Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a huge mess. For example, what is the time difference between Paris and Houston? It’s seven hours today. Yesterday it was six. A couple weeks ago it was seven.
Countries observe DST at different times or not at all. Even within one country it can be complicated. For example, the US generally observes DST. But Arizona, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa do not. And even within Arizona, the Navajo Nation does observe DST.
I wish everyone would take a few minutes to learn about universal time, UTC. It is essentially the time in Greenwich, England except it ignores DST. Learn how your time relates to UTC and use UTC when communicating with people who don’t share your time system. This allows, for example, a group to announce the time of a conference call in UTC and let everyone convert that to their local time. This is so much simpler than “your time”, “her time”, “his time” etc.
It’s also convenient to let people know how your time zone relates to UTC. For example, Houston time is UTC-6, i.e. six hours behind UTC. When someone asks in an email what my time zone is, maybe so they could call me during normal business hours, I may say Central Time, UTC-6. (Or in the summer, UTC-5.)
[The abbreviation UTC is an odd compromise. The French wanted to use the abbreviation TUC (temps universel coordonné) and the English wanted to use CUT (coordinated universal time). The compromise was UTC, which doesn’t actually abbreviate anything.]
Update: I’m not suggesting that people set their watches to UTC. Time zones are necessary. And if part of the world wants to have DST and another part doesn’t, vive la différence. I’m only suggesting that people use UTC when communicating with others outside their time zone.
Related post:
Software engineering and alarm clocks
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Alexander Bogomolny 11.06.11 at 08:43
Isn’t UTC a mess (as it does not abbreviate anything)?
Weiwei 11.06.11 at 09:04
Nice post!
A very practical solution I’ve found is to use the provided by timeanddate.com.
As an event organizer, it allows you to convey clear schedule information to the participants.
Jorge Stolfi 11.06.11 at 09:20
In English, UTC could stand for Universal Time Coordinate . Unfortunately I cannot think of a viable French backronym.
Mike Anderson 11.06.11 at 10:10
UTC! I’ve always wondered what to do with the “second time zone” setting on my wristwatch. Now it’s UTC. Thanks for the tip.
AB: Since there are no rules for abbreviations (Mrs, BBQ, PA, etc), we’ll just muddle along with UTC.
steve harris 11.06.11 at 10:12
Agree – and in my experience it creates a lot of extra work for IT staff all over the world, for no real gain. Many software products require updating to later releases to get fixes to time zone databases. These out-of-band updates are very unwelcome to IT staff, because of the need for testing each release in staging areas, and is made worse by cascading dependencies between product versions. Truly an unnessary mess.
Anton 11.06.11 at 10:21
You are right!
I will say about Russia.
Several months ago our president cancelled DST in Russia, because incoviniences due to time changing were higher than energy savings. Nevertherless, two weeks ago computers and mobile phones adjusted clocks one hour ahead. This was predictable, so we manually adjusted clocks back.
But what was wery strange is that one week ago some computers and mobile phones adjusted time one hour back without warning! In result, we was late to a doctor.
Only people with simple wall clocks were able to go through this revolt of the machines!
P.S. You should also mention leap seconds. They are not known ahead in time, so we can not precisely calculate time difference between dates in future.
Anton 11.06.11 at 10:45
Corrections to my comment: computers in Russia adjusted time one hour back at October 31st, as usual (inspite of DSC cancellation), then at November 4th, Microsoft updated timezone tables for Russia, and, surprisingly, time was adjusted again 1 hour back.
Frank N. 11.06.11 at 10:50
@Anton
Russia did not cancel DST. Instead they (you) just never returned to “normal” time.
Dom 11.06.11 at 10:59
Is this right? I thought the odd letter order was to maintain continuity with UT0, UT1, etc. [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Time].
Seattleite 11.06.11 at 11:14
Is this different from GMT? And if so, is that designation no longer in common use? Alas for the legacy of the Astronomer Royal…
John 11.06.11 at 11:31
Seattleite: GMT and UTC are essentially the same thing. There are subtle differences that most people can safely ignore.
John Eppley 11.06.11 at 12:06
Universal Time Compromise?
rfk 11.06.11 at 12:29
> Russia did not cancel DST. Instead they (you) just never returned to “normal” time.
In Putin’s Russia, time changes you!
Guan Yang 11.06.11 at 12:58
In civil timekeeping, “GMT” almost always refers to UTC, but actual mean solar time at Greenwich is closer to UT1 than UTC.
UTC 11.06.11 at 13:36
UTC should be Universal Time Control
Matt 11.06.11 at 13:47
One should note that Unix machines always keep their hardware running on UTC and then adjust from there if necessary; this is why you don’t have to worry about adjusting the clock on a Unix, you just adjust the time zone files if there is a problem. In my experience Unix tzdata files are usually updated within hours of a public announcement about changes in time zones.
Ram 11.06.11 at 14:13
How is using UTC offsets any different from just saying Central Time? You still have to take DST into consideration – “Central Time, UTC-6. (Or in the summer, UTC-5.)”.
How does saying UTC-6/5 depending on DST offset make it easier? To me it looks like this just adds more math to the equation, while earlier you just had to figure out what Central time is now.
John 11.06.11 at 14:23
Ram: The difference is that I’m responsible for keeping up with my own time zone’s peculiarities. I tell people I’m UTC-6 when I am, and UTC-5 when I am. I don’t expect Europeans, for example, to keep track of when the US changes its clocks. And if they do the same, I don’t have to keep track of their time changes either.
Anton 11.06.11 at 14:50
@rfk «In Putin’s Russia, time changes you!»
No, this was our president Medvedev who cancelled time change in Russia. Medvedev is famous by many small changes he made (like reforming militia to police, moving some goverment services to the Internet and so on). These reforms look funny given that the country is in trouble, and time changing is not the thing he should worry about.
Jeff 11.06.11 at 15:01
Universal Time, Coordinated.
Weiwei 11.06.11 at 15:08
[with corrected links]
Nice post!
A very practical solution I’ve found is to use the Event Time Announcer provided by timeanddate.com.
As an event organizer, it allows you to convey clear schedule information to the participants. Here is an example. For an event on Saturday, 12 November 2011, 12:00 New York time, it produces the following table giving the corresponding time in different places. It then becomes a simple look-up task for the participants.
Steven H. Noble 11.06.11 at 15:45
I was recently in a bar and I saw a countdown clock to the number of minutes until the next hockey game. I commented to my drinking partner that I would never have the guts to create such a device. Due to crossing several DST changes the risks of a sign error bug would be just too high for a device that I could not patch later.
So for me DST changed something as simple as a timer into an engineering marvel.
Jonas 11.06.11 at 15:53
Now what is that saying again: Those who do not understand unix is doomed to reinvent it..?
David Baron 11.06.11 at 22:37
Describing “what my time zone is” is a lot of work if you’re talking about an event that recurs: you need to describe the rules for when you change UTC offsets, and what offsets you have before and after the changes. Ideally, we could just exchange time + location, and software could use the Olson tz database plus the map data at http://efele.net/maps/tz/ to figure out what time was intended.
Geoff 11.06.11 at 23:46
Re your edit: Are timezones necessary? If I go to work at 10pm and come home at 6am, and that’s dawn to dusk, who cares? Let’s just do all UTC, always.
Ravikanth 11.07.11 at 00:16
UTC is also known as Universal Coordinated Time
David 11.07.11 at 07:14
And the most important question of all: why do people in Greenwich get to be in charge? Didn’t the British Empire collapse a very long time ago?
Frank N. 11.07.11 at 07:53
@David
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Conference
Dave Jacoby 11.07.11 at 13:34
I’m reminded of Swatch time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
First, it’s decimal time in “beats”, not seconds and minutes. That’s the part I least liked. The part I kinda liked is how there was one planetary time. If the time is 358 in Bern, it’s 358 in Delhi, Perth, Vegas, wherever. Then there’d be a local convention as to when start-of-business, lunchtime, etc., were.
I mention Bern because, as “Swatch” comes from “Swiss Watch”, it was centered on Bern time.
It strikes me that Pacific islanders getting up one day and going to bed the next day would be weird, but a regular daily bout of cognitive dissonance fits in the mind better than one that occurs twice a year on a freely-moving date.
Dave Jacoby 11.07.11 at 13:35
I used to have a Timex Iron Man watch with two time zones, and when I would travel, I would move to the one I had set to UTC and remember the offset, so I could always press a button and know what time it is at home.
John Venier 11.07.11 at 14:07
I’m surprised no one’s mentioned the fractional hours present in some time zones. That’s got to be even worse to keep track of from a human, and potentially software, standpoint. The culprits (current, I think):
Maquesas Islands, French Polynesia — UTC -09:30
Venezuela — UTC -4:30
Newfoundland (and sotuheastern Labrador), Canada — UTC -3:30 / -2:30
Iran — UTC +3:30 / +4:30
Afghanistan — UTC +4:30
India — UTC +5:30
Sri Lanka — UTC +5:30
Nepal — UTC +5:45 (!)
Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Australia — UTC +06:30
Myanmar — UTC +06:30
Northern Territory, Australia — UTC +09:30
Lord Howe Island, Australia — UTC +10:30 / +11:00 (!!!)
Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia — UTC +10:30
South Australia, Australia — UTC +10:30 / +09:30
Norfolk Island, Australia — UTC +11:30
Chatham Islands, New Zealand — UTC +12:45/ +13:45 (!)
I seem to recall in the not-so-distant past that Newfoundland was the only place with a time zone with an offset which was not in whole hours.
I was delighted to find a wristwatch for $57 which sets the time based on radio signals, and it always handles DST in the Central time zone in the US perfectly.
John Venier 11.07.11 at 14:17
Oh yeah — and in the US, in Indiana, the decision of whether to follow daylight saving time or not was until recently left up to local government. Fun fun fun as you change your watch driving around Indiana, I’d imagine.
A good friend who grew up there swears that the reason it was left up to local government choice was the outcry from farmers who insisted their crops couldn’t take an extra hour of daylight in the summers. Of course, I suspect he never let facts get in the way of a good story.
On the other hand, the actual history is truly a tale of legislative magnificence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana#History
Dave Jacoby 11.07.11 at 15:48
I live in Indiana. Used to have long discussions with support in Chicago over when to schedule upgrades, but beyond that, there wasn’t normally a problem. Counties near Chicago moved their time with Chicago. Counties near Cincinnati moved their time with Cincinnati, and the rest of the state didn’t, until Mitch Daniels moved us to follow the rest of the nation in folly. I don’t think it ever really affected me that much.
John Venier 11.07.11 at 16:06
I wasn’t thinking that the time zone affiliation would be a problem as much as the selective observance of daylight saving time. That probably wasn’t as problematic as it sounds, but I could imagine two adjacent counties with the same time in winter but differing by an hour in summer. Probably it is not realisitc but I also imagined driving across Indiana in summer and having the local time change everytime a county line was crossed.
Dave, do you happen to live in Anderson? My buddy grew up there, and has a *bunch* of colorful tales to tell.
Mario Gonzalez 11.08.11 at 07:54
I believe China has one time zone for the whole country! This makes sense in some ways I guess.
Dave Jacoby 11.08.11 at 08:08
Nope. Lafayette. Purdue University.
Ben McCormick 11.08.11 at 08:15
If daylight savings time is the next best thing to sliced bread, then why doesnt UTC and/or Greenwich Mean time move their time also (kidding of course, what a nightmare that would be). However, if the UTC reference changed, then wouldn’t everyone else have to do nothing? Side note: Our dog is used to be fed dinner at 6:00PM. Try to tell a hungry dog that its REALLY only 5:00PM. She peed on the kitchen floor as she is used to be let out at 6:00AM. Her bladder didn’t know to hold it one hour longer for the REAL 6:00AM. Thanks Mitch Daniels.
j5c 11.08.11 at 08:18
I work for an American company and all of their meetings are scheduled in EDT / EST. This is very frustrating as I live in GMT / BST. I cannot persuade them to used GMT-x / GMT-x as everyone ought to know their GMT offset. Having said that, I can never remember whether BST (British Summer Time) = GMT+1 or GMT-1.
To complicate things further, the UK government is looking at using BST all year round or introducing double daylight saving time. What is wrong with just using your local time zone (e.g. GMT in my case) and working 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. some months and 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. other months? Much simpler than changing dozens of timepieces.
Ricky Bennett 11.08.11 at 08:18
In Illinois it’s 8:15. In Ohio it’s 9:15. In Indiana, flip a coin!
Greg Baryza 11.08.11 at 08:21
You almost made it. You were doing fine until you wrote “in the summer”. As someone who routinely works with folks in Australia where the time difference varies between 14 and 16 hours from Cambridge (MA) you must learn to say “in my summer”.
There isn’t a “the” summer in that situation.
smiles 11.08.11 at 08:35
Ultimate Triangle Clocks
Ultimate Ticking Clocks
Universally Turning Cogs
I am on GMT Get Less Time, what i really want is Get More Time
Tom 11.08.11 at 08:41
@Geoff – Yes, perfect. Of course, I live in England…
@Ram – I’m struggling to comprehend quite such parochial thinking. How many places have a “Central Time”? And how exactly do I find out what your version of Central Time is just now?
@John Venier – I used to live in South Australia. I recall back in the early 90s using several pieces of software (which exactly escape me for the moment) that did not acknowledge the existence of fractional timezones at all.
maaxiim 11.08.11 at 08:45
Couldn’t agree more! Hospital charting systems are a real PITA at DST boundaries… imagine charting fall back; is it 1am 2am 2am 3am… hmm… Or 1am 2am 3am with 2am actually spanning 2 physical hours…. how many hours in the day are there at the spring forward boundary? 1am 3am 4am My brain hurts just thinking about it.
Guan Yang 11.08.11 at 09:01
I actually love DST, although there are some bad implementation details like inconsistencies within the US and between the US and Europe. It is a lot easier to change clocks, especially these days with the Olson database, than to convince most businesses, schools and other institutions to change their schedules. Maybe your employer is enlightened enough to change an 8-4 schedule to 9-5 during the summer. But what if your child’s school doesn’t do the same? Or decided only to move things 30 minutes, or to phase the change in over a 2 month period? Or starts the unofficial DST a few weeks before or after? It would create an (even bigger) mess.
DST solves a big coordination problem. Almost everyone does manage to change their schedules at the same time, within a country and we all benefit. If there is a minority, such as farmers, for whom DST is inconvenient, then the cost for them of changing their schedules is much lower than it would be for everyone else to do it, even if we didn’t have to mess with clocks.
K.Kong 11.08.11 at 09:04
Most international companies have been using UTC for a couple of decades. It’s domineering US companies or US companies without international operations that impose local time.
Mark A. 11.08.11 at 09:05
In Greenwich it is GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) in winter, but BST (British Summer Time) (GMT+1:00) in the summer.
Some UK politicians want us to switch to DST (Double summer time or GMT+2:00) in the summer and BST (GMT+1:00) in the winter.
So Greenwich will no longer use GMT or as some people call it UTC.
The only reason for this is to make us (The UK) more like the rest of Europe.
In reality it means we will go to work in the dark, have more road accidents (Children walking to school in the dark) and trying to go to sleep when it’s still light.
Ben McLendon 11.08.11 at 09:05
Don’t forget the mess it causes with computers. Some OSs do a better job than others keeping up with DST changes. If you have legacy UNIX systems it can really be a pain.
Rupert Davis 11.08.11 at 10:03
The reason the British get to name time (GMT) is because we invented the first co-ordinated time and navigation system based in Greenwich London.
You cannot navigate a ship on maps alone, you need to know what time it is as well, and this has to be the same for everyone, hence the establishment of the standard time at greenwich to which all ships clocks were set and is on longditude 0.
Being first is always important!
Anony Mole 11.08.11 at 10:19
Not to mention trying to deal with financial market data. EST is the time most US markets are marked in. But then DST shows up and now you have to shift your market data times around if you’re not in the EST timezone or not on DST for the US. And if you’re dealing with UK markets, or AUS markets…, what time did the market open? Hell, I don’t know, last hour, next hour. Bah! Get rid of all timezones and just have a single time for the entire planet. We just do stuff at different times from longitude to longitude. I get up at 15:00 UTC and go to sleep at 6:00 UTC. Brits get up at 7:00 and got to bed at 22:00. There, done, no more nonsense.
Guan Yang 11.08.11 at 10:55
Until 1978 French civil time was based on an offset to “Paris Mean Time retarded by nine minutes and twenty one seconds.”
David Foy 11.08.11 at 11:29
UTC stands for “Undoing Temporal Complications”
Chris Chiesa 11.08.11 at 11:34
I fail to see how referring two different “local” times to a third, “universal” time is an improvement over just referring the two local times to each other. Now, instead of dealing with a one-stage, two-term conversion, you have a two-stage, three-term conversion. The only possible way in which it might be “better” is that, carried out universally, it leads to a centralized, or “star,” topology rather than a point-to-point one, hence fewer “edges” — but that’s graph theory, and is that REALLY a valid talking point here?
herp 11.08.11 at 11:39
What an insightful article. Perhaps next time you could introduce us to the metric system or, better yet, SI.
Br.Bill 11.08.11 at 12:26
Daylight Savings Time is a travesty. A solution with no problem. If someone needs to get up earlier or later because the sun is out at a different time, THEN JUST DO SO. Dumbest idea ever.
Nikunj Bhatt 11.08.11 at 13:28
I don’t prefer different time zones for different countries. In the whole world, there should be only one time. Clocks are created to do everything with some specific time and they are created by human (in the universe, there is no calendar). If something is going to happen, for example the Britain’s Royal Wedding, which is going to telecast in many countries then we can say that it will be telecast on 10 PM, and every countries can tune at the same time (10 PM). There will be no need to calculate the time of telecast for each country. Time zones are really big headache for everyone and special international software developers.
Similarly there is no need to adjust with leap second. If we do not count leap seconds then how much difference will it REALLY create in the real world?
Time is maintained by us for our day-to-day activities, not for time itself. Why to bother that much? Scientists have always problem with the concept of KISS (Keep It Simple Silly), they just know how to make things complicated!
There are many other things in the world which are creating complex problems, for example units of weight, distance, temperature, speed etc; these should also be standard in all countries. A committee should be created to choose the best from them and those should be standardized in all countries. If any country do not follow it, it should be boycotted.
Mike 11.08.11 at 15:14
I’d happily vote for both of the following items…
1. We adopt daylight savings time ALL of the time. Let’s just stop adjusting our clocks. This alone would (after a little up-front IT cost) save our business untold hours every year.
2. We all adopt UTC as THE time, everywhere. Yes, it would be a little weird for the first few weeks – only a handful of people would be working from 9 to 5 – but the massive benefits would soon have us wondering why in the world we didn’t do it sooner.
Sander 11.08.11 at 15:34
I have UTC on my watch in the ’second time zone’ slot. It’s a Casio Pathfinder with radio sync so I just set my current time zone and it takes care of the rest. I just missed the automatic no-more-DST adjustment of a few days ago.
The whole DST thing is absurd of course. Weird thing is I only hear/read people complain and never hear anyone say how it’s so great. I mean people will comment how it’s so nice to ‘have an extra hour’ or some such nonsense but never something like ‘well we saved $5B in energy expenditures because we fiddled with your clock’. It is an absurd notion that farmers (or anyone) rely on the clock to tell them when to milk the cows or do anything that’s sun dependent. They use the Sun to tell them when it’s time to do X, not a clock. If DST saves us energy, why not simply admit our timezones are incorrect and permanently adjust them? If an hour shift saves energy in the Summer, wouldn’t it also in the Winter or vice versa? I mean the whole thing is mind boggling. If an hour time difference really had a measurable effect on energy consumption or anything for that matter we’d have benefits to living on the border of timezones, right? Clearly our local time doesn’t really match the Sun anyway so why shift it?
Then there’s the whole thing about people being late for appointments or worse, getting into accidents because they’re more groggy than usual. You only need a small percentage increase in accident rates to get a measurable effect in a large population. If 10 extra people die the morning after a time change, is that worth the trouble?
Pick reasonable timezones for areas on Earth and keep ‘em that way. Clearly the local time doesn’t matter one iota (note how crooked the time lines are and how) so abolish the madness.
Sorry, no idea how to affect this.
Martin Halford 11.08.11 at 18:05
This is a perennial issue – particularly for the reasons stated regarding various local governments wanting to placate the biases of their particular constituents. It would be a significant benefit if the business community developed a standard approach for dealing with this. With so much work conducted internationally, the idea of a standard 9 to 5 work day is long gone. However, it would be nice to not receive phone calls at 3am because an account manager in Florida doesn’t understand the time difference in relation to Melbourne, Australia!
K.Kong 11.08.11 at 19:07
I have not seen this mentioned here yet. I thought the primary justification for DST, other than for farmers, is so that your shades won’t fade.
People sleep with curtains drawn, and open them when they wake up. If they are still sleeping when the sun is up, the curtains will fade faster.
D0MBAR 11.08.11 at 20:15
Use the newer way to tell the time.. the “Internet Time”..
With the internet time, it’s the same time all over the world!
http://www.timeanddate.com/time/internettime.html
Yurash 11.09.11 at 02:50
Here in Russia, I find very useful to describe local time zones as UTC+4 (Moscow), UTC+9 (Irkutsk), UTC+11 (Khabarovsk) – Russia is a huge country!
Non-IT people in Russia usually use Moscow-based time shift (Moscow+4h etc).
In software design I use UTC time for storing date-time values.
DST was a mess, I agree. I’m happy it was gone in Russia. Every half-year switching was hard for healthy feeling.
As to leap seconds, it is inevitable ambiguity. It describes Earth rotation slowdown, which is not strictly predictable (some estimation could be provided, though – I think, estimation error should be about 1 second per 100 year). Satellite systems (like Navstar/GPS) use time without leap seconds, but it is also a mess to keep it in mind in data processing (there is a 15 seconds difference with UTC as far as now).
colin dick 11.09.11 at 05:14
UTC Universal Time Constant
Imagine the hassle when trying to write date&time stamps to a DB using a DST clock. I realised a longtime ago, I’m ancient, that mainframes used GMT to log data to a DB. This avoids the Autumn duplicated hours problem. Especially when you try to back out ( roll back ) a transaction.
John Line 11.09.11 at 06:43
Good post! How’s about dates? I always use 2011/11/09, that way the Brits and the Yanks don’t confuse each other
K.Kong 11.09.11 at 06:44
@colin dick
I think there’s no disagreement about storage. Storage of time should always be in UTC or a fixed time zone.
Presentation is another thing altogether. The same time value can and should show up differently for different users in different time zones.
negativeland 11.09.11 at 07:28
Do you know how many time zones there are in the Soviet Union?
Eleven.
human mathematics 11.11.11 at 00:43
Is it really that big of a deal? Regional differences are an inevitable result of different, free political jurisdictions with different preferences for how to handle time. Whenever it matters on a large scale, computers can automatically handle the particulars.
Nikunj Bhatt 11.11.11 at 05:44
@human mathematics
“Computers can automatically handle” is partially true but computers can handle it because “programmers have implemented” with great amount of efforts. Programmers have to care a lot on this, it is the biggest headache for them (saying because, I am a programmer too).
John 11.11.11 at 05:54
human mathematics: I’m all for regional differences. If the people of one country want to set their clocks ahead 37 minutes on Fridays, that’s fine with me. It might be kinda nice to start every weekend early. Maybe they could set their clocks back on Tuesdays.
But if they did that, I would hope they wouldn’t expect me to keep track of their quirky system. If I were scheduling meetings with them, it would be thoughtful for them to state the time in UTC.
Mark A. 11.11.11 at 08:28
DoMBAR:
The Internet Time or Beat time was invented by the watch company Swatch, in Switzerland.
It is based on Switzerland local winter time.
So is out by 1 hour from GMT/UTC (This is 41.666 beats in their system)
Instead of dividing the day into degrees they divide the day by 1,000 and call each 1000th of a day a beat.
So midday is 500 beets.
1 24th of a day or 1 hour is 41.666 beats.
As they are out by one hour from UTC, you will need to add or take away 41.6666 beats when converting.
Not the best system in the world and I dought there are many people that would use it.
I invented a similar system to this as a joke in the 80’s.
See http://markagius.co.uk/webpages/contents.htm?SubPage=TenHour.htm
Sander 11.11.11 at 08:29
@human etc.: ‘Free political jurisdictions’ can maintain any time they like. But -my- freedom allows me to then completely ignore them because they’re not willing to cooperate with others.
Computers can handle the complexity of systems far greater than trivialities of time change. One of the questions is how do you keep all these systems up to date with the latest time zone quirks? My car has a clock that adjusts automatically for DST. Worked great in 2005. Then the DST date changed and the DST settings can’t be updated. We used FC4 linux at work. Its DST settings were also wrong. To keep logs in sync we had to update timezone data. MS has had to release multiple patches to make DST related changes.
It’s a frackin’ pain in the rear. Abolish DST or at least leave the heck alone.
rodrigo polo 11.13.11 at 00:14
I always use GMT-6 but I think that I have to use UTC-6 XD
Ukr 11.13.11 at 04:21
@negativeland
The Soviet Union does not exist anymore, but the President of Ukraine would like to have his own little version of it.
jan 11.15.11 at 13:26
@Anton
Yeah right, and Putins just chilling in his house in the countryside and has completely resigned from politics. Dude, that guy still holds the strings (and the antique vases).
Sam 11.15.11 at 15:09
How can you say that time zones are necessary?
Chris C. 11.15.11 at 16:32
The biggest issue I have with the bloody seasonal time change from DST to STD time is that when it happens, the computer takes off one hour from all my PREVIOUSLY WRITTEN files regardless of whether I want to have my files reflect actual local time, or not.
It’s high time we got rid of this useless seasonal time change. It has no purpose in a modern society.