The not-so-micro software giant also stomped on the heads of a bunch of Xbox LIVE cheaters last week, but these dudes weren’t stealing software – they were boosting their scores. Heck, is nothing sacred? Do these people have no respect for frag-rates? This is just plain wrong. Their parents must be total delinquents. I mean to say, there’s nothing wrong with getting a few free-games at the arcade when the high-score gets frozen at some silly number you can beat without even pressing the fire button, but actually boosting your score? Shudder. What is the world coming to?
The Redmondites have been having trouble with that LIVE branding – they also tried to use it for their online CRM offering (Should salesforce.com be worried? Hell, yeah! Look up Netscape in wikipedia). It seems the name attracted a bunch of gamers who thought it was a way to keep track of the various elves and trolls they’d slain. So Microsoft changed the name to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. So now there won’t be any confusion. Except for those who don’t know what Dynamics means in this context. Or CRM. Or Online. Hang on, everyone knows what ‘online’ means. Frag fight!
The last thing on the Microsoft radar was the daylight savings debacle. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m as keen as the next bloke to put the boot into a multinational when they get their code wrong. But daylight saving? Nope. This debacle is directly attributable to the governments of our wide brown land. In case nobody in parliament has noticed, time zones are not just applicable for your own country. They operate vertically from the top of the globe to the bottom. It is supposed to be the same time everywhere on a particular longitude. There is an international standard for observing daylight savings.
The only choice should be “does” or “does not” do daylight savings. There was never supposed to be a “does bits of it” or “does it but not when everyone else does it” or “we do it in the south but not in the north and in the real south we even do it properly and in the west we don’t do it all at once.” Nope, there’s no software vendor with deep enough pockets to code the Aussie interpretation of daylight saving into their operating system. Not without asking for a considerable few extra dollars. Which we won’t pay. Adjust your own clocks accordingly.