Re: DST (was Minimal XYWRITE & DOS Virtualization)

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Carl Distefano  on Sun, 11 Mar 2007
12:30:24 -0400


> > 2) In XP, if you don't trust M$ patches, you can do this too,
> > but I was surprised when I was looking at the XP Date & Time
> > tabs to see an automatic synchronization tab. Why wouldn't that
> > take care of the whole thing?

Because the fundamental concept of what constitute the beginning and end dates
of DST has changed in the USA, by law. You would think, in unsupported
versions of Windows (past "End-of-Life", by M$'s definition) e.g. Win2K, that
changing the TZ environment variable would take care of everything. But it
doesn't. Or maybe it would if I rebooted; but I don't want to reboot.

> I'm running XP-SP2 with current updates. The clock changed
> automagically, hands off.

Supposedly, M$ only distributed that fix for XP and Vista. Somewhere I read
that they want $4000 for the fix for other OSes, which strikes me as a tad
heavyhanded. Anyway, DL a copy of TZEdit.exe, follow instructions -- and
problem solved!

http://www.fastservers.net/blog/operating-systems/the_new_dday_unsupported_oses/

BTW, the correct "full-form" TZ variable for the U.S. Eastern Time Zone is now:
 TZ=EST+05:00:00EDT+04:00:00,M3.2.0/02:00:00,M11.1.0/02:00:00
This will be reflected in frame SETTIME in the next release of U2 (there's a
concise explanation of how to "read" & interpret the TZ variable at HELP
SETTIME). I think I'm also going to change the time server to
129.6.15.28 (time-a.nist.gov).

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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