How does it handle leap seconds?
.Beat Swatch Internet Time
11–20 of 67 posts
Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time
#12This always felt like a marketing gimmick. I've never seen it actually used for anything, unlike UTC.
Most definitely marketing. It’s got the company name in it. I’m surprised other watch makers didn’t come up with their own time standards as gimmicks.
Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time
#13This always felt like a marketing gimmick. I've never seen it actually used for anything, unlike UTC.
Even UTC+-0 I have seen rarely. AoE seems more common, especially for deadlines
Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time
#14This always felt like a marketing gimmick. I've never seen it actually used for anything, unlike UTC.
The Sega Dreamcast online RPG "Phantasy Star Online" displayed the current time in beats.
Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time
#15This always felt like a marketing gimmick. I've never seen it actually used for anything, unlike UTC.
Even UTC+-0 I have seen rarely. AoE seems more common, especially for deadlines
> Even UTC+-0 I have seen rarely
Hover the timestamp here on HN and you'll see it at least once in your life time :) I'm guessing it's mostly developers, especially ones working internationally, who come across it every day. Others seem to prefer to convert between people's timezone, while we just send UTC+00:00 to each other.
Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time
#16Fun fact, PHP has built in support for Swatch Internet Time with it's "B" format token. https://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.format.php
What a blast from the past. I added that!
Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time
#17Since humans still prefer to work in daylight and sleep in darkness, even without timezones you still need to have extra information in addition to "what time is it" to figure out if Steve in Australia will be awake at @700 or asleep... Maybe when the nuclear winter makes it dark all the time, or forces us all to live underground, then we can abolish timezones.
[deleted]
Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time
#18This website:
> There are no confusing time zones ordaylight savings time shifts to worry about.
Also this website (and in the very next sentence - emphasis mine):
> There are exactly 1,000 .Beats in a day, making each .Beat precisely 1 minute and 26.4 seconds long.
Having a laugh.
I'm assuming this cannot be serious, otherwise get thee hence!
Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time
#19I don't think global time would be a problem like many people suggest. If you're in US and talk to somebody in Australia, you will quickly develop an intuition that time @X is night (or whatever it happens to be) over there, just like our other intuitions about how many things (weather, season, how long are sunsets, etc.) are different in different places.
Timezones are failing at all of their jobs. Getting time to correspond to sun position? It can be 7pm here and 7pm there but here it will be fully dark and there it will be still mid-evening. Knowing working hours of shops and government? Everything is all over the place. Everything is fluid and changes with seasons.
Plus, there is this unfair specialness that some countries are at UTC and others have offsets. With global time, everybody gets @0, just for different places it will be at a different sun position. (As long as we find a political way to pick something neutral, instead of saying "that's when the sun is highest in London".)
Finally, we don't have per-latitude calendar and things are working fine for us. It's February here and February in Argentina, and yet life doesn't stop even though it corresponds to winter here but to summer there.
Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time
#20This was a missed opportunity to call it netric time.
Wait is that available? Best clock would be UTC + decimal time anyway, netric time is a good name for that. Decimal time: you divide the day into powers of tens, a 'deci' is 2.4 hours, a 'centi' is 14.4 ~= 15 minutes, a 'mili' is 1.44 minutes ~= 86 seconds and so on. Great system with convenient lengths, and easy to add duration + date, and convert between different units.
See French Decimal Time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
Not to be confused with Metric Time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time
Timekeeping units of measurement: