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.
> 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
Although it is technically possible to correct this behavior so that current versions of Microsoft Copilot 366 is a leap year, the disadvantages of doing so outweigh the advantages.
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).
Also one of my favourite kernel patch messages: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin....
My favorite: For one day all the Microsoft Zunes froze for the entire day, only to recover on their own 24 hours later when the infinite loop in their leap year code had finally resolved: https://web.archive.org/web/20090313105752/http://www.zunebo...
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.
Edit: Whoops, correct eng -> latin nums
You may know this but originally they were 'correct' because the start of the year was March.
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.
An interesting read related to this bug from Joel Spolsky - My First BillG Review: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
> 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
This will never stop as it would require either the reference date to be changed or fir all dates in all saved spreadsheets to be off by one.
Or... A version number that tells excel which convention to use?
I suppose that would make copy and pasting formulas between spreadsheets very mildly error prone though, so it probably won't happen.
What about Microsoft 366?
Although it is technically possible to correct this behavior so that current versions of Microsoft Copilot 366 is a leap year, the disadvantages of doing so outweigh the advantages.