I know this is at least slightly off topic (well, it's a newbie
question, maybe not a Linux question) ;-)
I'd like to make sense of the way times are reported in email.
I'm in the Eastern (U.S.) Time Zone, with Daylight Savings in effect.
Just a few minutes (3:38 PM) ago I sent myself a test email.
Looking at the test email, the date and time (sent) is reported as:
Mon, 03 Sep 2001 15:38:00 -0400
OK. Clearly the "15:38" is my local time.
Then there is the "-0400", and if I'm not mistaken, right now (daylight
savings) we are four hours different than Greenwich Mean Time.
So, I might jump to the conclusion that I can simply subtract 4 hours
(-0400) from my current time to get Greenwich Mean Time.
Wrong! It's just the opposite (unless I'm really mistaken) -- I have to
add 4 hours to get Greenwich Mean Time.
I might have hoped that whoever set this up had some thought of making
this somewhat mnemonic. In other words that the "-" would be the clue
to tell you whether to add or subtract to get to GMT.
Either they didn't, or my head is twisted around backwards. It's easy
enough to change the sign (mentally) before applying the 4 hour
correction, but somehow I'm hoping that someone can give me another way
to look at this so it will seem logical.
(I've mentally gone through this exercise a few times (that is,
reminding myself that I must change the sign), but it just doesn't
stick. (Maybe it will after writing this email.))
If it really is counterintuitive to everyone else also, let's make a
plan to change it. Will we have to wait and roll it in with the Y10K
changes, or can we sneak it in sometime before then?
Randy Kramer
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
