> "A.Brown" wrote: > > Hi All > I just wondered what members in the group think of the latest > zoneless time concept, Internet Time where the day is broken up > into beats eliminating the need for geographical based time > zones. Is it seen as helping to make ours one world or as > cynical "commercial" exploitation?
More often than not I feel dumber than I'd like to admit. I have always seen this Swatch issue as one of the purest form of hype. When I hear anything about "beat" I see it as snake oil talk. We already have too many good ideas about time and Swatch time, in my humble opinion is NOT among them. First of all, I can't see how it will avoid the "time zone" issue. If it could do it, we would do better with a 24-hour clock adjusted for (say) GMT or UTC. And it would have the advantage of allowing quick and easy fall back to the old "time": it would be only a matter of each country/county/person "shifting" back or forth one hour per 15 degrees longitude. Or -- still more precise -- shifting hours, minutes and seconds so every single person in this world could use both a universal time and a very precise local time. Perhaps synchronized with the sun (as apposed to political time). In fact, that's how UNIX is supposed to work since 1970. It's clock counts the seconds since midnight of first of January, 1970. The trick is to make that midnight a UTC (or GMT) midnight). Than it will offer you a "universal time". Different applications apply certain rules to convert to local time. A user can set a "personal" variable named TZ or TIMEZONE (standards are so good some people have decided to offer us several of them for the same purpose!). This way, a single machine, running anywhere in the world, can provide a time corrected for any other place in the world. It is very hard to think Swatch "beats" has anything to add to this simple and effective idea. And has been working for tens of years. The Intel machine I use most has maybe the worst clock ever made. It drifts off by as much as 40 minutes per day! I don't care. I am connect to the Internet on a permanent basis so I what I do it to read the time from a very precise clock at ntp2.usno.navy.mil I have programmed my machine to do it each 5 minutes (I could have programmed it to do it at any interval I wished). So, in fact, the clock I see on my screen appear to be very, very precise. Now, the time I read is UTC (or is it GMT -- too lazy to check now). It does not matter. And so is the time my machine's clock keep. Nevertheless, the software I use for displaying the time takes my longitude into account and gives me what I want more often. So, off with Swatch! It adds nothing but confusion. It creates nothing, but downgrades previous creations. - fernando ------------------------------------------------------------------ Fernando Cabral Padrao iX Sistemas Abertos mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pix.com.br Fone Direto: +55 61 329-0206 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] PABX: +55 61 329-0202 Fax: +55 61 326-3082 15º 45' 04.9" S (23 L 0196446/8256520) 47º 49' 58.6" W 19º 37' 57.0" S (23 K 0469898/7829161) 45º 17' 13.6" W ------------------------------------------------------------------
