[comp.os.vms] ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) (10/28/87)

In article <4709@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> david@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (David Robinson) 
writes:
>Simply have DEC maintain in kernel
>all times in a fixed timezone (GMT?) and have each site
>specify their timezone and if they are on DST.  This way
>a file created on VAX A in London will appear to have the
>same creation date on VAX B in Los Angeles if it is transfered.

HORRORS!  What do you think this is, a colony of the British Empire?
It's bad enough that the quaint ancient practice of referring to Her
Majesty's Royal Greenwich Observatory's local time as a standard hasn't
died yet.  Worse, you folks now want modern, state-of-the-art operating
systems such as VMS to be defiled in this manner.

I'm afraid the UNIX users are slowly beginning to corrupt the pure
minds that used to dwell, free from tainted thoughts, in VMS-only
shops.  What will they want next--I/O redirection, pipes, forks???

Leave VMS alone!  Daylight savings time is an ancient concept that
originated in the blackouts of war-ravaged London.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi

mitch@batcomputer.UUCP (11/02/87)

In article <1362@bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>HORRORS!  What do you think this is, a colony of the British Empire?
>It's bad enough that the quaint ancient practice of referring to Her
>Majesty's Royal Greenwich Observatory's local time as a standard hasn't
>died yet.  Worse, you folks now want modern, state-of-the-art operating
>systems such as VMS to be defiled in this manner.

Then how about if we instead use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)?  This
is the time broadcast by the National Bureau of Standards from Fort Collins
and Honolulu as a time standard for the U.S.  And, oh yes, it just happens
to correspond to GMT, but does not suffer from DST changes.

-Mitch Collinsworth
 mitch@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu

tmca@ut-ngp.UUCP (Tim Abbott) (11/03/87)

In article <1362@bsu-cs.UUCP>, dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
> In article <4709@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> david@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (David Robinson) 
> writes:
> >Simply have DEC maintain in kernel
> >all times in a fixed timezone (GMT?) and have each site
> >specify their timezone and if they are on DST.  This way
> >a file created on VAX A in London will appear to have the
> >same creation date on VAX B in Los Angeles if it is transfered.
> 
> HORRORS!  What do you think this is, a colony of the British Empire?

It used to be, does this give you a problem?

> It's bad enough that the quaint ancient practice of referring to Her
> Majesty's Royal Greenwich Observatory's local time as a standard hasn't
> died yet.  Worse, you folks now want modern, state-of-the-art operating
> systems such as VMS to be defiled in this manner.

Now just a minute, if you want to get all po-ed about this then do it
properly and quit bitching at 'quaint practises'. We use Universal Time
on all our uVAXs, a time system that happens to coincide with British
Winter Time (or whatever it's called, it's been a while) i.e. it has
the same zero point and is sometimes known as Greenwich Mean Time. This
is simply a convenient standard, and just *happens* to be used all over
the world, certainly in every observatory.
Or would you prefer we adopt a new standard, New York Mean Time (NYMT), 
perhaps, or is Berkely the center of your universe (BMT? :-))? Honestly,
you have to settle on some standard somewhere; in my uneducated way, I
might imagine that we only use GMT, or UT if you'd prefer a little more
anonimity, because man only became really aware of the need for such 
standards at a time when Britain was a more important world power than
it is now.

> 
> Leave VMS alone!  Daylight savings time is an ancient concept that
> originated in the blackouts of war-ravaged London.
> -- 

Was it really? Interesting. I have to agree with you it is something of 
a pain to the computer programmer, and if everyone picked a nice convenient
standard (such as UT) and wrote local routines for conversion to local time
life would be a lot easier. However, it does have its uses, particularly in 
saving power during normal work hours (for those that look a little further
than the nearest CRT).

Apart from that, do you have a better solution than the one suggested by
Mr. Robinson above? Seems eminently reasonable to me.


	T.
	Clean as a Q-Tip,
	Quiet as Nylon,
	Don't look now,
	We've got eyes on.
	Sway, this way.