4 ms·
Can we move to UTC exclusively next please? Enough with vague abbreviations only people who use them understand like EET, PST and whatnot. "I live in UTC+2 an
by kabacha 8y ago
Can we move to UTC exclusively next please? Enough with vague abbreviations only people who use them understand like EET, PST and whatnot.
"I live in UTC+2 and you live int UTC-5, meeting at 15:00UTC?" ain't that easier? I add 2 hours, you take away 5 - math a 6 year old can do.
And yet we refer to timezones with some made up meaningless words like Easter European Time - what does that even mean? It's not even accurate description as not all Eastern Europe follows it - pure madness.
- lloeki 8y ago> Can we move to UTC exclusively next please Your phrasing was ambiguous. For a moment I thought you meant https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish. Still, you can't remove the past, and since the names carrying disambiguating meaning (notably DST changes, is UTC+01:00 CET or BST?) even if you remove them for the future the past still exists so you still have to handle them.
- kabacha 8y agoUTC is explicit, you don't need to know anything than your local number. With current system you need to learn what all of these dumb abbreviations mean and their relations to your dumb abbreviation - it's pure madness and I just can't fanthom how this even came to existance when we had GMT since 1884.
- gadders 8y agoCan we go back to calling it GMT as well?
- dijit 8y agoUTC and GMT are similar but not the same. GMT does not observe leap seconds for instance.
- gadders 8y agoTIL GMT != UTC
- welterde 8y agoUTC only has leap seconds to keep within 0.9s of UT1, which is the mean solar time at 0° longitude (based on Quasar measurements). GMT is essentially equivalent to UT1 (and in modern usage either means UTC or UT1). UT1 essentially doesn't need leap seconds, because it is the correct mean solar time and not an 1Hz approximation of it (which UTC pretty much is).
- Faaak 8y agoGMT and UTC are not semantically the same though. In this case UTC makes more sense as it doesn't depends on Greenwich time. GMT should be defined by UTC, but not the other way around
- carreau 8y agoCan you imaging changing date in the middle of the day ! - I'm going to lunch I see you early tomorrow ? - But we have meeting this afternoon ! - Yes tomorrow, should I remind you we are UTC+12 ?
- ktosobcy 8y agoThis doesn't remove the problem, only shift it to different place. From the local perspective: "I always eat breakfast at 8am!" - two people can communicate when they eat (or do whatever). When you move to different country instead of sticking to your routine (minus jet-lag) you have to adjust your brain to completely different hours. Benefits of using UTC internationally would only be good for companies and people that do a lot of international meetings so using UTC would make their life easier (instead of wrapping their heads around multiple timezones)
- gvx 8y agoI don't think they were advocating for using UTC exclusively, just identifying their own timezone relative to UTC when communicating with someone in a different hour. For example: "I always eat breakfast at 08:00 UTC+01, so I prefer to do that Skype call we planned at 09:00 UTC+01 at the earliest. Is that fine with you or do you have plans in the evening?" If you're not in UTC+01, it's easier to work out what time that would be for you than if I said I wanted to have a tele-meeting at 09:00 CET.