timezone

I agree, wrong timezone (DST or not?) is as bad as no timezone.

From my experience, the defining parameter is now the timezone difference (or, working hours kept), rather than distance.

Cross the border from China to Afghanistan, and you'll have a 3½ hour timezone change.

Instead of looking up the timezone offset, you would look up the sunrise offset.

I'm not sure if there are any English teaching jobs in South America, but the timezone would be nice.

Same thing for getting phone calls from a different timezone etc.

For example, it looks to me as if on iOS you can only be identified down to (browser * iPhone model * iOS version * timezone).

I have gotten in the habit of using Olson timezone names, US/Eastern for example, because I have seen CT used to refer to both US and European Central time.

The simple fact that newbs and admins alike will never have to lookup the man pages for arcane commands to accomplish simple tasks like setting the timezone (dpkg-reconfigure tzdata) is a big difference in terms of usability.

Yes, I set all of my infrastructure to UTC and then keep the clock on whatever UI I'm using set to display distance from UTC in my current timezone (and current Unix timestamp in UTC).

It turned out that glibc `localtime` can misbehave in the way that it ignores the local timezone when it was unable to read `/etc/localtime`, and the Linux box the server was in had some issue on reading that (I never had fully identified it, this read was probably the only disk I/O from that server anyway).

"Urumqi simply adjusted their operation schedules to reflect natural waking hours, therefore, a store may be open from noon to 10 PM." This is exactly why I would propose a single timezone for the entire world.