I feel that this is what we should be using instead of the current illogical time system.
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.
That’s simple. It’s at 12:80 PM. Wait… no… yeah. Whatever, let’s just run Famitsu Attack or Endless Nightmare 4 again.
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 remember having the wrist watch that had this under the time. Just the one shown on the wikipedia page, IIRC.
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.
Dates? Swatch replaces seconds, minutes, and hours with .beats. Metres per second (used in scientific contexts), minutes per kilometre (used by runners), and kilometres per hour (used in most other contexts) would all be unusable under Swatch time.
If we were using beats, it would be meters per .beat I guess. Many physical constants would be different numbers but that’s about it
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.
Eliminating time zones would make things worse. Right now you know that from 10am to 3pm local things will be opened with close to 100% certainty. Remove time zones and now you have to find out what are normal opening hours for the country where you’re trying to call.
I think that it’s harder to all be in the same time zone. You then have to remember each zone’s working hours instead of the offset from your time.
I don’t see how it’s easier to get rid of time zones.
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.
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”.
