And it takes zero effort to get updated tzdata on 'n' different platforms that a company might run? Including outdated ones (sad, but common).

I was involved in the project to manage fan out the last time US changed DST rules a few years back. It's a project.

At the time I would occasionally read the tzdata mailing list. I was amazed at how many countries kept changing the rules willy-nilly. No one in government has any understanding of computer systems. I assume these countries with frequent rule changes get used to half of their computerized systems showing the wrong time.

Correct. A key point most are missing here is that tzupdater tool's purpose is to update TZ data on an existing java runtime. Install latest java runtime and you don't need this tool.

And "refactor" of your code to latest java is typically a bit of testing effort. It's not like there are frequent compatibility breaks version to version...

Smcfancontrol is 3rd party software, not Apple.

I've long wanted macfixit.com to have some prominent indicator on stories about problems. The indicator? I'M AN IDIOT AND I INSTALLED SOME LOW-LEVEL "HAXIE" AND IT CAUSED PROBLEMS. BECAUSE WHO COULD IMAGINE THAT PATCHING CHANGES INTO SOMEONE ELSE'S SOFTWARE COULD HAVE BAD SIDE-EFFECTS. AS I SAID I'M AN IDIOT.

OK, maybe a little wordy. But it'd help me quickly skip articles reporting "problems" where the "fix" was to uninstall some crazy low-level hack.

Kind of, but not really.

Yes, XML catalogs are the answer.

Nothing in the XML specs says that any actual document is hosted at the URI. It's a mechanism to specify a globally unique identifier. It's an identifer, not a promise to host a document. Some folks host the DTD document at the URI, but there's no requirement to do that.

While I'm sure not every RSS client uses a high-quality XML implementation, it seems clearly true that every RSS client is an XML processor. RSS is an XML format. So an RSS client is, um, processing XML...

As for checking for updates, that's a non-issue. Remember, the URI is a unique identifier. If you ever update the DTD, you'd generate a new URI.