5 ms·

No; this isn't a good idea. The developers on our team live in 3 different time zones (this number has been as high as 6 in the past), so I have some experienc

by jtheory 12y ago

No; this isn't a good idea. The developers on our team live in 3 different time zones (this number has been as high as 6 in the past), so I have some experience in this. Times have meanings that would be quite difficult to track without the reference points. I'd be happy if daylight savings were gone -- that's much more cost than it's worth. But even if it were possible to switch everyone to UTC, it'd be awful. Let's say you're in SF and you want to schedule a conference call with someone in Bangalore. You'll use worldtimebuddy.com or similar to compare your day with theirs, and you'll find that your first thought, 2pm, is 2:30am in Bangalore. So... maybe you can get up early -- 7am for you is 7:30pm for them. Better ask if maybe they'd prefer to meet after dinner, or (since you stay up late) perhaps YOU could call after your dinner and catch them at 9am Bangalore time... that's when the most common working day starts. Think about doing this check without timezones. 2pm for you is... 2pm for them! How useless to know that. So you'll still need some reference to figure out when they will probably start their workday, when they'll probably break for lunch or go home for dinner, etc.. But how can you refer to those times sensibly without using times? You'll say "oh, so 2pm for YOU is sort of like 2 AM for me, how awful that I called your mobile then". And boom, you've re-invented timezones.

marak830 12y ago
Exactly what i was thinking. Which the author probably would have been told over and over if he had comments enabled -.-
hackuser 12y ago
If there were no timezones, then worldtimebuddy.com would show you sunrise, midday, and sunset, or typical start/end of work.
- jtheory 12y ago
  Yup; it's not impossible; but think of how much more complicated the interface would become. There would have to be a whole lot of little, wordy labels instead of simply showing the time. Times (with shared meanings) are good shorthand. If we discard the shared meanings, we'll need something else to replace them when we're talking to people outside our part of the world (which, of course, is happening more & more). A "9-5 job" would become... what? A "most common workday start time to most common workday end time job"? "I was up coding last night until 3am" would have to be something like "I was up coding last night until 6 hours before the next day's standard workday start". ["Until 3 hours before dawn" was my first thought, but that's not very meaningful -- staying up until 3am is pretty much the same even though the sunup time may vary widely depending on location and time of year...] If you're talking to someone who lives in Barcelona, and you say "oh, I should probably let you go -- is it almost dinner time?" -- because it's 6pm in CET -- she may respond "oh, no -- most people here don't have dinner until 9 or 10pm". That's interesting, right? But how do you even have that conversation without sharing a time/meaning shorthand?
  - icebraining 12y ago
    A "9-5 job" would become... what? A "most common workday start time to most common workday end time job"? It'd become the same as in any country which doesn't have that particular expression, that is, probably most of them. "I was up coding last night until 3am" would have to be something like "I was up coding last night until 6 hours before the next day's standard workday start". There's no such standard; different countries have different business hours, so to a foreigner "3am" doesn't tell her that it's "6 hours before the next day's standard workday start", and to a local you can just say the actual time, since she would know the new "standard", whatever it'd be.
    - jtheory 12y ago
      Can you give some examples of parts of the world that have different standard business hours from 9 to 5? In your explanation, don't use times as reference points. ... Yes, of course there are variations in standards; but that makes times all the more valuable as reference points. People in Saudi Arabia, for example, will have similar ideas of "what people do" around 6pm, and if they work with someone in Argentina, they can have an interesting conversation figuring out how Argentinians are different (and how they're the same). But if they lose time as a shorthand, it's suddenly really hard to have that conversation.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >Yup; it's not impossible; but think of how much more complicated the interface would become. There would have to be a whole lot of little, wordy labels instead of simply showing the time. Or, you know, it would just be something like "+6" (meaning 6 hours ahead of your time in their daily cycle), etc. I mean, it's like a lot of people commenting against this hasn't paid any thought to it at all...
    - jtheory 12y ago
      > Or, you know, it would just be something like "+6" (meaning 6 hours ahead of your time in their daily cycle), etc. That's re-inventing time zones for this timezone-free world, though, isn't it? The problem is that timezones would still exist (as you point out -- that +6 must come from somewhere...), but because they would be unofficial and no longer standardized, it would be harder to know. Every city would need to figure out "standard business hours" somehow -- because an awful lot of businesses talk to each other during their working hours. Neighboring cities would need to coordinate, somehow. But how would worldtimebuddy know whether to display "+6" or "+7" for a given city? They can't just guess it on sun cycles; sunset in London varies from 4 pm to 9:30 pm, and of course some people live further north (or south) than that -- and "working day" hours aren't bound very tightly to sun cycles anyway.
rodgerd 12y ago
> Times have meanings that would be quite difficult to track without the reference points. Precisely. When's breakfast? About 7 am UTC. And 7 am NZDT. And 7 AM PDT. And so on and so forth. This proposal only makes sense from the point of a lazy programmer who is arrogant enough to imagine that their local understanding of schedule trumps everyone else's.
- icebraining 12y ago
  My breakfast is at 0630. My collegue's at 0900. My brother eats it at 1030. The idea that there's a "time for breakfast" (or for working, or for sleeping - my father-in-law in a night guard) is no less arrogant. If you want to know what time to call someone, how about you ask them?
  - jtheory 12y ago
    It's not arrogant to know there's a "most common" time for meals, working, and sleeping. When you're actually setting up a specific event, of course everyone will participate ("actually, a 7am call is great for me -- I work early"), but knowing the defaults saves a lot of time.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- coldtea 12y ago
  Where does the idea that when getting rid of timezones we'll also get rid of "relative time" reference points stems from? We'll also know that 12am is noon in England and dawn in New York. We could have handy mappings to look that up too. We just wont have all the constant need for mental conversion baggage associated with timezones, and the crazy boundary issues.
  - manicdee 12y ago
    No, you'll just have the ever-present mental baggage of knowing that "today" lasts until about the first tea break at work, at which point we flip the calendar over to "tomorrow". What an absurd, broken world to live in, just because someone was too lazy to use a calendaring system that was timezone-aware! Sorry folks, living on a round planet orbiting a star means you have different sleep/wake cycles when compared to a common clock. It's a solved problem, and changing the solution won't make the problem go away.
lmm 12y ago
> Let's say you're in SF and you want to schedule a conference call with someone in Bangalore. You'll use worldtimebuddy.com or similar to compare your day with theirs, and you'll find that your first thought, 2pm, is 2:30am in Bangalore. So... maybe you can get up early -- 7am for you is 7:30pm for them. Better ask if maybe they'd prefer to meet after dinner, or (since you stay up late) perhaps YOU could call after your dinner and catch them at 9am Bangalore time... that's when the most common working day starts. And then you discover that you misread the direction of the shift and you actually should have arranged in the early morning for you, or you've checked time in that country's capital rather than in the place your contact is, or they thought the time you gave them was in your timezone... and neither of you realize you've fucked up until meeting time. Without timezones, you look the timezones up and suggest 7pm, but you've shifted the wrong way and that's the middle of the night for them when you thought it was early afternoon? So you say "how about 7pm" and either they say "no, that's the middle of the night, how about 10am", or they just get up in the middle of the night. But either way, that time you've agreed is completely unambiguous for both of you and there's no way for it to go wrong.
- jtheory 12y ago
  There are definitely inconveniences with timezones (believe me, I know); but this would be worse. The political nightmare of convincing the non-British part of the world that "sorry, your day of the week is going to switch in the middle of the afternoon", for example, hasn't even been mentioned yet. Some of those places might not be keen on having their clocks running on British time. To put it mildly. And honestly, the inconveniences aren't hard to work around. If you work across timezones, you figure it out pretty quickly. I work on London time, but live in Central European time; I just talk normally in London time when I'm at work. If we're scheduling something in a timezone-disparate group, I always say "2pm London time" and optionally add in "6:30pm Bangalore time" or whatever is needed. It's only daylight savings that gets annoying, because it changes the offsets. If I've done this bit of simple arithmetic wrongly -- hey, it can happen -- the problem is revealed when I send out meeting requests. Everyone using standard calendar software on their computers (Outlook, Google calendar, whatever) sees the meeting in their local timezone (because of course meeting requests include tz offset info!), so before they actually accept the meeting request, they'll know I've done it wrongly.
icebraining 12y ago
One problem is that people (and even software) often don't include timezones. By having none, you always now what time they mean. Knowing the best time to call someone in another area of the world seems like a problem that wouldn't really change, neither for the better nor for the worse; instead of having wordtimebuddy.com tell you the time there, it'd tell you the working hours (eg. 2m - 10am).
coldtea 12y ago
>Think about doing this check without timezones. 2pm for you is... 2pm for them! How useless to know that. So you'll still need some reference to figure out when they will probably start their workday, when they'll probably break for lunch or go home for dinner, etc.. But how can you refer to those times sensibly without using times? You'll say "oh, so 2pm for YOU is sort of like 2 AM for me, how awful that I called your mobile then". And boom, you've re-invented timezones. With both schemes you need to know that, say "2am here is like 2pm there". With the proposed scheme, all the other crap that goes with timezones unnecessarily is removed. Finding when time X (that you have a meeting or an event happens) is at both places? Instant. Knowing time difference when you are given the time at 2 different places? Instant. Time conversions for commerce etc? Done with. How long a flight will take? Instant. Adjusting your watch after arriving somewhere? Done with. It's the difference between having to do the conversion only when you need it (e.g to know the relative "phase of the sun" at another place) vs having it to do for trivial stuff that doesn't need it, and complicating things needlessly. (Not to mention: timezones, because they are irregular, and not equal 24 divisions of earth, do not reflect actual "phase of the sun" at place X. With a constant universal time, we could use equal divisions to find out the difference, which would be even more accurate than knowing 2am Bangalore is X am at some other place).
- kybernetikos 12y ago
  > timezones, because they are irregular, and not equal 24 divisions of earth, do not reflect actual "phase of the sun" at place X. With a constant universal time, we could use equal divisions to find out the difference, which would be even more accurate than knowing 2am Bangalore is X am at some other place The time system I came up with uses geolocation to orient the clock so local solar midday is always at the top of the clock (12 o'clock on a normal clock) and local solar midnight is always at the bottom of the clock (6 o'clock on a normal clock). http://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT http://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT

by jtheory 12y ago

marak830 12y ago

Exactly what i was thinking. Which the author probably would have been told over and over if he had comments enabled -.-

hackuser 12y ago

If there were no timezones, then worldtimebuddy.com would show you sunrise, midday, and sunset, or typical start/end of work.

jtheory 12y ago
Yup; it's not impossible; but think of how much more complicated the interface would become. There would have to be a whole lot of little, wordy labels instead of simply showing the time. Times (with shared meanings) are good shorthand. If we discard the shared meanings, we'll need something else to replace them when we're talking to people outside our part of the world (which, of course, is happening more & more). A "9-5 job" would become... what? A "most common workday start time to most common workday end time job"? "I was up coding last night until 3am" would have to be something like "I was up coding last night until 6 hours before the next day's standard workday start". ["Until 3 hours before dawn" was my first thought, but that's not very meaningful -- staying up until 3am is pretty much the same even though the sunup time may vary widely depending on location and time of year...] If you're talking to someone who lives in Barcelona, and you say "oh, I should probably let you go -- is it almost dinner time?" -- because it's 6pm in CET -- she may respond "oh, no -- most people here don't have dinner until 9 or 10pm". That's interesting, right? But how do you even have that conversation without sharing a time/meaning shorthand?
- icebraining 12y ago
  A "9-5 job" would become... what? A "most common workday start time to most common workday end time job"? It'd become the same as in any country which doesn't have that particular expression, that is, probably most of them. "I was up coding last night until 3am" would have to be something like "I was up coding last night until 6 hours before the next day's standard workday start". There's no such standard; different countries have different business hours, so to a foreigner "3am" doesn't tell her that it's "6 hours before the next day's standard workday start", and to a local you can just say the actual time, since she would know the new "standard", whatever it'd be.
  - jtheory 12y ago
    Can you give some examples of parts of the world that have different standard business hours from 9 to 5? In your explanation, don't use times as reference points. ... Yes, of course there are variations in standards; but that makes times all the more valuable as reference points. People in Saudi Arabia, for example, will have similar ideas of "what people do" around 6pm, and if they work with someone in Argentina, they can have an interesting conversation figuring out how Argentinians are different (and how they're the same). But if they lose time as a shorthand, it's suddenly really hard to have that conversation.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Yup; it's not impossible; but think of how much more complicated the interface would become. There would have to be a whole lot of little, wordy labels instead of simply showing the time. Or, you know, it would just be something like "+6" (meaning 6 hours ahead of your time in their daily cycle), etc. I mean, it's like a lot of people commenting against this hasn't paid any thought to it at all...
  - jtheory 12y ago
    > Or, you know, it would just be something like "+6" (meaning 6 hours ahead of your time in their daily cycle), etc. That's re-inventing time zones for this timezone-free world, though, isn't it? The problem is that timezones would still exist (as you point out -- that +6 must come from somewhere...), but because they would be unofficial and no longer standardized, it would be harder to know. Every city would need to figure out "standard business hours" somehow -- because an awful lot of businesses talk to each other during their working hours. Neighboring cities would need to coordinate, somehow. But how would worldtimebuddy know whether to display "+6" or "+7" for a given city? They can't just guess it on sun cycles; sunset in London varies from 4 pm to 9:30 pm, and of course some people live further north (or south) than that -- and "working day" hours aren't bound very tightly to sun cycles anyway.

rodgerd 12y ago

> Times have meanings that would be quite difficult to track without the reference points. Precisely. When's breakfast? About 7 am UTC. And 7 am NZDT. And 7 AM PDT. And so on and so forth. This proposal only makes sense from the point of a lazy programmer who is arrogant enough to imagine that their local understanding of schedule trumps everyone else's.

icebraining 12y ago
My breakfast is at 0630. My collegue's at 0900. My brother eats it at 1030. The idea that there's a "time for breakfast" (or for working, or for sleeping - my father-in-law in a night guard) is no less arrogant. If you want to know what time to call someone, how about you ask them?
- jtheory 12y ago
  It's not arrogant to know there's a "most common" time for meals, working, and sleeping. When you're actually setting up a specific event, of course everyone will participate ("actually, a 7am call is great for me -- I work early"), but knowing the defaults saves a lot of time.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
coldtea 12y ago
Where does the idea that when getting rid of timezones we'll also get rid of "relative time" reference points stems from? We'll also know that 12am is noon in England and dawn in New York. We could have handy mappings to look that up too. We just wont have all the constant need for mental conversion baggage associated with timezones, and the crazy boundary issues.
- manicdee 12y ago
  No, you'll just have the ever-present mental baggage of knowing that "today" lasts until about the first tea break at work, at which point we flip the calendar over to "tomorrow". What an absurd, broken world to live in, just because someone was too lazy to use a calendaring system that was timezone-aware! Sorry folks, living on a round planet orbiting a star means you have different sleep/wake cycles when compared to a common clock. It's a solved problem, and changing the solution won't make the problem go away.

lmm 12y ago

> Let's say you're in SF and you want to schedule a conference call with someone in Bangalore. You'll use worldtimebuddy.com or similar to compare your day with theirs, and you'll find that your first thought, 2pm, is 2:30am in Bangalore. So... maybe you can get up early -- 7am for you is 7:30pm for them. Better ask if maybe they'd prefer to meet after dinner, or (since you stay up late) perhaps YOU could call after your dinner and catch them at 9am Bangalore time... that's when the most common working day starts. And then you discover that you misread the direction of the shift and you actually should have arranged in the early morning for you, or you've checked time in that country's capital rather than in the place your contact is, or they thought the time you gave them was in your timezone... and neither of you realize you've fucked up until meeting time. Without timezones, you look the timezones up and suggest 7pm, but you've shifted the wrong way and that's the middle of the night for them when you thought it was early afternoon? So you say "how about 7pm" and either they say "no, that's the middle of the night, how about 10am", or they just get up in the middle of the night. But either way, that time you've agreed is completely unambiguous for both of you and there's no way for it to go wrong.

jtheory 12y ago
There are definitely inconveniences with timezones (believe me, I know); but this would be worse. The political nightmare of convincing the non-British part of the world that "sorry, your day of the week is going to switch in the middle of the afternoon", for example, hasn't even been mentioned yet. Some of those places might not be keen on having their clocks running on British time. To put it mildly. And honestly, the inconveniences aren't hard to work around. If you work across timezones, you figure it out pretty quickly. I work on London time, but live in Central European time; I just talk normally in London time when I'm at work. If we're scheduling something in a timezone-disparate group, I always say "2pm London time" and optionally add in "6:30pm Bangalore time" or whatever is needed. It's only daylight savings that gets annoying, because it changes the offsets. If I've done this bit of simple arithmetic wrongly -- hey, it can happen -- the problem is revealed when I send out meeting requests. Everyone using standard calendar software on their computers (Outlook, Google calendar, whatever) sees the meeting in their local timezone (because of course meeting requests include tz offset info!), so before they actually accept the meeting request, they'll know I've done it wrongly.

icebraining 12y ago

One problem is that people (and even software) often don't include timezones. By having none, you always now what time they mean. Knowing the best time to call someone in another area of the world seems like a problem that wouldn't really change, neither for the better nor for the worse; instead of having wordtimebuddy.com tell you the time there, it'd tell you the working hours (eg. 2m - 10am).

coldtea 12y ago

>Think about doing this check without timezones. 2pm for you is... 2pm for them! How useless to know that. So you'll still need some reference to figure out when they will probably start their workday, when they'll probably break for lunch or go home for dinner, etc.. But how can you refer to those times sensibly without using times? You'll say "oh, so 2pm for YOU is sort of like 2 AM for me, how awful that I called your mobile then". And boom, you've re-invented timezones. With both schemes you need to know that, say "2am here is like 2pm there". With the proposed scheme, all the other crap that goes with timezones unnecessarily is removed. Finding when time X (that you have a meeting or an event happens) is at both places? Instant. Knowing time difference when you are given the time at 2 different places? Instant. Time conversions for commerce etc? Done with. How long a flight will take? Instant. Adjusting your watch after arriving somewhere? Done with. It's the difference between having to do the conversion only when you need it (e.g to know the relative "phase of the sun" at another place) vs having it to do for trivial stuff that doesn't need it, and complicating things needlessly. (Not to mention: timezones, because they are irregular, and not equal 24 divisions of earth, do not reflect actual "phase of the sun" at place X. With a constant universal time, we could use equal divisions to find out the difference, which would be even more accurate than knowing 2am Bangalore is X am at some other place).

kybernetikos 12y ago
> timezones, because they are irregular, and not equal 24 divisions of earth, do not reflect actual "phase of the sun" at place X. With a constant universal time, we could use equal divisions to find out the difference, which would be even more accurate than knowing 2am Bangalore is X am at some other place The time system I came up with uses geolocation to orient the clock so local solar midday is always at the top of the clock (12 o'clock on a normal clock) and local solar midnight is always at the bottom of the clock (6 o'clock on a normal clock). http://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT http://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT