Where’s the Calendar?
When you are working in XP, and you need to view a calendar to see what day of the week a particular date falls on, how do you do it? Well, if you are like 95% of non-corporate windows users (not getting your time from a domain controller or time server), you probably double click on the little date/time thingamajig on the taskbar. This takes you to the computer’s date/time settings, which allows you to you know, change the system date/time. This is idiotic. Really, what you want is a calendar application to pop up. Some mystical application that lets you view upcoming dates, which is iCal on OS X and non-existent on Windows. So, if you want to see what day of the week the 30th of next month falls on, you have to actually change the system date/time to next month. Now of course, if you just hit Cancel, it won’t apply your changes, but sadly, my parents and many others aren’t that savvy and just hit OK when presented with any non-threatening looking dialogs. Additionally, there is no warning that you are making a system wide change.
This ends up, ridiculously, having a pretty terrible impact on the user’s web browsing experience. When my parents attempted to access their bank/credit card website after accidentally setting the system time to a month ahead, all of a sudden, their PC thinks that Amex’s security certificate is invalid and blocks them and warns them that the site is not secure because the system time is ahead of when the certificate expires. This is so incredibly dumb. OS X and most Linux distros gets this interface wrong too. Settings to change the system time should be buried somewhere in system preferences, and arguably, you should be required to have Admin rights to change it. When an end user clicks on that little date/time thingamajig, they should get a calendar application (non-existent in windows), not a date/time settings dialog.
UPDATE: Making this even more ridiculous, I checked out the time sync properties, and it was actually set to sync automatically wint time.windows.com or what have you, and a successful update had been performed on 9/26/08. Awesome. Syncing time from the future!
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