On Nov 9, 2010, at 8:45 AM, Roger Burton West wrote:
On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 04:26:57PM +0000, Tony Finch wrote:
Who needs
timezones anyway?
Doesn't MS still set the machine's clock to localtime - and thus
change
it twice a year in most places - rather than simply leaving it on
gmtime and converting in-OS (i.e. the Unix or "correct" way)?
Apple had the perfect opportunity to correct this oversight of the
original 1984 Macintosh ten years later, when they switched processor
architectures. Instead, they continued to store local time in the
system clock, so switching off Daylight Saving Time means you're
actually setting the clock back an hour, and anything you touched ten
minutes ago is now more recent than anything you do in the next 50
minutes.
I still haven't set the clocks back on my OS 9 boxes, mainly because
if I do so without restarting immediately afterward, I risk crashing
the system a week later and forgetting that I have to set the clock
back again, since even though the disk has been hit thousands of times
in the interim, the system knows that the best time to permanently
save changes to system configuration is right before shutting down.
Dual-booting OS 9 and OS X demonstrates OS X using local time as
well. I don't know what happens on Macs that can't boot classic Mac OS.
Josh
