UTC time

[me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org (Matthew Gillen)]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> WRT: Local Time vs. UTC time. Unix was originally designed as a time 
> sharing system. The developers Thompson, Ritchie, Khernigan realized 
> that it would be used in different time zones, so not only was it 
> designed to use UTC, but it was designed to use epoch time (specifically 
> the number of seconds since midnight, Jan 1, 1970. All had also been 
> involved with Multics. It was never intended to be a single user desktop 
> system. The IBM PC was intended as a standalone desktop system, and in 
> that context, local time was appropriate. MS-DOS itself was a very 
> lightweight "operating system". At that time data communications was 
> pretty much limited to a maximum of 1200 bps over phone lines. 
> Networking was never part of MS-DOS, and was added to some versions 
> Windows 3.1. By that time, local time was cast in concrete.  
> Unfortunately, the designers of Windows NT did not change this.

And M$ products will continue to be plagued by issues like those outlined here:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/mswish/ut-rtc.html
until they fix it.  The problem is that DOS is long gone, and now microshaft
actually does sell server software that is supposed to be up 24/7/365.  The
fact that they're too stubborn to fix how they deal with something as basic as
/time/ speaks volumes about how broken the rest of the system is.

On a related note, I love the clock applet in gnome 2.22 (fedora 9).  There's
a little drop down thing where you can add "locations", and it not only tells
you the local time at all your locations when you expand it to show the
calendar, but offers a one-button switch to that time zone.  Awesome for
travelling laptops (and their owners).

Matt