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I agree. Also swatch tried this. The respective watch still resides in my collection. Swatch beat (or was it beep) decided the day into 1000 pieces and had no t
by sdoering 10y ago
I agree. Also swatch tried this. The respective watch still resides in my collection. Swatch beat (or was it beep) decided the day into 1000 pieces and had no timezones.
Clearly it worked and no one uses the old system anymore. <irony off>
For me timezones are OK. They are a cultural construct developed to accommodate the custom of counting the hours from sunrise (later midnight) and higher numbers meaning later in the day.
Not every sociocultural construct is bad just because it causes us code monkeys some trouble.
And believe me. Trouble it causes day in day out to me.
- spacehunt 10y agoAh the Swatch Internet Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time ... I remember implementing this for a local BBS, nobody could figure out how it worked.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoThey arrogantly based it on UTC+1. Might have been useful of it was sane
- WorldMaker 10y agoYes, because UTC itself is a non-arrogant, sane default. Clearly the Royal Observatory in Greenwich is the center of the Earth and always will be.~
- andrewfromx 10y agobut try living UTC 24 yourself. Change all your own clocks. I did awhile ago and I'll never go back even though I live in Los Angeles. Everyone can do this as well and be liberated from time.
- yongjik 10y agoIronically, your experiment worked only because all the adopters (that is, you) lived in a single time-zone, neatly sidestepping the entire problem timezones were meant to solve.
- boulos 10y agoDo you have any meetings / conversations with people in other time zones? Particularly ones further away like say London or Sydney? It's easy enough to remember +-3 within the US because we shift in unison (and your choice of UTC just means you'd memorize a different offset when someone says "10 AM Pacific") but interacting across real changes in time is hard. Unless you get everyone to use the same inputs, you're going to do this translation on all correspondence. So how do you live? ;)
- thaumasiotes 10y agoThis doesn't make any sense. Minor: Los Angeles doesn't have a constant offset to UTC. But it changes rarely enough that it's easy to absorb the inconvenience. Major: if he was using Los Angeles time internally, he'd have all the same problems when interacting with anyone else. Using UTC internally, he still has those for counterparties that don't use UTC, but they disappear for counterparties that also use UTC. Using UTC is a strict upgrade in terms of interacting across "real changes in time". When I interact with people in a different time zone, I like to use their time, because I figure the odds of them messing up when using their own time are low. But if I didn't do that, I seriously doubt they would have more difficulty with my proposal "let's meet at 04:00 UTC" than with my proposal "let's meet at 12:00 pm my local time".
- andrewfromx 10y agoI convert back to LA time when I need to. It's fun math that keeps me sharp and helps me always program timezone aware apps because I'm always thinking about two different timezones.
- hx87 10y agoWhy would translation be difficult? It's just adding small integers to another small integer.
- scott_s 10y agoI use times to coordinate with other people. How do you accomplish this coordination?