[ByteMercenary]

I stopped by the office on the way to church and noticed that our Linux/Unix systems had all moved up but none of the Windoze computers had ... how has it come to pass that this generally imcompetant operating system controls the world?

[dayglored]

> I stopped by the office on the way to church and noticed that our Linux/Unix systems had all moved up but none of the Windoze computers had ... how has it come to pass that this generally imcompetant operating system controls the world?

You see, long long ago in 1981 there was this little Unix & BASIC company in Redmond called "Microsoft", that swung a deal with IBM about a new small computer IBM was bringing out. They bought a Quick-and-Dirty operating system, crossed out "QDOS" and wrote "MS-DOS" in crayon, sold their Unix business to SCO, licensed MSDOS to IBM, and the rest, as they say, is history.

In the consumer computing world, despite all the flash and glitz, DOS/Windows competence has yet to catch up with mid-70's Unix.

But you knew this already... ;-)

[MarkL]

I stopped by the office on the way to church and noticed that our Linux/Unix systems had all moved up but none of the Windoze computers had ... how has it come to pass that this generally imcompetant operating system controls the world?

Unix/Linux (and Novell servers, as well) have the start and end dates of DST set as a text string in a configuration file. Changing it on these computers is trivial. In the case of Windows computers, the start and end dates of DST are set through the registry, and there's a free tool from MS, TZEDIT that will allow you to reset those dates quite easily, as well as checking to see that the change was made.

Mark

[MarkL]

I stopped by the office on the way to church and noticed that our Linux/Unix systems had all moved up but none of the Windoze computers had ... how has it come to pass that this generally imcompetant operating system controls the world?

How new are your linux/unix computers? Do you have some sort of upgrade protection? The problem is with Congress, NOT Microsoft, at least not completely. Remember that Congress made the change last year. Somehow, that change was communicated to the linux/unix computers you use. If the OS was shipped after Congress made the change, that's why: Because they knew the start and end dates of DST. However, if Congress makes another change, the computers won't "know about it" unless there's some outside intervention again.

Mark

[Beagle8U]

“how has it come to pass that this generally imcompetant operating system controls the world?”

I watched a program on TV last night that covered exactly your question. I think it was called “Browser Wars” or the history of the Internet.

It was a very interesting program.