Comment by p_ing
2 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).
2 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).
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).
Let's hear why you think this.
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?
> What problem are you thinking it would solve?
Traveling.
4 replies →
Thing is... noone resides in UTC at all.
Reykjavik lives all year round in UTC
Places do not lie in UTC, data does. Iceland follows Western European Time (WET), which has no offset to UTC.
So does a large part of Western Africa.
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.
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.