[lug] laptop time

[Timothy C. Klein]

On Fri, Feb 23, 2001 at 06:56:08PM +0100, rm at mamma.varadinet.de wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 23, 2001 at 10:25:35AM -0700, Timothy C. Klein wrote:
> > 
> 
> AFAIK they are stored in seconds since epoch, i.e. seconds since
> 1.1.1970 (this is when everything began :-)
> BTW, GMT is definitely not what you would want to use, use UTC.
> UTC is a kind of abstract global time reference used on most
> (*nix) hosts. GTM is the timezone for certain parts of europe etc.
> There _is_ a big difference: GMT does have daylight savings time,
> so sometimes GMT !+ UTC.

I was aware of this.  However, the epoch had to be recorded somewhere on
the planet earth.  It just happens that was 00:00:00 1 Jan 1970 UTC,
which doesn't really refer to a place anymore, but usually correspondes
to GMT.  I realize we should say UTC, but others seemed to prefer GMT.

Thus, this does not avoid the issue of time zones.  The number of
seconds since Epoch, if converted into a human-readable date and time,
will give you a time value in *UTC.*  So, that is why it is good to let
the hardware clock be set to UTC.

Lets let all Unix machines live in UTC.  Time zones should only be used
for us annoying humans ;-)

Tim
> 
> 
>  Ralf 
> 
> 
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