The suggestion of coming up with a better way to select the time zone is a good one, and the case of "Español" is a good example of the complications involved. I agree we need a better way. However, the fix suggested would be a worse solution than the current default.
New York is a BETTER selection than any European time zone. In the United States alone, 34 million speak Spanish at home, which is roughly comparable to the number of native Spanish speakers in Spain itself. Most Spanish speakers are in Latin America; of all countries with majority Spanish speakers, only Spain is outside of the Americas. Mexico has the most native Spanish speakers of any country, including Spain. If you want to make a reasonable default, Central Time (aka Chicago) has the most Spanish speaking people. A Least Squares regression to take into account the Spanish speaking population around the world, New York turns out to be the right choice. (While it's not the zone with the greatest number, it is "least wrong" on the whole. ) Most of IYCC's customers are native Spanish speakers, born and raised in Texas, in the Central time zone. Few of them know to select "Chicago" as their time zone. How are folks in south Texas supposed to know to pick Chicago as the correct time zone, when Texas is the second most populous state in the United States. (Texas has twice the number of inhabitants as the entire state of Illinois, where Chicago is located.) To complicate matters more, several parts of the Central timezone have their own rules. The state of Indiana has a few locations that have in the past opted out of Daylight Savings Time, so there are separate rules for them. The hapless Spanish speaking Texans have no way of knowing which of the little dots on the map they are supposed to click, and it's difficult to select the one you want when you do. Perhaps a better solution would be to simply ask the user to type the country, state or province, and city (or perhaps postal code) and have the system prompt with a reasonable choice. There are many widely databases that have location information, and there's just no reason to require the user to figure it out. Besides, the location information could and should be used for populating, inter alia, the "About Me" address fields and the OpenOffice.org User Data infomation. Happy Trails, Loye Young Isaac & Young Computer Company Laredo, Texas http://www.iycc.net -- Wrong time zone defaults for some countries https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/283861 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
