I'm installing Windows 7 on an older Dell, and one of the first things I want to do is install Firefox...however, the default IE install and Bing keep complaining of a "certificate error" when trying to reach Mozilla.org. Naturally this sets my paranoia instincts on edge; obviously MS is up to their old anti-competitive tricks again!
Well, no. After a bit of hair-pulling, I finally realised that the system clock was set to 2003, so actually the impossible "future" certificates were "correctly" failing (I said it was an older Dell).
Yet I'm not ready to let Microsoft completely off the hook on this one. First off, the error message could have been a lot more clear about the reason the certificate was rejected, which would have sped fault-resolution. But more fundamentally, a WINDOWS 7 computer was calming accepting a system date of 2003 with nary a whisper of complaint. Windows 7...really?
Experienced programmers know how many subtle and nasty issues an unsynchronized clock can cause, from "make" errors to NFS bugs to profiling miscalculations to logfile misalignment (as well as broken certificate chains). Is it really asking too much to have the OS, which "knows" it was released on such-and-such a date, to automatically detect and warn the user on real-time system datestamps which are self-evidently impossible?
BIOS resets and PRAM battery failures have been common problems for decades...let's put a little smarts into the system to detect and warn of root causes before they develop into real problems. Low-hanging fruit, really.
Update: Laura just charged up a 1st-ed iTouch that had lain dormant at least 6mo, and when I tried to connect to the App Store, it failed to authenticate -- them promptly suggested, "Please check your system clock." Sure enough, the unit had reset itself to Jan 1, 2000. See Redmond, it's that easy.
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