TIL about Swatch Internet Time, a decimal time system that has no time zones.
Swatch Internet Time - Wikipedia
I feel that this is what we should be using instead of the current illogical time system.
Our time syatem is not illogical and if you think it is you haven't thought about the consequences. The only bad thing about timezones is how far they swing away from their ideal position sometimes.
Sega used this in their pioneering MMO from ~1999, Phantasy Star Online. “Beat Time”. The idea was to help you coordinate meeting times with people regardless of time zone. The problem was we had to convert it to regular time to have any idea when 725 beats was or how long 150 beats from now was.
Eve Online have something similar too. The Eve time is just Reykjavik time, which makes conversion easier. I used to have a clock on my phone screen to show Reykjavik time to remind me of the event time with my space friends.
I constantly got the day wrong on ops. Saturday 0200... Uhh shit. Friday night?
That's simple. It's at 12:80 PM. Wait... no... yeah. Whatever, let's just run Famitsu Attack or Endless Nightmare 4 again.
But we're having lunch at 12:90.
Alcoholics hate this (its not 5:00 somewhere)
But for that one magical moment, it's @5.00 everywhere
It's stupid to remove timezone.
Why?
No it's not. Time zones are a source of incredible confusion for programmers and are the cause of countless computer bugs that affect billions of people.
If we all used UTC time, you'd get used to it. You'd simply get up at xx:00 and have lunch at yy:00, etc. The numbers we use now (like 6 or 12) are completely arbitrary. You would get used to your day cycle using different numbers and the next generation would think literally nothing of it.
It would be a mess talking to anyone about time where you do not live.
Say that you wake up at 06:00, everyone understands. Remove all time zones and now you wake up at 14:53. Anyone not native to your location would have no clue where in the sky the sun is relative to you and what that actually means for your day.
Would 14:53 for you post removal be compared to 06:00 or 09:00 pre removal? What if oyu are porned post removal and do not have the frame of reference for the old system. How would you go about it then?
I can see the merit in keeping time zones.
I get your logic but no amount of bugs will ever be enough to justify making the entire world change their idea of time.
So because programmers are lazy and stupid we should change how people live?
Why?
Their value is so that we all can imagine what the sky looks like when we say "seven am".
But why is that important?
Because it's what make the time have a meaning. The time when you eat, when you go to sleep or wake up, when you go to work,...
In fact, you're looking at it the wrong way. The time is localised because that's how it make sense for people. And that's how it make sense for physics too. Relativity means each place has its own time.
The question should be why do you want to change this?
What's the point?
We have UTC/GMT my dudes. Just count times by that and boom, no time zones. You can even remove a colon, meaning you just end up with 4 numbers, like 1700 for 17:00 UTC (5pm Greenwich time)
I tried to have a discussion about this on reddit about how everyone should just use utc and he called me a lunatic because his working day would start at 3am instead of 8am, completely misunderstanding that utc 3am would be a different time to his current 3am and he just could not get his little head around it.
I've said this all my life and I can't wait for the day we all shift to a single tike zone. While we're on the topic, we also need to change a few more things - single global currency, zero customs duties, no passports, and the metric system with a single kind of 240v electrical socket/plug (my own preference being the UK plugs).
You should have been there for it's christening.
We're getting rid of minutes/hours/seconds
YAY!
We're getting rid of daylight savings time
YAY!!!!!
We're getting rid of timezones
Yu..wait how the HELL is that supposed to work?
And we sat there, waiting for the other shoe to drop, crickets.
So how do you tell someone when your day starts? How do you coordinate multi content projects? What's the minimum time segment? Just under 90 seconds. So no more microwaving for 30 seconds, or do we start with fractional beats?
It was just early internet clickbait.
The questions you raise all seem to have trivial answers. You can just... tell people those things? How is telling someone when your day starts any worse than telling them your time zone?
Also, coordinating projects across multiple continents becomes easier, since without timezones everyone just naturally communicates the correct relative times to each other. None of this "my time" or "your time" nonsense.
A timezone is a constant (barring DST shenanigans) offset, which works for all the hours of the day. I can look at my watch here in Germany and I know that it's 8:15 in New York right now. So I know that it's still early in the day for my buddy Jeff.
In the same-time everywhere logic, I would need to remember specific times, like "people in New York usually start working at 15:00 and stop at 24:00", which is just plain inefficient.
Actually it's not that difficult, as you can see on the wiki page time is shown in
@392.51
So yeah there are fractions.
Also I don't really see the problem without timezones, so if it's @451 maybe that is night for you and morning for me.
It would actually make traveling easier, because you will immediately see what time it is for your family at home.
Instead of the hours at a place being the same (like 19:20 is in the evening for everyone), now we keep the time the same but we have different experiences at certain beats.
It would actually make traveling easier, because you will immediately see what time it is for your family at home.
So what? Time doesn't mean anything anymore. What time is dinner? What time do they get up? What time do they go to bed? When can you call?
What time does someone in Moscow go do bed? How about LA?
You're no longer lumping them in to timezones. Someone on one side of the us is exactly 5 hours off the other side now. Places work in chunks. Every last place just opens and closes at different times.
It would just be chaos.
Right know, if i vaguely know what quarter of the US you live in, I can tell what time you get up, exactly when your banks open, when you're eating dinner, when you should be done work. You're not going to say that's just trash right?
Honestly, all we need to do is eliminate time zones. It wouldn’t solve all the problems with time systems, particularly for programmers, but it would go a long way to solving the practical problems humans face, as well as eliminating one of the biggest machine problems.
Just everyone switch to UTC. As I write this it is 10:51 UTC. Anyone in the world can convert that to their local purpose. In eastern Australia, 10:51 is mid evening. In the UK it’s late morning. In western United States it’s late at night. If we always used UTC, people would just be used to this pretty quick.
It'll never happen because approximately 0 people think about it outside of programmers.
Anyone who works with people in different time zones. Which is a lot more of us as we go remote.
The Navy and Air-Force use of Zulu time would disagree with this statement.
approximately 0 people think about it outside of programmers
It comes up all the time. Any time people are scheduling something between different time zones and run into trouble figuring out "is that your time or my time?" That's an issue that would be resolved by not having time zones.
It would take about 30 years
Maybe programmers should learn to do their job correctly instead of asking the whole planet to fix their simple problem for themselves.
The biggest machine problem ? That must be a joke!
It really isn’t that simple.
If all your system cares about is recording incoming events at a discrete time, then sure: UTC for persistence and localization for display solves all your problems.
But if you have any concept of user-defined time ranges or periodic scheduling, you get in the weeds real quick.
There is a difference between saying “this time tomorrow” vs. “24 hours from now”, because of DST, leap years, and leap seconds.
Time zones (and who observes them) change over time. As does DST.
If you allow monthly scheduling, you have to account for some days not being valid for some months and that this changes on a leap year.
If you allow daily scheduling, you need to be aware that some hours of the day may not exist on certain days or may exist twice.
If you poll a client device and do any datetime comparisons, you need to decide whether you care about elapsed time or calendar time.
I worked on some code that was deployed to aircraft carriers in the Pacific. “This event already happened tomorrow” is completely possible when you cross the international date line.
Add to all of this the fact that there are different calendars across the world, even if the change is as small as a different “first day of the week”.
I feel like trying to switch to this would cause more problems than it would solve. If you switch to this time system, what do you do about all the other units of measure that include a time component? Either everything has to change, or you have to start using two different time systems.
Something something xkcd new standard
What sort of cursed units do you use that have dates in them
No daylight savings time. Sold.
You also listen to 99% invisible?
What is that?
It's a podcast. One of the stories in this episode talks about Swatch Internet Time, how the French tried to make the day be 10h, etc: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mini-stories-volume-17/
Wow, this brought back memories and I feel old.
I don't know, way back in the internet 1.0 days.... my child brain hung out with some other kids of similar age on chat channels. Time zones fucking boggled my mind at the time, and I tried to sell some other people on this shit so we could always meet up at the same time to chat.
TL;DR - I "bought into" the marketting as a kid... I always did like watches, tried to convince some internet buddies to use the shit. Later in life, understood how timezones worked.
I remember having the wrist watch that had this under the time. Just the one shown on the wikipedia page, IIRC.
I've got a .Beats watchface for my garmin watch. It's unusable. I love it.
I pretty much just have to switch AM to PM and I'm pretty much there
We also need to switch to 13 months at 28 days each. Makes things so much easier.
Relevant https://m.xkcd.com/320/
I had a roommate for a semester in college who essentially lived on a 40 hour schedule. He'd stay awake for 24 hours straight, then sleep for 16 hours. Not sure if he managed to pass any of his classes that year.
There's pros and cons., though personally I used this calendar for my fiction writing.
I'd like to find a way to sync the lunar cycle and solar cycles since the earth's, moon's, and revolutions around the sun are soooo close (5 days off) plus it'd make sense to keep in theme with the Babylonian-esque base-60 system (where 60 is readily divided and a factor of 360 days, 12 months, 30 days, etc).
Which is pretty much what the Ancient Egyptians did.
*edit: pretty much have 5 "fake days" and add a sixth "fake" day to account for the gradual desync.
New year's week sounds good haha
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I'd personally prefer 12 months with 30 days each, a 6-day week (makes for even rotations in shifts, 4 on 2 off), and an inter-calary week of 5 to 6 days at the new year.
If we're going for broke on this I'd also want to convert to the dozenal system over decimal, as 12 is more easily divisible by smaller numbers which means easier division for numbers we use more often (like 3 or 4), which means that ¼ would be 0.3 and ⅓ would be 0.4.
12? Ew. As someone who relies on my fingers to count I repudiate such discriminatory system!
Wow. A dozenal system sounds useful! We should use it for measuring distances!
Fuck it. Lets get real and just go all the way back to Sumeria. Sexagesimal numbering system here we come.
I like that with 13 each month starts on a Monday and ends on a Sunday. Makes that calculation super easy.
I would say that at the very least we could adjust February by taking a day from July and August and the extra day every four years could be added inbetween them as a "monthless" day in the middle of the summer.
A dozenal system is more difficult in multiplication. Decimal: 107 =10000000, 108=100000000, 109=1000000000, etc. Dozenal: 127= 35831808, 128=429981696, 129=5159780352.
Gets very messy very quick.
Math checks out, but who do we name the other month after? Another Roman emperor?
We can just name it after some guy named John. We can call it Johnuary
Smarch. Just gotta watch out for that lousy Smarch weather.
How about Sextuary after August and before September? It counts up from there until December anyway.
Honestly just numbering them would be easier haha
Yes please! I love that system so much I made it the default in my fantasy novels.
An alternative is 10 months where each are 36 days for even numbered months and 37 days for odd number months
A benefit for 28 days is all months are 4 weeks.