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Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:51:58 +0100
From: =?UTF-8?B?QW5kcsOpIFdhcm5pZXI=?= <aw@ice-sa.com>
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To: Tomcat Users List <users@tomcat.apache.org>
Subject: Re: [OT] Displaying Time Zones for user preferences
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Caldarale, Charles R wrote:
>> From: André Warnier [mailto:aw@ice-sa.com] 
>> Subject: Re: [OT] Displaying Time Zones for user preferences
> 
>> Can you not use GeoIP to find out where a user is connecting 
>> from, and select his time zone automatically for him/her ?
> 
> Not reliably.  For example, it says my desktop PC is in Pennsylvania, when it's really in Minnesota (but then I'm actually in Ontario right now :-).  What you'll really get back is the registered location of the ISP or company, not necessarily that of the actual client.
> 
Well, in my case, when I am in Germany my ISP is a big nation-wide one (the one which AT&T 
was just forbidden to marry the daughter of), but the location I provided earlier was 
pretty accurate (say within 10 Km or so, good enough for a MIRV ICBM anyway).
(What I mean to say is that it is obviously much finer than the location of the ISP's 
headquarters, which in this case are 500 Km away).

I guess it depends really on what the actual purpose is in this case.  If it is just to 
make the website look more friendly, it may be good enough and avoid a lot of extra work 
and complications.  As Konstantin points out separately, if you are going to use the local 
timezone for anything "serious", then you could get yourself into a lot of complications. 
  And who says the users are going to go though the trouble of selecting the right zone 
anyway ? and what if the user indeed spends his time traveling and making the life of the 
site designer difficult, like you above ? And what about users who are connecting first to 
their corporation's VPN from wherever they are, and of which all subsequent accesses 
appear to come from that corporation's firewall. Oh wait, that was an argument against 
using GeoIP, wasn't it ?


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