g1smd - 6:08 pm on Oct 27, 2002 (gmt 0)

In an ideal world everything would just synchronise to UTC which is a time zone that does not have daylight savings time. It would then be up to each user to select their Standard Time offset from UTC in their profile, and then additionally during their own local Sumer months [ North: Apr-Oct / South: Oct-Apr ] tick a box that adds one more hour on to this time, so that Dates and Times display correct for their locality.

In reality a lot of people seem to run their server on some local time, and tell the software what the offset to UTC is. Unfortunately, some people have moved their server time back one hour at the end of DST, but haven't adjusted the offset value in their software to cater for this. What this has meant is that in quite a few fora anyone who didn't end their DST today, now sees all their times wrong by one hour, as the server has shifted one hour relative to the user (this shouldn't happen). In 2002 I am really very surprised at all this. It seems that Y2K taught almost no-one anything about Date and Time, Time Zones, and DST.

One big mistake that people make is in thinking that UK Clock Time is GMT. This in only true during the UK Winter. In UK Summer, British Clocks show BST which is GMT+1. This is usually referred to as UTC+0000 (GMT) for Winter, and UTC+0100 (BST) for Summer.

This is posted at 18:08 UTC (and WW screen says 6:08 PM seems like Brett is one of the few people on the net that actually understands these issues).

DST changeover details at: [timeanddate.com...]

[edited by: g1smd at 6:16 pm (utc) on Oct. 27, 2002]