-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Friday, 2010-11-12 at 13:54 -0800, Greg Freemyer wrote:
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 1:01 PM, James Knott <> wrote:
date and not much more. With Linux & Unix, GMT was used from the start, perhaps because it was developed at a telecommunications company, where GMT is commonly used.
So MS made a bad decision back when Bill Gates was still programming.
They knew it was a bad decision the first time someone took a luggable running DOS on a plane. Maybe 1983 or so.
Perhaps not, it was IBM. The PC had to ask the user for the time every time it booted. Time zones were not changed, you simply booted and typed the current hour. The machine did not run for long, anyway, and time was unreliable. Using local time was far easier than using UTC and timezones. Consider the OS had less than 360 KiB of disk space, nobody thought that the machine would be such a success and any design decision would have consequences farther away than 5 years. Including the decission to hire MS to do an OS! :-p
It really is not that hard to fix. Linux has had the "UTC / Local" checkbox for the hardware clock as long as I can remember. And as far as I know, it works reliably.
It is probably nearly impossible to change now, because any trivial change affects many functions and third party software. I don't think they see a problem with using local time, even if you travel. You have to change the timezone anyway, the clock is adjusted adequately, and on next boot it works fine. Only people double-booting to linux have problems - so why would they care? - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. (from 11.2 x86_64 "Emerald" at Telcontar) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.12 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkzd/EMACgkQtTMYHG2NR9UmUACfQMJxqCc0gAXlJNeUjAimE0YS TNkAnA84PlxpaIVSiEoc3NtrUcsDszTH =nZ67 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----