| ▲ | p_ing 3 days ago |
| Running UTC as a clock on an end user workstation is about the dumbest thing you can do (unless they reside in UTC). |
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| ▲ | teo_zero 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| I must be the dumbest person in the world, then, because that's exactly what I've been doing on all my computers for 20 years (and I don't reside in Iceland). |
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| ▲ | lstodd 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Let's hear why you think this. |
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| ▲ | Terr_ 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Not parent poster, but: It creates annoyance and frustration for the end user, it creates new sources of error (especially when the end-user has to do time-conversions) and provides no actual benefits in terms of system correctness. What problem are you thinking it would solve? | | |
| ▲ | teo_zero 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > What problem are you thinking it would solve? Traveling. | | |
| ▲ | Terr_ 2 days ago | parent [-] | | So instead of your settings sometimes being wrong and easily-fixed with a few clicks, you want them to be almost always wrong? :P Again, I don't understand what pain-point or use-case is motivating this "set your laptop OS to UTC" proposal. ... Well, not unless it's some workaround for flawed software running on that machine, perhaps made by developers that misunderstood the business-domain of time zones. | | |
| ▲ | teo_zero 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > So instead of your settings sometimes being wrong and easily-fixed with a few clicks It can't be easily fixed. Imagine I continuously change the OS's setting to always reflect the local time. Now I read a log of events happened last Tuesday. Was it when I was in Europe or when I was in the US? How should I read those timestamps? Then I compare two timestamps from last spring. They differ a few minutes, but one was before the switch to DST the other was after. Which one happened first? > you want them to be almost always wrong? I think "wrong" is relative, isn't it? > Well, not unless it's some workaround for flawed software Exactly the opposite: there used to be a SO from Redmond that didn't allowed you to set its internal clock to UTC. I think it's been corrected now. | | |
| ▲ | Terr_ 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Imagine I continuously change the OS's setting to always reflect the local time. Now I read a log of events happened last Tuesday. Those two things are unrelated, how frequently you changed timezone settings should have zero impact on your log... unless it means more "settings changed" entries. Changing your current timezone does not move things that already happened. The event-log entries (A) shall be order-able by actual chronology, excepting relativistic effects, and (B) shall all display under some unified reporting timezone, whether that's hardcoded to be UTC, or the system timezone when exporting/displaying, or a time-zone chosen in an Event Viewer GUI. If either (A) or (B) are false, that means you're dealing with worryingly flawed software from developers who weren't prepared to implement timezone logic. > Now I read a log of events happened last Tuesday. Was it when I was in Europe or when I was in the US? In all cases, your first step is to figure out where those real-world events fall relative to the log entries. It will always be less work if the event-log display timezone happens to match one of the ones for your departure/arrival times. > Then I compare two timestamps from last spring. They differ a few minutes, but one was before the switch to DST the other was after. Which one happened first? Easy: The one that sorts earlier, and if you display logs in UTC they will be visually distinct as well. | | |
| ▲ | teo_zero 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I think we agree without understanding each other. It must be possible to sort all system events in an "absolute time line". To do so, the system must know in every moment at what point of this "absolute time line" we are, so that it can stamp the event with such absolute time marker. Now, we can make it coincide with any known TZ, but once set, we must not change it. I set it to UTC; you might prefer your home TZ, if you have a place you call "home". But then don't change it when you travel or when switching DST on and off! Of course you can still change the TZ of the time that's displayed to you (so that it's synchronized with the local church's bells, for example, which is convenient and might avoid you a lot of misunderstanding with your local friends), but not the TZ the OS uses for itself. I find that any choice of home TZ would be arbitrary, so UTC is the best choice. |
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| ▲ | dheera 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I do this on all my workstations, phones, wall clocks, Google calendar, and everything. After a lot of frustration I found it the lesser of evils to just think in UTC regardless of where I am in the world, and convert for local people on the fly. |
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| ▲ | izacus 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Thing is... noone resides in UTC at all. |
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| ▲ | adrian_b 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I have set my clock on UTC on all my workstations, desktops and laptops for many decades. This has been particularly convenient on the laptops used in business trips. For many years, when I still had some other clocks besides those included in computers or mobile phones, e.g. wall clocks or wrist watches, those were also set in UTC, thus with no change between winter and DST. I prefer to keep in mind the current offset of my local time from UTC, and also the offsets of a couple of places where people with whom I communicate frequently are located, and to add those offsets mentally to the displayed UTC time when that happens to be necessary in order to synchronize to some external event, like a meeting or the opening hours of some place. I schedule my own activities, e.g. eating or sleeping, in UTC. This habit was triggered decades ago by the fact that I found much more annoying the hour change of all clocks to/from DST than changing in my mind the current offset of the local time from UTC, and also by the fact that the local time does not correspond with the solar time anyway, because I an not located on the center of the time zone, so if I want to know when it is noon, I have to also keep in mind the offset of the solar time from local time, which changes when DST applies. At least with UTC, that offset remains constant. I do not consider myself dumb :-) On the contrary, I consider that the legal time is designed for people who are so dumb that they cannot remember that during summer they should wake up and go to work earlier than in winter, the same as their ancestors did for many millennia. To be fair, their ancestors did not use a clock for this, but they woke up depending on the rising sun, which took care of this automatically. |
