Wedge

I'm currently at GMT[1]+8 and to be honest, I don't think it matters too much whether Beijing or if Taipei is used although Hong Kong would be a more "neutral" option.

As far as Russia is concerned, there are two "standard" times used throughout the country. There's the "longitudinal" time with St Petersburg and Moscow at GMT+4 through to Vladivostok at GMT+10, by which businesses operate at the local level; there's also "Moscow Time" which is still used by the railways and (I believe) airlines and is also used by businesses, government departments etc., at the national level. China follows a similar model.

That said though, I recently installed Ubuntu 12.04LTS onto a netbook that had previously been struggling with Windows 7[2] and I was pleasantly surprised to see that Ubuntu's installer was very obviously using geo-location to suggest the time-zone. You see, no software that I've come across ever suggests "Manila" and although it got the city wrong[3], it did get the right country. I'm wondering whether Wedge could use a similar system - just think of all those bytes you could save, Nao, by not having an extensive list of options! :)
 
 

1.	and being British, I positively refuse to call it "UTC"
2.	despite the fact that it has 2Gb of physical memory
3.	I'm actually in Davao, a two-plus hour flight to the south

As well you should, GMT != UTC anyway. The two are different notably that UTC is UTC is UTC and never varies, even for DST while GMT is only the placeholder assigned to Britain etc. during the winter months. There are some minor vagaries involved at the system level too but nothing to worry about.Odd, 12.04LTS (last I installed it) didn't use any geo-location, it asked me my language first and foremost and since I'd said English UK, it just went from that.

What did you put in as your language?Not going to happen.

1. Geolocation is a rat's nest, and that's going to get worse, not better, as IPv4 exhaustion will lead to buying and selling blocks.
2. We don't have the resources to generate the relevant lists, and I don't see us paying for the maintained lists - and that's a good way to push upgrading.
3. I'm fairly certain there are privacy implications.
4. The alternative is to use the Location API but not all browsers support is and of those that do, they all ask first for permission to use the API. Fairly certain most users would say no.
5. Other than IP address, the only other measure is the language code, which may or may not be accurate and it won't tell you the location of the user in all cases.

Not really adding a great deal to the debate, but I keep all my *nix servers locked at UTC, no matter where they are physically (or virtually) in the world (barring the server at work that handles our Subversion repos, otherwise the devs get all upset when the DST switchovers occur and SVN refuses their commits :eheh:); logs are easy enough to understand in UTC, and everything else DST is pretty much handled transparently on the client-side IMO (email datetime strings, f'rinstance).Mmmmmm... Tech OCD starting to kick in...

Yes, and no. While the time prime meridian is acknowledged to run through Greenwich (and long may that remain the case; anyone want to come to GRO with me to look at the Harrison timepieces?), there is no difference between GMT and UTC (and insofar as "lies told to children", can be treated as being exactly the same thing). Should the EU bigwigs decide to move the time prime meridian (to *spit* Paris, f'rinstance), then this would necessarily introduce a 1hr difference between GMT and UTC.