APUG Upgrade re-scheduled for tonight Midnight CST US time -site may be locked down

Bob F. said:

On the other hand, try asking anyone around the world who isn't a Ham Radio operator or in posession of other techy credentials what "UTC" stands for and watch the blank faces... It's not even spelt the right way around for a English speaker (Coordinated Universal Time)... It's "UTC" because that's the way it is in French grammar (as in NATO becomes OTAN in France).

Besides, by the only gauge that really matters, Google has 5 times the number of hits for GMT as the number of UTC hits.

Cheers, Bob.

Click to expand...

You are, in part, correct.

If you listen to the automated time announcement each minute on WWV (the US government time standard) - the robot does say "At the tone the time is XX hours and YY minutes, Coordinated Universal Time."

But general written usage, even in English, is "UTC" - yes, from the French acronym. Maybe because "CUT" looks dumb?

As to the Google GMT "hits" that would hardly seem relevant. More people (you Brits) refer to GMT on a daily basis. Besides, probably a lot of those "hits" are listings of those innumerable GMT time references made BBC news "readers" at the end of every friggin' story!

Sympathies and best wishes from me too.

I agree, it would help with any of these announcements (not just server outages) if the predicted date was set out in the thread title, rather than using just "tonight". Some times when I'm looking for an update on something, I'll actually go into the forums themselves. It is hard to tell the "todays" or "tonights" apart.

I guess if something is scheduled for midnight, it might be clearer too if you used 11:59 p.m. .

I know, it's the anally retentive lawyer/physics graduate in me - I just can't help it!

Matt

Are we upgraded? Is it safe to go back into the waters?