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.Beat Swatch Internet Time

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Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#61

Post by madcaptenor »

zokier wrote: post #56
bmacho wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

I think what likely happens here is that everyone just starts calling 10^(-5) days (= 0.864 current seconds) a "second". (And then there's confusion over which second people mean, analogous to what happens now with tons.)

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#62

Post by xnorswap »

jampekka wrote: post #60
xnorswap wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're going through the hassle of dropping DST, why not settle on BST as the permanent timezone if that's what the preference is for hours of daylight?

Asking an entire culture to change from 09:00-17:30 to 08:00-16:30 seems awkward and doomed to failure in comparison to simply landing on BST instead.

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#63

Post by sph »

netsharc wrote: post #45
sph wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I still have to look up what is the time zone difference to Australia and do mental maths, which is the exact same effort as looking up whether @700 is day or night time over there.

Aren't we saying the same thing? On second thoughts, the extra information is probably less complicated, Steve can say "I'm available between @300 and @1000" (maybe he keeps odd hours), and this knowledge plus a glance at the current time can tell me whether I can call Steve. Steve could also just tell his availability in UTC, and the same lack of maths is needed. Although, we still need maths because most of us don'…

> Steve could also just tell his availability in UTC

Good luck convincing Aussies, Kiwis and Americans to share their times in UTC without having to ask or doing the conversion yourself.

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#64

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

toyg wrote: post #53
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.

Makes sense. Probably a literal translation, then.

Thanks!

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#65

Post by fainpul »

TapamN wrote: post #14
fainpul wrote: post #8

This 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.

"And because Sega is working with Swatch, we wanted to encourage the use of the BEAT system."

This was also marketing driven, it seems.

Kinda telling, that they had timezone troubles, even when using Beat :)

"The BEAT system that shows up on the game screen isn't just based on the Dreamcast settings -- it's sent over from the server. And because there are so many different servers in different time zones, it was a bit of a pain to get all of that unified."

https://web.archive.org/web/20021208112249/http://www.sega.c...

Re: .Beat Swatch Internet Time

#67

Post by anileated »

nickorlow wrote: post #55
anileated wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> just another thing to memorize

Not knowing what time it is for my Australian colleagues at all without checking my phone every single time is worse. Remembering N timezone offsets (remember DST and half-hour offsets, too) is worse. Doing UTC translation or adding "my time/your time" every time is worse.

If you talk mental overhead, current system is like 10x of that than global time.

We agreed to meet at "8pm their time" but unless I literally put it into my TZ-enabled calendar app every time the chance I mentally translate it to my TZ wrong is unacceptably high. With global time, meeting would be @123 and that's it. I can keep it in my head or write it down on paper, no confusion and full precision every time. I don't even need to know if it's day or night if it's a remote call with the other side of the Earth, maybe me or my colleague works late, who cares, but I know what time it is there at any moment.

> is not as high as people make it out to be.

It's not just timestamp translation and all the errors that come from that, it's all the rest of it, waste standardizing timezones and moving them around, having to convert time all the time, missed meetings, etc.

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