timezone setting

[Nik N]

> ... Well we used to call it [Greenwich] Mean Time. So just set the time to London England about and it will be right.

(Well, my users might then conclude that the server is actually
located in Britain; this would definitely rub them the wrong way!  :)

As somebody else correctly noticed, if that was done, the issue of
"daylight saving" would again invalidate the idea of ALL
geographically dispersed but cooperating computers running on the same
time.

<rant>
How come all applications that generate or use time-stamps are so
brain-dead that they simply pull the local computer time and generate
the time-stamp with absolutely no consideration for the fact that
time-stamped object will be moved to or accessed from a different
geographical location? Who the heck is writing this stuff? Did they
ever travel more than hundred kilometers east or west from where they
live? Did they take their laptop with tem?

While the distro-cooks can not fix ten thousand faulty applications,
surely they must anticipate that a large number of users will apply
the only (AFAIK) remedy possible: have all cooperating or networked
computers run on UTC as "local" time, regardless of where they are (or
happen to be, at any given point in time!). This should be reasonably
easy to set up during the installation. Especially for servers! (And
laptops, especially if those are expected to travel more than hundred
kilometers east or west. :)
</rant>

Anyways, (as I found out) on the server, one can (post-installation)
run the command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
(and select UTC).

The question however remains: after doing that, is there any remnant
of the inappropriate timezone that the user was *forced* to select
during the installation left on the system?

Nik N.