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Except that [generally] GMT gets adjusted for Daylight Savings, UTC does not (at least in my experience - not to say I'm any kind of expert here).
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Nope, GMT stands for Greenwich Mean Time, and is not adjusted - the UK switches between GMT and BST (GMT + 1) for winter and summer respectively.
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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Interesting. I'll look into that on our servers. I've seen the GMT reference (yes I know what GMT is short for), but not a BST. but you are right - there is a separate check box for whether to adjust for DST. We have our severs set to UTC for consistency...
Thanks for the info...
Mark
(just a cog in the wheel in Denver, CO)
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OriginalGriff wrote: "It's British for GMT"
You must mean "UTC", SQL doesn't have a GETGMTDATE function. 
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Richard MacCutchan wrote: I could never get our American programmers and analysts to fully understand time zones
And we wonder why our educational systems are failing. 
I bet they all knew where the Twilight Zone was though!
Marc
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None of them were what you would call stupid, it's just that the whole concept of how to use time zones seemed to elude them. Always baffled me.
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Perhaps it was actually your accent they could not understand. 
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Yeah most likely; I always wrote my emails in English. 
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Richard MacCutchan wrote: ; I always wrote my emails in English.
Yep that's it. Try writing in American next time.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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No you mention Twilight Zone to these youngsters today and they just stare uncomprehendingly at you.
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joeller wrote: No you mention Twilight Zone to these youngsters today and they just stare uncomprehendingly at you.
True. I date myself.
Marc
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Need to make them watch more SyFy channel XD
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Richard MacCutchan wrote: I could never get our American programmers and analysts to fully understand time zones, irony, that other countries exist, that "America" is a pair of continents comprising lots of countries, that English accents aren't cute (they just don't sound bluddy awful like yankee ones), or that everything that they believe was invented in the US wasn't.
It must be a developer thing, but I hate seeing incomplete statements.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mea culpa. 
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Marc Clifton wrote: UTC
University Town Center -- it's a mall in La Jolla.
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: University Town Center -- it's a mall in La Jolla.
Yes, I used to shop there, was a frequent customer of the Ritz Camera that was there (is it still?) And is it actually part of La Jolla or University City?
Funny you mention that, I was almost going to post that acronym in my original post, but decided nobody would get it (though I suppose there's a website for the mall.)
Marc
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Marc Clifton wrote: frequent customer of the Ritz Camera
As was I when I lived in the area, 1995 - 2001. There are very few Ritzes left, probably not that one.
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: As was I when I lived in the area, 1995 - 2001.
Interesting. I moved back to the East Coast in Dec of 1999. It's amusing to think we might have been in the Ritz store at the same time. Very small probability, but not 0!
Marc
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Let's just assume we met! And if you worked at SAIC we can say we worked together.
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
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The US won't be in the world cup long enough for them to need to use blasted-colonial time zones.
With any luck, the UK and NL won't last much longer, so the noise will decrease to bearable levels.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Marc Clifton wrote: Well, what do you think they should use, UTC?
Well, didn't China ("which we call Red China") fairly recently switch to use a single time zone for the entire country?
It makes sense. It really doesn't matter what you call the time when you get out of bed. People in the west DO get out of bed five hours later than the people in the west, so why should they both insist of calling it six o'clock, create a lot of problems. As long as you live isolated, you might want to insist on your day starting at 06:00, but once you start cooperating with someone far away, I cannot see one single advantage of labeling the same point in time with different values. I wouldn't mind UTC beeing established as the "time zone" for the entire world.
(My country, Norway, is a tiny north-south string of land. Nevertheless, we span two complete time zones: The people up north (-east) see the morning sun two hours before the people on the west coast. We live well with that, and have always done.)
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Makes me wonder, if the sun didn't even set the previous day, can you really call it the 'morning sun'? How do you measure the difference in time to other locations' morning sun when you don't technically have one? 
Then again, US citizens may be reading this - let's not confuse them even more 
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Member 7989122 wrote: I wouldn't mind UTC beeing established as the "time zone" for the entire world.
Being from the US, I would object to finding it dark outside at noon.
Fletcher Glenn
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Our app functions across multiples time zones so we've dealt with time zone despair for years as well. We store everything in UTC and convert back to local when displaying to user, but it's a real pain, especially when MS changes standards over time (for those that don't know, they try to automatically adjust times for you by comparing time zones of client and server - not helpful when we're already doing the conversion ourselves). If anyone ever needs help with the horrors of time zones drop a line - lots of experience to share.
As part of your useless trivia for the day, Coordinated Universal Time was originally going to be abbreviated as CUT, but since people couldn't agree on the abbreviation it was arranged so that no one got what they want. That's compromise!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time[^]
The official abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time is UTC. This abbreviation arose from a desire by the International Telecommunication Union and the International Astronomical Union to use the same abbreviation in all languages. English speakers originally proposed CUT (for "coordinated universal time"), while French speakers proposed TUC (for "temps universel coordonné"). The compromise that emerged was UTC,[8] which conforms to the pattern for the abbreviations of the variants of Universal Time (UT0, UT1, UT2, UT1R, etc.).[9]
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Ah, blame the French - it is agreed then - this mess is their fault.
Seriously though in newer .Net and SQL DateTimeOffset is a support primitive type, and 99% of the time that is what you ought to be storing not DateTime. So many issues go away completely whith that simple change.
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