Ian Abbott wrote:
I also noticed that Windows 7 displays the same zone name to the user as "(UTC) Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London"
So they've moved on from "GMT" to "UTC". The parenthesised part previously referred, and presumably still refers, to the zone's "standard" (non-DST) offset from UT. So for London it's "GMT" and for Paris it's "GMT+1", for example, regardless of whether DST is in effect. It seems extremely unlikely that they're making any meaningful distinction between GMT and UTC (i.e., the sub-second difference between flavours of UT). Of course, hardly anyone else makes that distinction in a timezone context anyway.
Perhaps the use of "UTC" to mean "legal time in Eire, Scotland, Portugal and England" is even more confusing than "GMT"!
Are they doing that? The existing misuse of "GMT" is in the strings "GMT Standard Time" and "GMT Daylight Time", which name the two states of the timezone. Have those changed to "UTC Standard Time" and "UTC Daylight Time"? The "(GMT) ... London", as I noted above, is describing one of the offsets, and neither that nor "(UTC) ... London" is incorrect for that purpose. Albeit a bit misleading: its purpose would be clearer if it had an explicit "+0". -zefram