42823
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/bootnotes&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZVziNUNE3LCMQN@lBbUy-AAAAAY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UCohRKY2ns
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[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/15/google_deepmind_graphcast/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/16/developers_build_ai_to_read/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/21/it_help_desk_guy_arrested/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/06/mozilla_vehicle_data_privacy/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/01/what3words_geolocation_criticism/
[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Easily fixed
As far as I know, Macs still have a timezone map. The difference would be when they ring up to complain, Apple tell the countries where their borders go.
Anyone professionally involved in map-making should be well aware of the political sensitivities attached to it! The number of places around the world where the wrong name will get you into hot water is enormous. Google fudges the issue in some places (e.g. Falklands/Malvinas) but of course, that's only one of many similar issues. Antarctica is a special case with many different (and equally authoritative) naming authorities (see https://www.scar.org/data-products/place-names/) - and although territorial claims are "held in abeyance", they still exist!
Making maps of a territory is one of the ways that nations assert their sovereignty, and Foreign Offices are notoriously sensitive to such things. It's one of the very few issues where I have had to toe a political line!
Rose-tinted spectacles
So even in the good old days, Windows testing & QA was still shit.
Rome or Vatican?
This is a thing I've seen on every version of Windows and MacOS and every Linux distro: if you click on Rome to select CET time zone and locale it always selects Vatican City first, Rome after a few clicks around the neighboring pixels. I mean it's not like Rome is the largest city in Italy by size and population right?
Re: Rome or Vatican?
it's the only city to contain an entire country
Maybe if we all just starting ditching weird and 30-minute timezones and things like daylight saving time, we could just have 24 possibilities, named by "+1", "+2", etc. and solve the problem once and for all.
As it is Microsoft don't care about non-US timezones very much (and it's usually the cause of a lot of problems if you try to remove en-US everywhere even if you're not using it), but having to select "London" rather than "GMT + 0" is an annoyance I could really do without.
But then you have the EU, which insists on being 1 time zone, even though it really straddles 3. Most of Spain is West of the Meridian. Portugal is the same longitude as Dublin. Greece, Romainia, Bulgaria are really in +2.
Pedant alert!
The EU straddles far more than three time zones. There are bits of France (which is in the EU) that are in the Caribbean and South America, plus a handful of islands in the Indian Ocean and South Pacific.
Pedant alert! (2)
The EU isn't all 1 timezone. The Republic of Ireland has GMT/UTC in the winter and Irish Standard Time (UTC+1) in the summer, so its the same as it is the UK. It didn't follow that between 1968 and 1971 where it just adopted UTC+1 all year.
Portugal also has Western European Time (UTC) and Western European Summer Time (UTC+1), again the same as it is in the UK and Ireland. Although between 1992 and 1996 if followed Central European Time.
Also, Central European time, which is what most of the EU follows also has some non-EU states following it as well
To paraphrase CGP Grey, The EU is such a mess of asterisks and exceptions that it's a story for another time. This isn't a physics video.
But then you have the EU, which insists on being 1 time zone
When did that happen?
Never happen. That makes too much sense and is easy to understand.
Geopolitics
Plus ça change...!