Ask Slashdot: Is it Time To Call Time on Time Zones? (ft.com) 408
An anonymous reader shares a report [may be paywalled]: Anyone who has struggled to schedule a conference call across multiple time zones should pity the poor residents of Indiana. For decades, the Midwestern US state has been in flux over whether to observe Central or Eastern time. Some counties even switched time zones twice in as many years during the mid-2000s. This situation must be particularly baffling to the people of India and China, whose countries span thousands of miles yet obey a single time zone -- whatever the cost to their citizens' Circadian rhythms. Today's time zones are a 19th-century invention, driven by railway engineers' desire to harmonise schedules across states and countries. Now that we travel at internet speed, the system is breaking down.
[...] One of the first modern-day attempts to disrupt time zones came, counter-intuitively, from a watchmaker. In 1998, as dotcom hype was crescendoing, Swatch tried to divide the day into 1,000 ".beats," each lasting one minute and 26.4 seconds. "Internet Time exists so that we do not have to think about time zones," Swatch declared. Swatch no longer produces .beats watches and the idea has been largely forgotten. In 2011, economist Steve Hanke and physicist Richard Conn Henry suggested a slightly less radical version of the same idea. Instead of replacing the current 24-hour system of timekeeping altogether, they argued for replacing the "cacophony of time zones" globally with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), sometimes also known as Greenwich Mean Time. "The readings on the clocks . . . would be the same for all," they wrote, while office hours or shop opening times would be adapted locally. This seems even more feasible today, in a world when the nine to five has been replaced by gig-economy jobs and homeworking parents spend their evenings with laptops on their knees.
But such a change to global UTC would create new headaches of co-ordination. We would no longer be able to ask, "What time is it there?" to understand when it might be appropriate to call someone. Assuming our calendars tracked UTC in the same way they do local time today, days of the week would become a confusing concept for many parts of the world. When the clock passes what we now call midnight, Monday would tick into Tuesday at lunchtime in some places and breakfast in others. No amount of fiddling with the numbers on the clock can change the fact most people will want to work when it's light and sleep when it's dark. Your thoughts?
[...] One of the first modern-day attempts to disrupt time zones came, counter-intuitively, from a watchmaker. In 1998, as dotcom hype was crescendoing, Swatch tried to divide the day into 1,000 ".beats," each lasting one minute and 26.4 seconds. "Internet Time exists so that we do not have to think about time zones," Swatch declared. Swatch no longer produces .beats watches and the idea has been largely forgotten. In 2011, economist Steve Hanke and physicist Richard Conn Henry suggested a slightly less radical version of the same idea. Instead of replacing the current 24-hour system of timekeeping altogether, they argued for replacing the "cacophony of time zones" globally with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), sometimes also known as Greenwich Mean Time. "The readings on the clocks . . . would be the same for all," they wrote, while office hours or shop opening times would be adapted locally. This seems even more feasible today, in a world when the nine to five has been replaced by gig-economy jobs and homeworking parents spend their evenings with laptops on their knees.
But such a change to global UTC would create new headaches of co-ordination. We would no longer be able to ask, "What time is it there?" to understand when it might be appropriate to call someone. Assuming our calendars tracked UTC in the same way they do local time today, days of the week would become a confusing concept for many parts of the world. When the clock passes what we now call midnight, Monday would tick into Tuesday at lunchtime in some places and breakfast in others. No amount of fiddling with the numbers on the clock can change the fact most people will want to work when it's light and sleep when it's dark. Your thoughts?
Now (Score:5, Funny)
The only timezone that matters is your personal "Now". Everything else (from that point of view) is in the past.
And my watch clearly says, "Time for another beer."
Re:Now (Score:4, Informative)
You are correct [youtube.com]. Everything that happens now is happening now.
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And my watch clearly says, "Time for another beer."
Mine stopped at 9:32am, so snap!
Re:Now (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you're writing software or firmware. Timezones of customers then start mattering. Plus you often need to know when daylight savings time starts and ends for your customers. Not for simplistic web apps of course.
Problem one, is that most people don't understand timezones or DST very well, but most people think they are expects since they clearly have been able to use clocks since they were out of diapers. Problem two, is that most software developers are like people and they naively think they understand time and will refuse to do the necessary research or consult an expert for something to basic. Or they rely upon a library and incorrectly assume they're calling it correctly, or incorrectly assume the library is implemented correctly.
Problem three, and here's a biggy - many software developers assume you only need to deal with "local time". Ha, naive fools! I've worked on a system where the customer straddled a time zone boundary; half their machines were in one zone, the other half in a different zone, and the devs did not allow for local time in the UI even though the underlying OS supported this.
Yes - personalization/humanity, and laziness (Score:4, Insightful)
We're not a computer or travel network. When a human being asks, "What time is it?", he's asking where the sun, moon and stars are in the sky. An answer that sounds like, "It's 7AM in the morning , is going to be more a meaningful answer than, "It's 1200 ZULU".
And people are lazy by default. If you're having to calculate a mental time zone from a single timestamp, then you're just doing the, "what time OF DAY?," mental work that official time zones have worked out for you already.
(Setting a single timestamp for everyone to use also has a depersonalizing effect and takes away a little humanity - and sanity - away from us, but that's harder to quantify in a short post...)
Re:Now (Score:4, Interesting)
The only timezone that matters is your personal "Now".
So measure everything in SFN. Seconds From Now.
Want to have a meeting 3600 SFN?
Nah, I'll be busy, how about 7200 SFN?
OK
Re:Now (Score:5, Funny)
Mine says, "One bourbon. One scotch, and one beer."
So there you are.
You owe a lot of back rent for your room and need to pay up.
Time Zones are OK. Daylight Saving Time is EVIL! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Time Zones are OK. Daylight Saving Time is EVIL (Score:5, Interesting)
This. Daylight savings kills. https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
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You can make the same argument for a LOT of things. Like the current pandemic. That doesn't mean we should just let things go to hell.
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Somewhere on my low-priority bug list at work is fixing a client-server interaction bug which trips a sanity check when the client and server don't have the same data for a given timezone. This caused us problems for a while a year or two ago when Chile made a late change to its summer time.
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The libraries work and are tested.
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why would you even THINK of re-doing that?
Someone has to, for each new language, and sometimes for new environments, as libraries are often not suitable for realtime or kernel-mode use.
Re:Time Zones are OK. Daylight Saving Time is EVIL (Score:5, Informative)
If you're dealing with wall-time in the kernel, you're doing it very wrong.
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I agree Date and Time functions require a lot of extra coding. However there is so many things in life, that have been complicated in order for the computer to more easily calculate it. Having to deal with forms in Military Time, Zip Codes, Phone Numbers... For the most part we still work off of local time. Changing it just because it is hard to code, just tells me that Programming Languages need better default Date/Time options.
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Re:Time Zones are OK. Daylight Saving Time is EVIL (Score:4, Insightful)
DST Sucks.
I want the sun at zenith at noon. You know, like it's defined.
Quit trying to break shit because ignorance.
Re:Time Zones are OK. Daylight Saving Time is EVIL (Score:5, Informative)
Okay so you're advocating a return to having each town having its own time zone then. That's the way it was everywhere throughout history before railways required accurate time keeping and the advent of nearly-instantaneous long-distance communication. Towns would set their own clocks, and everyone would sync up to the master clock tower in town.
If you insist on noon being at the zenith then you'll have to accept that some days are up to 15 minutes shorter than 24 hours and some days will be longer than 24 hours. Also it will require many many time zones. Because the way time zones are now, only along the central meridian will you find the sun at its zenith at noon, and only on the solstices and equinoxes.
I find sundials fascinating and creating one leads down quite the rabbit hole!
Causes problems of all kinds (Score:3)
DST (what the Europeans call 'summer time') is great.
I'd be in favor of keeping the clocks on Standard Time -- i.e., winter time -- but yes, changing the clocks is the work of the devil and is to be avoided.
A subtle problem when changing clocks is the differences in time zone initialisms [wikipedia.org] between the US and UK systems. In the US, time zones in the winter are "standard" time zones (Eastern Standard Time, Central Standard Time, Mountain Standard Time, Pacific Standard Time) and so carry initialisms with an "S" as the middle letter (EST, CST, MST, PST). In the
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DST is the same as acknowledging that your local time zone is wrong, or that you prefer time to be arbitrary ("I want high noon to be when the sun starts going down because I'm more awake then!"). Now maybe it's because you're in a bad location within the time zone boundaries. Even with perfectly straight time zone boundaries someone is going to be 29 minutes too far ahead and someone else will be 29 minutes too far behind, and one of them will be bitching about it.
If you want DST, then just wake up an ho
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There has been a cold war that has lasted for many millenium between morning people and non-morning people (aka, normals). Anyone not fully productive at work at 7am is considered a lazy bum and passive aggression towards that person is officially allowed by management. You will be told that you have to be in a 6:30am meeting because "it's the only slot available", but when you suggest 5pm the morning people will be aghast and insulted that you suggest they work late just so that you can sleep in.
I'm at t
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No, Standard Time is evil. DST gives us light in the evening when everyone is awake. Standard Time gives sunlight to early morning joggers and nobody else.
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That logic makes no sense. "Hey, pi being a nasty number makes calculations hard. So let's define it at 3.14. This will make results wrong, so let's extend all formulas to correct for that.".
Noon is defined as "when the sun is in zenith". If you want the first half of your wake period to be spent at work, go to work at 4am not at 9.
Re:Time Zones are OK. Daylight Saving Time is EVIL (Score:5, Insightful)
NO, DST does not give you more light in the evening. It tricks you into getting up an hour earlier and lies to you about when evening starts.
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Go to work at 6am instead of 7am. Get out and have plenty of light left. It's not hard. How to do this? Simply start "banker's hours" at 8am instead of 9am and you get what you want without having to play silly mind games on when your evening starts.
It's not a problem (Score:4)
I schedule meetings across time zones all of the time. I've worked overseas but with keeping with US time for things. I've not generally had this problem and solved the overseas problem by having two clocks: my watch set locally and my computer set to US time.
Re:It's not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not a problem (Score:5, Informative)
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The small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri disagree with you.
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Re:It's not a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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People keep saying that, but I have yet to hear a single example of a problem it would cause. it would make it drastically easier to understand posted business hours for all businesses worldwide. it would make it much easier to coordinate anything with anyone in a different physical location. It would make it easier to understand airline schedules and long distance bus/train schedules. It would have no effect at all on sleep schedules, work schedules, school schedules, etc. What problem exactly would it cau
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What we want to know is "is it appropriate to call at this hour" which is a completely different question, and no harder to answer if we all use UTC than it is now
Uh.....this problem is a lot harder if we all use UTC. Another question is, "What time is breakfast?"
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How is it any harder? Explain it to me, because everyone is asserting that, but have yet to provide any indication of why it would be harder.
As for "what time is breakfast" I already can't answer that for even my own city. Some people eat at 0400, some eat at 1100 You assumption that everyone in the world is exactly like you is where this all breaks down.
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Explain it to me, because everyone is asserting that, but have yet to provide any indication of why it would be harder.
Because If I tell you it's 12:30 in the afternoon in a timezone, you automatically know whether it's appropriate to call or not. You have an idea of whether they are at lunch or not. In fact, even the word afternoon tells you quite a bit. I think you need to spend more time attacking your own ideas, instead of trying to find ways to support them, and your ideas will be clearer.
As for "what time is breakfast" I already can't answer that for even my own city. Some people eat at 0400, some eat at 1100
And yet you've already narrowed the range quite a bit. You know it's not at 1300. The communal knowledge we have around hours of the
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Ok, does your local grocery store open at 7am? or 9? do they close at 1900? 2300?
LOL you know roughly what time it is that my local grocery store opens and closes, and yet you still claim you can't think of any way time zones are useful. That's a really big blindspot you have there mate, better work on it. Start attacking your own ideas, it's the scientific way.
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Business hours are generally (in a given timezone) 9am - 5pm. Some go outside this, and have other supported hours. The main use of this is for companies that are local to them and need to interact with them.. If you know the distance is great, you also know you need to factor in a time offset. This is elementary, and I've not found anyone who can't do it. Your way does not make things easier due to loss of valuable offset data. Why are you interested that a local grocery store at the other side of the
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This is exactly the same as "is it appropriate to call at this hour", but with a different question.
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Ahh.. From your posts, I think what we've established is that you don't know anything unless you look it up. When you look it up, you want it nicely packaged so you don't need to have any context in it, yet want it to work everywhere with no effort to you (and I'd hazard a guess you'd want your area to stay on current time, so you didn't need to absorb the cost of rewriting every contract everywhere with immediate effect and have that absorbed on your taxes etc.).
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Another way to reply to your question, in this work-from-home era, is "whenever the fuck I get up". And if it's too late, it becomes "screw breakfast, I'm late for work".
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That still messes up the days of the week.
If we are all on UTC, then in the US Eastern Time Zone I arrive at work at 4am. After my 8 hour day, I commute home from work on Monday. I eat dinner and it switches to Tuesday at 7pm.
If I lived in China, I arrive work at 5pm on Monday. An hour before I get off, it's Tuesday and I leave work at 1am Tuesday.
No, that's not complicated at all. /s
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I schedule meetings across time zones all of the time. I've worked overseas but with keeping with US time for things. I've not generally had this problem and solved the overseas problem by having two clocks: my watch set locally and my computer set to US time.
Which US time are you referring to though? My own company is in two time zones, and my own state also has two.
It's confusing as hell for people.
Re:It's not a problem (Score:5, Informative)
Several, actually. Florida is one, and it was an issue during the 2000 Presidential Election when some moron newscasters started calling the election after polls closed in "Florida". Except the didn't close in the Panhandle and they were still voting because they're on Central Time.
A list of the split States: https://www.thoughtco.com/states-split-into-two-time-zones-4072169 [thoughtco.com]
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UNIX time (Score:3)
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Another example is a heart monitor like an Oura ring, that might want to know if a user wakes up in the morning.
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That's what we do, except instead of UNIX timestamps we use International Atomic Time (TAI). Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is computed from TAI by adding leap seconds to adapt it to Earth's rotation. Standard time is computed from that depending on your geographical location and time of year. If you want to go further you could compute your personal local time, based on your precise location.
My thoughts (Score:2)
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So you want to abolish time zones (Score:5, Insightful)
So you want to abolish time zones." [qntm.org]
tl;dr: You still need to know how far ahead/behind someone is relative to you, words and phrases like "today" and "this morning" etc. become a lot more ambiguous, civil and religious code become a lot more complex, and so on.
Time zones are not going anywhere.
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Re:So you want to abolish time zones (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides we will need specialized sundials for every location.
The thing is we as humans function on a solar day. We will normally want to wake up and spend a good portion of the day while there is light outside. And we sleep better at night.
Sure we have people doing Night shifts and such, however a 24 hour organization usually has the following shifts.
Work 09:00-17:00 - Sleep 23:00 - 07:00 - Sleeps thru 1 hour average of daylight
Work 17:00-01:00 - Sleep 02:00 - 10:00 - Sleeps thru 4 hours average of daylight
Work 01:00-09:00 - Sleep 16:00 - 00:00 - Sleeps thru 2 hours average of daylight
We will normally set our sleep scheduled around trying to maximize night time sleep, and minimize daytime sleeping. The Problem with Timezone planning in the global economy isn't necessarily what time is it in California vs New York vs Shanghai but at what time is will the people we want to communicate be awake for us to communicate with them. For that it means my NY AM meetings are usually off the books. and Everything will need to be in PM so the colleagues in California will be available. For Shanghai, we both will probably have to compromise on an inconvenient time. say 6:30AM EST and 6:30PM CST
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> I don't know anyone who likes DST
--Well, you do now. I'd prefer DST all year round.
Visual explainer (Score:2)
TFS is asking the right questions -- how to coordinate, how to ask other people when they are sleeping.
And I deal with people in other countries that typically work different hours to be more accommodating to people in New York time zone.
I have seen watches that deal with this using a round graphic that shows you all the cities and times there. But we use screens more than watches.
I'd like to see a visual paradigm that somehow shows a long horizontal or vertical strip with major cities, where it is before-n
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I have seen watches that deal with this using a round graphic that shows you all the cities and times there. But we use screens more than watches.
We need some sort of bit-mapped graphical screen which can emulate a round dial or other representation as needed. We'll put our best technical people on it right away.
It's always fall on the internet now (Score:5, Informative)
From the 'Awesome Falsehood' list -- https://github.com/kdeldycke/a... [github.com]
* You Advocate a Calendar Reform - Your idea will not work. This article tells you why -- https://qntm.org/calendar [qntm.org]
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A suggestion still as stupid as it always was. (Score:5, Insightful)
And if it still is a problem, just bookmark timeaddate.com and leave the rest of us alone.
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The viewpoint and needs of everyday life and work life are different. While a global time may help conglomerates and their management-level workers, it would confuse the non-work life of regular citizens, at least for a few years. Your average voter won't go for it. They'll argue the conglomerates can freely use their own alternative time system if they want, similar to the military's 24-hour system.
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So how does 99% of the population do business globally?
How complicated can time zones be? (Score:2)
There will always be time zones (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we still would need time zones, even if all the clocks read UTC. So many things have hours that rely on times.
For example, if the post office has hours of 9-5 normally, if you remove time zones, it's not going to be open 9-5 UTC, it'll just have different hours depending on where it is in the world. Where does it switch to different hours? Probably around where the timezone lines are defined.
Same thing for other times. People usually have lunch around noon, so that means everywhere you go, you'll have to learn when lunch time is.
Calling other time zones would be even more difficult. If I want to call someone in India from the US, I can check the time in their timezone and if it's something like 3AM, that's not a good time to setup a call, but if I don't have timezones, I know that 16:00 UTC works for me, but is that a good time for people in India?
Time zones are not the problem (Score:3)
As TFS says at the end: time zones do have a useful purpose. Working hours are during daylight, more or less from 08:00 to 18:00. Sleeping hours are at night, more or less from 22:00 until 06:00. Excluding shift-work, if you know someone's time zone, you know the structure of their day.
If you have a genuine need to coordinate with UTC, you can. Many technical projects do this, and the people who work on them know the offset between UTC and their local time-zone.
So, what was the problem, again?
History repeating itself (Score:2)
Hasn't there been enough (virtual) ink spilled about that subject that it needs to be asked again? Don't the authors know how to use Google/Bing/Yahoo/... to look up other people thoughts? And gee, even without any search, it's not that hard to see that both UTC and local time have their use.
Doesn't fix the listed issue (Score:2)
Anyone who has struggled to schedule a conference call across multiple time zones
But...
while office hours or shop opening times would be adapted locally.
You still need to figure out when people are awake/in the office based on their location. Even if it is '5:00' everywhere, some places may already be closed at '5:00' locally, even if you are still open at '5:00'.
our current time zones reduced the old count (Score:5, Interesting)
Before the railroad inductry spawned the current system of time zones there already were thousands of time zones as each town or city coordinated it time with the sun. If the sun was overhead, it was noon and the rest of the day proceeded from there. That's why the railroad industry wanted to synchronize all the towns into a coherent system and keep the times consistent across the continent.
Reducing the official time zone count to one for a Coordinated Universal Time and throwing everyone else to their own devices for handling local scheduling will only foster that old system of having every town and city having its own time. And, how many people in these local time zones will be able to keep track of the CUT. You'll say, not a problem, the cell phones will take care of it but not everyone has a cell phone or that smart a watch. Sorry, time zones are fine with me and I've had to work and make calls across them in my TIME.
Dumbest non-problem. (Score:3)
If you need to coordinate multiple time zones then why would you not use UTC which is literally a globally recognized standard?
How is this even a problem for even mildly competent people?
Welcome back, old friend (Score:2)
The idea beloved of Unix sysadmins... and ignored (or at best thought of as ludicrously silly) by pretty much everyone else. Seems like it’s been a couple years since Slashdot’s last “should we all be on UTC?” posts - nice to see it hasn’t been completely forgotten.
No. (Score:2)
3 zones in US, not daylight savings (Score:4, Interesting)
Here is a common sense proposal.
http://standardtime.com/propos... [standardtime.com]
Daylight sayings time, where we arbitrarily move the time by an hour for no benefit, is long obsolete.
---
Another related topic: What timezone is your sleep schedule in?
In a proper time zone, Midnight is approximately the midpoint between sunset and sunrise.
So find the midpoint between your sleep start and sleep end time, and find the timezone where that is midnight.
Rarely is this your timezone, unless you sleep from 8pm to 4am.
Though perhaps naturally we optimize for temperature, not light.
If that was the case, then mid-day is 2pm and mid-night is 2am.
Then natural sleep wouild be 10pm to 6am.
China's TZ problem is a China problem (Score:5, Interesting)
The China time zone issue is because the world revolves around Beijing. That is not a valid basis for scrapping time zones around the world.
India has the same issue.
The question should be "why do those two countries refuse to implement time zones?"
Just new more confusing problems (Score:2)
If I try to schedule a meeting across time zones now, as long as the users have set their time zones properly, If I schedule a meeting for 1pm my time, it automatically converts the time for the recipient.
But if I try to call someone, somewhere else in the world, using UTC, I don't know if they will be home or in the office, without knowing their personal work schedule. Imagine having to keep track of the work schedules of all your contacts, so you can contact them.
This is a change (Score:4, Interesting)
This is refreshing .... a Slashdot summary that explains why the answer to the title question must be "no" right at the outset. Kind of makes you wonder why they bothered in the first place.
Change the technology, not the people using it. (Score:4, Insightful)
It boggles the mind that the proposed solution is to ask humans to change when this is can be addressed with appropriate user interfaces. Build user interfaces that make plain the local times involved when scheduling meetings and so forth. Technology should make it brain-dead simple to see the local times of the participants I am scheduling for (for example).
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Happily, I rarely have to schedule meetings. But when I do, the biggest problem isn’t time zones - it’s knowing when people are actually available versus busy with some other scheduled task. And the main reason that’s a issue is that a large percentage of people either don’t keep their personal calendar up to date or else don’t make free/busy information viewable to others.
So you end up using one of those silly services like when2meet, relying on everyone to indicate when they
Well this is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, time zones require conversion when one is dealing with more than one; but (while there are some surprisingly fiddly edge cases) that's a reasonably solved problem and you can always use your preferred standard time(UTC, TAI, GPS time, etc.) for internal representation and time-zoned offsets for display to users; but they mean that everyone has a reasonably good idea of what a given time means for everyone else: a meeting at 3am is kind of a dick move; one at 11am not so much; and so on.
If we go on "everybody go with glorious UTC!" we don't have to deal with time zone offsets anymore; but it's still the case that if you schedule something at 7am UTC people in the former EST zone are going to resent the hideous hour of the morning you chose.
Unless you can actually get everyone on the same schedule(which seems unlikely given that we've got circadian rhythms and light sensitivity and stuff to deal with) time zones at least allow you to readily estimate the effective time of day for anyone you are dealing with; which lack of time zones requires you to either ignore that, with predictably sub-optimal results, or resort to an ad-hoc reinvention of time zones to estimate what times are suitable or unsuitable.
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Need to fix Indiana (Score:2)
It sounds like Indiana needs to be fixed---not Time Zones.
On a similar note, why does the world still call non-daylight saving time (or "summer time") "Standard Time"? Most of the world currently spends more of the calendar year in daylight saving time than standard time, so is it really standard anymore. Perhaps this should be renamed.
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It sounds like Indiana needs to be fixed---not Time Zones.
Oh, man, it sure does need fixing. What with the gawd-awful humidity in the summer, the bugs, the pollution... and don’t get me started on the people!
Really? (Score:2)
I have a hard time believing that it's any easier to remember what the normal business hours are in a target country as opposed to by how many hours you have to offset your calculations. You'll be looking up one thing or another either way.
I'm not saying I'm opposed to the idea per se, I'm just not sure how much better off we'd be once this ingenious plan actully made enemy contact.
DST and State Lines (Score:2)
Also, put the time zones along state/country lines. I really don't see a reason for FL having two different ones.
You want one time zone (Score:2)
Simple solution (Score:2)
Schedule functions that cross time zones in UTC. Leave the rest alone. If people can't handle that, they sure can't handle 3 offices in three time zones that all have different times posted as start of business and close of business.
Problem solved. (Score:2)
I keep a Solaris box up with a zone running for each Time Zone ...
Lol (Score:2)
So much angst about adding and subtracting numbers less than 12.
That is patently dumb. (Score:2)
whatever the cost to their citizens' Circadian rhythms.
Time zones have nothing to do with circadian rhythms. Time zones are merely a decision as to what the clock should read at sunrise and sunset.
If the speedometer of your car has numbers starting from 100-200 instead of 0-100, this does not double the speed of your car. The number reading on the clock at sunrise has no implication on the rising of the sun, and therefore no implication on your circadian rhythm.
I have no idea why people keep talking about circadian rhythms when it comes to time zones. Time zone
Why is it a struggle to schedule meetings? (Score:5, Informative)
I live in Europe, my boss in Australia, half my team in the USA, and a few scattered in India and Azerbaijan. The process for scheduling a meeting with them is no different than scheduling a meeting with anyone in my office: Hit the meeting button, and find a time that suits everyone.
We have computer's people, let them take care of working hours.
maybe we could all agree? (Score:3)
Maybe we could instead all agree that "I can't figure something out" isn't by itself logical justification for eliminating a thing.
A single time won't communicate meaningful info (Score:4, Insightful)
When a human being is asking, "What time is it?", it's to determine where where the sun, moon or stars are in the sky where they are - NOT what time UTC it is for a worldwide-connected network (computers, travel, etc.). "It's around 7AM in the morning here," will always mean more to a person than, "it's 1330 ZULU".
If you're having to calculate where you are in the day based on where you are on the planet, then you're going right back to mental time zoning anyways. Since people are lazy, they'd rather have the time zones figured out by someone else.
(From an extreme point of view, a single timestamp also kills a tiny sliver of individuality in the human experience - depersonalizing you a little.)
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And they all do it poorly.
I'm on a trip on the west coast. I add an appointment for next week when I'll be on the east coast. What time do I enter? If I enter the appointment in the time I was given, the software will automatically make it wrong for me every time. Most software has the option to include timezone, but it's usually buried, and depending on the device I'm using, the device may, or may not, know what timezone I'm in to start with. (my phone does, my computer generally doesn't, but worse yet, s
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We're all going to live at the north or south pole? Sounds chilly.
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No. Because those 15 degree lines cut through political boundaries. And wouldn't that be a mess if half the businesses in a city were on a different schedule than the other half.
Mixing time zones within one area can have disastrous consequences [darwinawards.com].
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> There's no difference between working 8-4, or 11-7, or any other schedule
--I see you've never worked third shift. Try that for a couple of years before you run your mouth, it ABSOLUTELY takes a toll on your social life and your health. Some people need blackout curtains, sleeping masks and total silence to sleep during the day so they can get to work without being a complete zombie.
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2 points:
1- your complaint is about working at night, not about working when the clock arbitrarily says a certain number. My point is exactly that the numbers on the clock aren't the issue. The time of day is. If we went to UTC and you started work an hour after sunrise, but that happened to be 2300 on the clock, it would be no different than if you now go to work at 0900 and that also happens to be an hour after sunrise. The only thing that would change is that everyone in the rest of the world would be ab
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