Summertime fallout
It’s Thursday, four days after European clocks changed to what others call daylight saving and I’m still finding clocks stuck on GMT.
I’ll forgive those without an Internet connection like the wall clock in the kitchen, but way too many devices should know better. Windows Mobile still seems awkward, probably because I’m still running 6.0. The brand new Blackberry Bold hooked up to my company’s Blackberry Enterprise Server really should have updated itself. Two years ago I wouldn’t have cared.
But iPhone has changed everything. It just worked.
A former colleague wrote recently that ‘save file’ should have no place in this day. Everything should be saved automatically all of the time. I think manually changing the clocks twice a year should follow it into extinction.
Sidenote – This is the first post I’ve written on the new version of WordPress for iPhone. It’s a big improvement and worth returning to if you’ve tried and rejected it in the past. It means I can post more easily from wherever I happen to be:
DOS/Windows/classic MacOS uses the model of “fixed clock is set to local time, and time zone awareness is an optional add-on”. Because the machines were never meant to be networked, this wasn’t a problem (unless you cared about the timestamps on files from another time zone) until they were.
Unix (and therefore modern MacOS, though I don’t know about the iPhone) uses the model of “fixed clock is set to GMT, and time zone awareness is built in”. This is slightly more effort at first, but it means that a Unix system will never go into that classic NT loop of “look how clever I am, I set the clock back an hour”… “look how clever I am, I set the clock back an hour”… “look how clever I am, I set the clock back an hour”… All that Unix users have to worry about is getting their time zone data files updated when a government makes an arbitrary and expensive change to the start/end dates.
I’d argue about saving files, in that you ought not to overwrite the version you started with without an explicit command. But by all means have a “recover file” facility in case things go wrong.
RogerBW
August 12, 2009 at 10:39 am