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    For a real life example of a locale mismatch, imagine writing an app for Maine, US users and then it's hosted in Amazon's west coast server farm. ;) This isn't that unlikely a situation, actually. Commented Sep 22, 2016 at 5:53
  • @jpmc26 I don't understand the difference - does Maine use a different date format to the rest of the US? Commented Sep 23, 2016 at 9:46
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    @PeteKirkham Maine and the US west coast use time zones that are 3 hours apart. Commented Sep 23, 2016 at 13:54
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    Or another real life scenario: Imagine running a server in Switzerland that has to serve clients in four (German, French, Italian, English) different languages with different locales (and slightly different formatting rules). Good luck picking the right locale for your server in such a situation. Commented Sep 23, 2016 at 18:01
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    @jpmc26 timezones and locales are not the same thing. For example, we have offices in Glasgow Scotland, Atlanta USA and Pune India. Consultants in these offices in turn monitor sites (campuses, hospitals, hotels etc) around the world around the clock. The application database works in UTC but displays times in local time for the site being monitored. The USA consultants have dates localised to MM/DD/YYYY but UK and India locales are DD/MM/YYYY - this depends on locale, not timezone of the site or user. Commented Sep 25, 2016 at 20:27