It's not a bug...

...it's a feature!

I've always wondered...

If you're born on 29th Feb, does that mean you only age 1 year every 4 years?

What do the do about celebrating their birthday every other 3 years?

I can't believe that these site's can't fix the leap year bugs. I mean I'm really not very good at writing shell scripts on Linux but I still managed to bodge up some code to detect leap years.

Rob

5 Year Old

Worrying that a leap year 5-year old would want a giraffe from Toy R Us.

OMG

'But that bug has been in our software for 20 years, it has to be in the standard.'

explanes a lot about microsoft

No Excuse.

I hate to write an "is-it-a-leap-year" routine recently, and after 10 minutes research on the internets, I found I could do it it about a dozen lines of code. It's not trivial, but neither is it atomic physics. There's no excuse.

There is a difference..

..between how many 'years old' you are and how many birthdays you have had.

A person born on Feb 29th may have had five 'genuine' birthdays but as they have been alive for 20 years they are 20 years old, not 5 years old.

And no Bill, it's not a feature or a standard; it's a bug. Bastard.

Sorry but I'm grumpy this morning.

Hang on... they actually want to tell the truth online?

Surely no-one with more than three brain cells actually answers online questions with the truth? More likely they're actually some kind of front organisation devoted to increasing the birthday-lie-space for us all. Brave heroes of the net - I salute you!

Alien because they're out to get us....

Ah but........

' And Microsoft said 'But that bug has been in our software for 20 years, it has to be in the standard.'" '

As this is a leap year related bug, it's only been in there 5 years!

That one there with the pocket protectors and the leather patches on the elbows.

Apologies for double post

I missed that this is the *international* society of leap year babies. So my fag-packet calculation should have pointed out that these 7,000 people are actually representing 4,500,000 people.

I always lie

My birthday is in sept but I usually lie on those forms anyway. Seriously, what benefit does telling them your actual birthday give to you? Different case when money is involved otherwise it's lies, lies, lies!

What's the Microsoft angle here?

Enough already! Stop right there!

Firstly, WTF has this story to do with the mad spastic-dancing foul-mouthed sweat-monster who loves his company? Putting his name in the headline merely draws specious attention to a non-story about whingeing twenty-ninthers, people who really need to get a grip! Who cares about their bloody birthday?

Secondly, like Spleen above I also: "...leave the month and day as January 1st anyway because a) privacy and b) four fewer mouse clicks."

Why would I want YouTube, eBay, Google and every packet-sniffer in between to know my true date of birth (DoB)? Allied with other personally-identifying info, DoB is a useful tool in any scamsters' armoury.

checkdate()?

in php it takes into account leap years:

if(!checkdate($month,$day,$year)){return false;}

one line. that's all. Not a javascript solution, but certainly one that works

surely this is easy

if(remainder($year/4)==0)

{

dayOfMonthDropdown.items.add('29');

}

// or even

$febDays = ($year\4==0) ? 29 : 28;

It is inexcusable that any developer would not think of this.

I think you've all missed the point

i've just signed about 40 of my mates up to the toys r us website for cards in the next week or two.

@JP

Yep thats definately it, everbody should start using that code.

of course that's sarcasm. you should reread the article and look for the clues that suggests it might be a bit more difficult than that (clue: 1900)

then perhaps wikipedia?

Is that the issue?

is it not about the validation of the date? or is it about the fact that calendar goes 28th Feb -> 1st March without processing all the records between those dates? Hence those people who registered their b day on the 29th feb never get their record in a batch job?

I'm confused what you said the problem is. If they can't get on the list then surely they already know they aren't getting a card.

Surely..

..the story (if such there be) is that MS/Excel doesn't behave properly towards leap years. Ballmer stating that the problem has existed for so long that it's now 'standard' tells you all you need to know about him and his company. I give it ten years...

@JP Strauss

It's precisely the "surely this is easy" attitude that created the bug in the first place. Leap year is not just based on a 4 year cycle, there are modifiers for 100 and 400 divisors too... RTFM

is it a Leap Year code...

if(year%4==0 && (year%100!=0 || year%400==0))

return true;

@ JP Strauss - surely this is easy

// Century correction: if year divisible by 100 but not 400 then common year.

// (Needed for calculating age of my great grandmother in days, or for messing about with daily interest rates of hundred-year Government bonds)

// Herschel's correction - if year is divisible by 4000 then common year - not required due to general insertion of leap seconds.

if(remainder($year/4)==0 && ! (remainder (year/100) == 0 && remainder (year/400) != 0 ))

{

dayOfMonthDropdown.items.add('29');

}

// or even

$febDays = ($year/4==0 ? ($year/100==0 ? (year/400==0 ? 29 : 28) : 29) : 28);

Excel

Excel implements the leap-year bug by default but you can switch to the 1904 date system by going to Tools -> Options -> Calculation -> select 1904 Date System.

Re 1900 bug -- standard

There's an old joke about this:

How many Microsoft developers does it take to change a light bulb? None. Darkness is the new standard.

Ashamed

As a pro codemonkey, this kind of thing makes me totally ashamed of my profession. Any date handling code should include leap years and the 29th of Feb in it's testing. It's the canonical edge case, FFS,

And Andy and JP, it's because of jerkoffs like you that this kind of thing still apparently happens regularly. Andy, because if it takes you a dozen lines of code, you shouldn't be anywhere near a computer programming role, and JP because yes, it is quite simple, and yet you have manifestly failed to grasp the essentials (as the bishop said to the actress) despite the clues w/r/t to 1900 in the article, and then ejaculated a piece of code that exhibits EXACTLY the problem under discussion, all the while staring smugly at your output and thinking "Well, that's another problem sorted, fookin genius me". Fail

I'm sorry, but you are incompetent, and you give the rest of us a bad name. Either quit now, or have the decency to admit that you are neophytes at best and go and learn your trade properly.

Sorry if this sounds a little harsh, but I've spent far to much of my career wiping drool out of people's codebases.

@ count ludwig

you're "or even" code is worse than JP's code - at least thats right a few times

your code will always return 28. even if it would run (missing '$')

average reg reader braincells seems to be on a downer here.

Forget the leap year

I think we should just have 365.25 days per year instead. No more leap year bugs, it can't be that hard can it...... OH GOD NO!!!11111one

Although that 0.25 is my kind of working day :o)

Sign my petition...

...to deploy giant robots that will speed up the earth's orbiting of the sun until it completes its trip in 360 days even. Then all our months will be exactly 30 days, and we will no longer have to suffer this, possibly the oldest of all still-living stupid programming errors (our birthdates and all other historical dates will be reset to the start date of the new calendar, in order to avoid any backward compatibility issues).

Nortel

Up to thier usual tricks, all the systems have the correct date 29/02/08 however the i2004 sets have a "feature!" where they refuse to see the date so it's currently 1st March

My nortel support says it will "sort itself out" tomorrow.

Meantime everytone thinks im a moron.

joy

coat cos im not paid for today so im off down thepub.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

"How do you explain to a five-year-old, that they won't receive a birthday card from Geoffrey over at Toys R Us this year, because the Toys R Us computer has no way to recognize their birthday?" asks Society spokeswoman Raenell Dawn

Picky point!: Any five year old who is having their 5th birthday on 29th Feb 2008 is a liar.

Now as they didn't get a 3rd birthday card then not getting a 4th birthday card is not going to cause too much distress. What you don't know won't hurt you. Does a 3/4 year old really worry about the fact that a stupid cartoon Giraffe is not going to send out a card and it will now ruin his/her birthday - I think not.

This is just a ego trip by the adults to pick on a high profile "Won't someone think of the children" issue for the sympathy vote when they should be campaigning against the ability to apply this to the real world such as putting birth dates into sites that serve a real purpose such as Shopping or Holiday booking.

Sorry but you have lost my sympathy on this one by not getting to the real point of the issue.

@Gordon Matson

Well played.