Re: RFC 99 (v3) Standardize ALL Perl platforms on UNIX epoch

[Bart Lateur]

On 20 Sep 2000 13:03:22 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

>It's not a hardware problem; the hardware clock just keeps a time.  It has
>no concept of time zones.

I thought later on that I wrote this the wrong way. What I ment was: the
guys who did the interface to the hardware.

>It's a software problem; back when DOS was a
>dead-simple operating system, Microsoft decided to interpret the time as
>local time, probably because that was simpler and getting time zones right
>is hard

Which is precisely the shortsighted and wrong design decision I was
talking about.

>From a pure hardware point of view, letting a clock run on and on
without regard of timezone and daylight saving time, is a lot simpler,
than updating the hardware clock every time DST goes into or out of
effect.

So actually, these guys have, in their childish enthousiasm, chosen the
hard way.

It looks to me like Windows 2000 still keeps localtime in the hardware
clock. Can you believe that?

-- 
        Bart.