[NTLK] [ANN] Patch 71J059 - Year 2010 Fix

[Lord Groundhog]

~~~ On 2010/01/31 09:08, James Wages at james at kiramek.com wrote ~~~

> But still, when I
> restart my Newton, I expect that my date and time will be maintained, and I
> had high hopes that the new patch would do that.
> 
> I restarted several times, and my date/time always gets reset to Jan. 1,
> 2008 at 9:00PM.
> 
> I searched the patch page and I see this is in fact a bug mentioned toward
> the bottom:
> http://40hz.org/Pages/Patch%2071J059
> 
> What a miserable bug this is too.  I was so overjoyed this past December
> that the patch had eliminated that headache for me, and now I am back to
> square one.  
> 
> Since the bug hasn't been fixed yet, I am going to assume it never will be.
> In such a case, is this bug going to plague me all this year and then vanish
> from next year?  If so, I have something to look forward to.  If no, then I
> need to reach for my blood pressure medication again.


James, 

Here's the difference in a nutshell:  WITHOUT this patch, Newtons are
unusable unless you're happy to pretend you live in 1999; WITH the patch, my
Newtons carry on happily in between resets.

As frustrating as this may be not to have a perfect fix yet, you have to
realize the extent of the problem.  Until Eckhart's patch, the Newton was
incapable of functioning in this year; in fact, it couldn't even be set to a
date past January 5th.  This is a problem arising from the Newton at its
most basic level and the challenge it presented would have been fiendishly
complicated.  I get a cold sweat just thinking of the work Eckhart had to
do.  Short of redesigning and remanufacturing a new iteration of the Newton,
there was no reason to suppose this patch would be totally trouble-free.
Honestly, I'm delighted that a reset merely means an easy date change from
2008, instead of a reset from 1996 to 1999 and a bodge to allow me to keep
my calendar sort-of working in very clumsy fashion.

I can't even describe how important this is in my case.  In the last 4 years
since I've had Newtons, I've found them such a great way to work, especially
with my appointments and other date/time-related tasks, that they are now
indispensable to me, for work and in my personal life.

Now with this patch in place, I work full out again and my Newts work with
me and for me.  Resetting the date from 2008?  Pffft!  I'll take it, with my
enormous gratitude to Eckhart.

If it really bothers you, I'm pretty sure there isn't anyone here who would
begrudge you if you wanted to try your hand at writing a better patch,
testing it out on various machines, debugging it, retesting it again,
debugging it again, etc. etc.   And if you succeeded, we'd all be as
grateful to you as we are now to Eckhart.  :-)

Just a thought.  
 
Shalom. 
Christian 

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

³Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from a Newton.²
            -- what Arthur C. Clarke meant

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1ZzpdPJ7Zr4
(With thanks to Chod Lang)
http://tinyurl.com/29y2dl
http://www.diyplanner.com/node/3942

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