I got your time-stamp right 'ere ...
I can time-stamp MS & Adobe crap-ware documents with any time/date you like. It ain't exactly rocket science. Are the AUS politicos really that far out of the loop when it comes to technology?
Time stamps in Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Word documents briefly became the centre of Australia's political agenda today, after seemingly dodgy dates in a press release were said to point to a conspiracy. To understand the sudden political import of metadata, you need to know that Australia currently has a minority government …
Why are you calling out Australian politicians specifically? I've never seen any particular ability with technology demonstrated by the politicians of other countries.
Well, with the exception of US politicians of course - inventing the Internet wasn't easy, what with all the welding together of tubes and such.
As an Australian, I'd have to agree. Most politicians' knowledge of of the internet encompasses the fact that their aides have told them posting on something called "facebook" and "twitter" gives them a valuable edge in the youth demographic.
Sadly such efforts are so transparent as to be close to pointless. It's well worth paying attention though, for the moment when politicians on either side (but more likely to be a national party or christian democratic party candidate) says something completely moronic before deleting it and hoping they got rid of it quick enough (hint - you didn't).
Sadly you are probably wrong and this is simply a software screw-up.
So much of MS (and presumably Adobe?) software did things in 'local' time and often without making clear what zone that was. That was just brain dead. What is worse, they assumed that the clock was in Microsoft's home time zone, not UTC, if nothing was specified.
The reason for being able to say its crap is this was already a solved problem before MS-DOS and Windows was created, as UNIX always uses UTC as its underlying time and just applies the local offset for presentation. That way when DST changes, or you access a LAN from another timezone, you still get the correct (OK self-consistent) times.
I would expect to see a server in UTC. There is no benefit in having it in local TZ.
So as far as the parliament PFYs having extra work for Xmas to reconfigure servers to local TZ - that it is stupid, counterproductive and against operational best practices. I used to reprimand PFYs working with me for doing that in the days when my job desc said BOFH. Too many badly written pieces of software out there which use localtime when they should not and do stupid things after a change to daylight savings time.
> I would expect to see a server in UTC. There is no benefit in having it in local TZ.
You didn't read his comment so I will repeat it for you.
as UNIX always uses UTC as its underlying time and just applies the local offset for presentation.
All underlying timestamps are in UTC. Individual applications might use and save local time, but that is the responsibility of the application.
Like Windows?
"Win32 API GetFileTime() returns the create time, last access time, and last write time for the specified file. The times returned are in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). "
>...and just applies the local offset for presentation...
Like Windows?
"The appropriate number of hours are then added or subtracted to/from the stored UTC value. This adjusted time is then displayed in any operation which reports local time"
Clearly, you haven't even begun to understand the problem, much less the solution. Probably better to restrict yourself to making coments about things you understand.
Bollocks to your bollocks.
Given that every state and territory in Australia does their own thing with regard to time zones and day light savings time, (including 2 with half hour offsets, and even one town split down the middle between DST and no DST), it's completely understandable any server is set to UTC, or there would be total confusion.
Think of how much effort would be saved if the world moved away from time zones and daylight savings times. Yes, it would be quite odd not to call the time when the sun is directly overhead 12, but instead noon could happen at what ever local hour it happened to fall at. It would be 14 o'clock in London, Chicago, and Hong Kong at the same time. We'd still have the same problem of knowing weather people are awake in that part of the world at the time, but knowing that the U.S. is dark from around 20 to 6 would mean the same thing for everybody.
...then why get clocks that auto adjust!
If you are talking about computers, both UNIX and Windows can be told not to adjust for DST, so I don't see your problem.
But be careful what you ask for. DST is applicable in summer, not the winter (which is what most people assume). We are lucky in the UK, because normal time (GMT) ~= UTC, so it is very clear to us which should be 'normal' time, and which is DST, but it is not so clear cut for any other timezone.
I would not object to losing DST, but only if time was such that the sun was at it's highest in the sky at noon.
Why, can't you adjust your sundial? I don't see your issue :-)
Unfortunately finsing non auto adjusting clocks is increasingly difficult (barring buying them online and getting raped for shipping). The bigger problem lies with stuff like dvd recorders etc, just smart enough to cope with dst, not smart enough to turn it off.
IIRC the concept is about 120 years old and was invented to allow more time for bug collecting and playing golf. When it was actually used it was to reduce coal usage. The reality is that any saving in energy usage is negligible and often can cause more usage depending on the climate and economy. Plus the disruption caused should be taken into account. It just seems to be a solution in search of a problem, many countries cope just fine without it so why bother at all?
If the server in question is just a print server or something, then there is no reason to care what it's "local" time is because nobody will see it. So I could see the potential for a server to be running on UTC because there are no users per se, just an Adobe print server or what not which embeds UTC into the meta data.
There are also very good reasons some times when UTC *should* be used. I to write code which talked with a trading system that returned trading tickets as a date / timestamp in Eastern Standard Time. So I had to write code which converted EST back to UTC using a timezone database and with the added risk that the timezone db on the client and server boxes might not contain the same values. Just because the server admins and server software authors couldn't be arsed to return a UTC formatted string like they should have.
Another time I was writing set top box software which showed a electronic program guide. I *insisted* that the server returned UTC simply to avoid stupid situations like the above, especially when times go back or forward an hour and the EPG is supposed to show a program which in local time could end 30 minutes before it even started.
What is it about Tony Abbott and his desire to resort to dubious legal action to get the political result he wants? Before this, he funded legal action against One Nation/Pauline Hanson (aka, 'that daft racist') on electoral fraud grounds, getting them imprisoned before it was all overturned. In that case, he established a secret trust fund and recruited potential litigants, in order to stop a candidate from standing.
It's all so underhand and seamy.
On the face of it, Pauline Hanson did commit electoral fraud. That's why she went to jail. The only way she got out of it was by hiring a lawyer to put up technicalities and plausable arguments. Which she was too stupid to do at first.
A big chunk of the voters agree with her: any kind of electoral fraud is OK if the working class gets in, no election is valid if the working class representatives do not win.
On the other hand, the political right has always held that the rules are rules, and should be obeyed. That is why we call them 'conservatives'.