Ubuntu affecting Windows XP clock

[Steve McIntyre]

On Fri, Sep 24, 2004 at 01:23:31PM +0800, John wrote:
>Kevin Krumwiede wrote:
>>
>>The hardware clock should always be set to UTC.  It just makes things 
>>simpler, especially for DST changes.  Unfortunately, this is another 
>>example of Windows being fundamentally broken and everyone else having to 
>>work around it.
>
>How does it make things simpler? You've offered no argument to support 
>your position.

If you store local time in the RTC, there is no way for different OSes
to know if any DST changes have been applied. This leads to ridiculous
situations (like the first Win95 release) where an OS / several OSes
may each try to put the clock back/forward when they're booted after a
change.

The only sane way is to store UTC in the RTC and apply offsets when
you read/write to it. Then everybody's happy. The only reason Windows
still does the broken-by-design localtime thing is for backwards
compatibility with DOS, which didn't know any better.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve at einval.com
"Every time you use Tcl, God kills a kitten." -- Malcolm Ray
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