Re: [wg-d] Time standard

["Mark C. Langston" <skritch@home.com>]

On 5 August 1999, Elisabeth PORTENEUVE <Elisabeth.PORTENEUVE@cetp.ipsl.fr> wrote:
>    I have no special difficulty to work with the UTC (standard, nowhere),
>    but my peronnal observation is that even the people working on space
>    program prefere use local time references for meetings or real life.
>
>    What about a sample of 3 or 4 real places (plus UTC if you wish) ?
>    Until now, I reference 3 well populated geographical areas:
>               Pacific US
>               Eastern US
>               Central European (300 000 people, more than UTC zone)
>    adding sometimes Singapore or Japan for Asia

UTC (or GMT) is typically set on UNIX systems, and local time is kept
as an offset.

I'd strongly recommend against using any US timezone, as I've yet to
see anyone in the WGs correctly refer to it.  So far, I've seen 
references to EST several times in the past few weeks.  The Eastern US
time zone is currently on Daylight Savings Time, which is abbreviated
EDT.  It may seem like I'm picking nits, but there's an hour difference
between these two.  

Other than inconvenience, is there any reason to avoid using UTC or
GMT as a standard?  If you're in doubt as to how to convert from GMT
to your local time, just look at your mail datestamps.  For example,
Elizabeth is +0200 hours from GMT.  I'm -0700, as is Karl.

-- 
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