On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 1:01 PM, James Knott <james.knott@rogers.com> wrote:
Greg Freemyer wrote:
The crazy part is that it seems the basic windows design calls for the user to change their bios clock every time they change timezones. That is just hard for me to believe.
That goes back to the DOS days, before portable or networked computers. In fact, back in those days, a hardware clock was an option and not built into the motherboard. Back then they were primarily worried about file time & 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. It persists today in the FAT filesystem which still uses local time in its date/time fields, but NTFS which came out in the early 90's I think uses UTC, so they've been slowly moving away from that mistake for at least 15 years. And as of Vista (2007?) they still have not fixed it to reliably allow users to have UTC in their hardware clocks. 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. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org