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Re: Indiana adopts Daylight Saving Time!
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2005 Apr 30, 22:24 EDT
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2005 Apr 30, 22:24 EDT
Dan you wrote: "Think of all of the software that just broke and became obsolete: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD - millions of computer systems quietly are affected." I think most of them are probably ok. The OSes usually do this time zone business right. They have named zones that you can select which are not tied to fixed geographic locations. Try changing your time zone in Windows. You can select Eastern (-5) or Indiana (-5) or various others (e.g. Quito, Ecuador which has the same offset to GMT as New York City but of course has no use for DST). Sometime next fall, most Indiana Windows users will have to go into the Time Zone tool and select ordinary "Eastern" instead of "Indiana". The time zone tools don't include all possible options, but all currently active options. And if some country adds a new DST system that doesn't match any of the currently active options, it's a straight-forward matter of adding a new definition. Apart from the OSes, some software on the market does it wrong. For example, there is astronomy software on the market that will let you select your time zone by clicking on a map. This can be risky (unless the underlying system is rather smart). When Windows 95 first came on the market, they had the same problem: you could select your time zone by mousing over the global map in the Select Time Zone function. Because this is subject to various difficulties, the clickable map was later turned off. But the map graphic remains and now serves only a decorative function. And you wrote: "I say we should abolish all Daylight Savings Time changes and just stick to time zones." Did you read that article on DST history I linked earlier? It's really very interesting. -FER 42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W. www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars