From: "Antti Kurenniemi" 

"Geo."  wrote in message
news:45eaeff9$3{at}w3.nls.net...
>> A lot of apps need to calculate time / date internally, and when money is
>> involved it's critical that the calculations are correct. So, if the
>> rules are changed, i.e. if you have programmed your app to calculate time
>> using the OS provided functionality, then this would break those apps.
>> And yes, I know it's only a very small change, but I was involved in
>> programming a delivery control system for a gasoline provider, and they
>> tracked the price changes by 15 second intervals! I'm sure there are
>> other industries where this would be significant change to make people
>> not very happy - although I think mostly the problems seem overstated: if
>> you have a system that is that critical, then don't run it on a system
>> that is out of support.
>
> Did you use local time or UTC time? The only thing that's screwed up in NT
> and W2K is the offset from UTC. I can't imagine anyone would write a
> program to check local time as that would make it impossible to interface
> with other systems in other time zones, no?

No but calculations. Say you have a plane that leaves place X today at 9
PM, and the flight takes 3 and a half hours. Now if the flight happens at
the date when DST is applied, then it can mean the difference wether the
plane arrives at the same night or the next day. None of this is anything
special, but typically you use the OS provided functions for calculations
with time and date. Now the point here is that if the OS provided functions
do not match with reality, you may end up with incorrect results (plane
arrival date is wrong).


Antti Kurenniemi

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