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.Beat Swatch Internet Time

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Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#51

Post by xnorswap »

jmkd wrote: post #41
xnorswap wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that technically London uses GMT for 5 months and BST for 7 months. The GMT offset is zero, but it's important to note the difference especially when configuring servers to avoid nasty daylight savings surprises kicking in at at end of March. There has been talk of moving to a +1 offset all year round for lighter evenings in winter, albeit at the cost of some very dark morning, but given we couldn't…

I think you mean complaining about metrication 50 years later :-) The counterpoint is that without the metric system how could we make snarky comments on US-based woodworking videos?

I was specifically thinking of the "Metric Martyrs" who were jailed over refusing to display weights and measures in metric.

The law requiring metric didn't actually come into force until 2000, these cases were early 2000s. Note that the law to this day still allows for imperial measurements to also be displayed, but they wanted to display in solely imperial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Martyrs

The situation another 20 years later is rosier, even the boomers have spent most their adulthood with metric, and they're dying off now.

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#52

Post by anileated »

firecall wrote: post #31
anileated wrote: post #19

I 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 c…

Australian here! I constantly forget which way the half hour difference is between Adelaide and Melbourne / Sydney! Then I have regular contact with offices in London and LA. For some of the year it’s not too bad, and then our clocks switch the opposite way and it gets less convenient! Which way is which I can never remember. Queensland doesn’t bother changing their clocks at all. Writing software that deals with Tim…

You have some fun ones. On the other side of the spectrum is PRC, where at the same hour of day it can be complete darkness on one side and almost technically noon on the other. It's super arbitrary with little rhyme or reason.

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#53

Post by toyg »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #21

I’ve heard about it, from time to time. It’s interesting, but don’t see it going anywhere. From the official Swatch page: > The BMT Meridian was inaugurated on October 23rd, 1998, in the presence of Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the media laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That’s an oddly-phrased sentence. I wonder what “in the presence of” looks like.

It means it was at a Swatch marketing event that featured Negroponte in person, in the room as they started the system.

It's like saying the Amiga 1000 was launched in the presence of Debbie Harry and Andy Warhol.

Maybe because I'm European and there are direct translations in my native tongue, "in the presence of" sounds just fine if a bit official.

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#54

Post by RupertSalt »

alexpotato wrote: post #36

Having worked at firms based in New York, Chicago and London, every time there has been a debate about "Should we use local or UTC time?", I ALWAYS mention Swatch Internet Time. The fact that it's now on the front page of Hacker News makes me so happy.

When I worked for a nationwide company, that was chiefly WFH with several small satellite offices, and a few abroad as well, we had some timezone issues.

The main one, which became my pet peeve about event and meeting announcements, was that they always, always used Standard Time abbreviations, whether it was DST or not DST, they always specified standard time.

So if a meeting was at 3pm on June 13 in Delaware, it was announced as "3pm EST". If the meeting was at 9am on August 8 in California, it was announced "9am PST".

This drove me up the wall because, living in Arizona, there is a legitimate difference for us between "MDT" and "MST". Now if we anticipate this quirk, it is really not a problem, except for edge-cases.

But I complained and asked why they were doing it, and they said they'd always done it that way, and even implied that it was written into policy somehow, and I came to discover it was far more widespread than just our one company's internal comms, and my brain exploded with ASD dissonance.

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#55

Post by nickorlow »

anileated wrote: post #50
nickorlow wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's at least to make time management in systems much less error-prone and complex, among other things. I'm sure people deal w/ more complex issues, but 90% of it is covered by storing everything as UTC and doing the conversion on the frontend. > What does that imply? If you mean "it's going to be dark", not really (you need to have more context to assume it's going to be dark at 9pm, there are places where in summ…

Things you will have in context when traveling: "it's going to be cold", "it's likely to rain", "it's going to be government conference so there will be extra delays with transport", "it's going to be %holiday% so everything's going to be closed all week", etc. You're so used to it you don't even question that, and if you add to that "@x is when sunset usually happens"... somehow I think the world will not come crash…

I don't think the world would come crashing down, but what's the point if it's just another thing to memorize?

The total cost/effort of timestamp translation in systems is not as high as people make it out to be.

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#56

Post by zokier »

bmacho wrote: post #10
xattt wrote: post #7

This 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.

While deciday is workable hour replacement and milliday is decent minute replacement, the metric time would be missing decent seconds replacement. The next named prefix, microday, is 86ms which is very small for humans.

Of course it is not insurmountable problem, but for lot of other units milli- tends to represent the lower end of "human scale"; millimeters, milligrams, milliliters, milliwatts, etc are as small as most people will ever use in day-to-day life.

In some ways it would be more convenient if the base unit would be e.g. 1e-4 days (or some other power of 10) so day would be 10 kilos. Understandably it would be lot less elegant but more practical. Deci- would be .86 seconds which is kinda nice.

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#57

Post by DuperPower »

pndy wrote: post #42
fainpul wrote: post #8

This always felt like a marketing gimmick. I've never seen it actually used for anything, unlike UTC.

This comes from that short period where the Internet was meant to be the bonding agent for our global village bright happy future. And it was always portrayed as a solution for arranging meetings for you and your friends or business people on the other side of planet. I think the other idea from these times was abolishing phone numbers and using unified global email-like identifiers. And in a way we got this on socia…

it was an frutiger Aero thing also drum and bass

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#58

Post by jampekka »

xnorswap wrote: post #26
anileated wrote: post #19

I 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 c…

It's worth noting that technically London uses GMT for 5 months and BST for 7 months. The GMT offset is zero, but it's important to note the difference especially when configuring servers to avoid nasty daylight savings surprises kicking in at at end of March. There has been talk of moving to a +1 offset all year round for lighter evenings in winter, albeit at the cost of some very dark morning, but given we couldn't…

> There has been talk of moving to a +1 offset all year round for lighter evenings in winter, albeit at the cost of some very dark morning

Why not just offset the office and opening etc hours by +1?

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#59

Post by xnorswap »

jampekka wrote: post #58
xnorswap wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that technically London uses GMT for 5 months and BST for 7 months. The GMT offset is zero, but it's important to note the difference especially when configuring servers to avoid nasty daylight savings surprises kicking in at at end of March. There has been talk of moving to a +1 offset all year round for lighter evenings in winter, albeit at the cost of some very dark morning, but given we couldn't…

> There has been talk of moving to a +1 offset all year round for lighter evenings in winter, albeit at the cost of some very dark morning Why not just offset the office and opening etc hours by +1?

Because society and culture doesn't work like that.

You can't will a culture of closing up at 4pm during GMT and 5pm during BST. That's just even more confusing.

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#60

Post by jampekka »

xnorswap wrote: post #59
jampekka wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There has been talk of moving to a +1 offset all year round for lighter evenings in winter, albeit at the cost of some very dark morning Why not just offset the office and opening etc hours by +1?

Because society and culture doesn't work like that. You can't will a culture of closing up at 4pm during GMT and 5pm during BST. That's just even more confusing.

The talk was +1 offset in clocks all year around, in effect dropping DST and changing the timezone.

Also a lot of places and services have different hours during different seasons.

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