So you want to abolish time zones

159 点作者 subleq超过 10 年前

31 条评论

pluma超过 10 年前

As someone who grew up in a country where 24 hours are the norm for digital displays, I'm a bit miffed that the author seems to portray that as alien and weird.You wouldn't say "oh-four" to indicate four AM. You only need to say "oh-four" if the 12 hours system is the norm and you need to clarify you're talking about "military time". You wouldn't need to say "twelve hundred hours" either.I'd recon if English speaking countries switched to the 24 hours system, they'd likely just do what everybody else has done: keep counting. It'd be far more natural to say "it's 13 o'clock" (just as you would say "it's one o'clock" when it's obvious from context whether it's in the middle of night or early afternoon).And "midnight" and "midday" would likely still refer to the "solar time" in the scenario where everybody uses UTC (though it's obvious the author is really just getting at how we would re-invent time zones eventually out of necessity).I'm not really sure what the article is on about, though. Did anyone ever really argue that we should abolish time zones in general? As far as I can tell most people who are annoyed with time zones (particularly programmers who have to deal with them a lot if they need to deal with date time logic directly) would only want to get rid of DST.

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drewcrawford超过 10 年前

While this is an amazing and thought-provoking article, I can't help but feel it missed the obvious answer to the question it presented.Phones should be programmed to accept or reject calls by the owner, because it is a really dumb idea to be able to wake people up knowing only their phone number. Notably, this is already the case: cellphones have mute/vibrate switches, and if you have a smart phone you probably have various "do not disturb" modes that do more advanced routing.As a followup and to actually resolve the question for the call placer, phones could broadcast their availability status and this status could be queryable by phone number.Stardates have their own problems but I'm not convinced those problems are harder than the problems we have with timezones now. We've built up a terrible amount of infrastructure around timezone handling, we should not be scared off when stardates require unique infrastructure projects.

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transfire超过 10 年前

What a bunch of hoo-wee. Lets start with the simple fact that China, which covers five time zones, doesn't use them. It's that same time in China no mater where you are in China, and they seem to be getting on just fine. Next consider just how insanely inconstant the time zones actually are. They aren't straight lines up and down, rather they zig-zag all over the place --sometimes even skip over one another in "time-zone islands". There is no way to know any of this except to ask Google. And as for the contrived example of calling one's Uncle. Just ask him what a good time is to call. That would be the polite thing to do anyway. And hey, you won't get it wrong when he says "2 o'clock".

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istvan__超过 10 年前

There is a great video from google where somebody explains that time zones are UI related things, and everywhere else UTC is the only timezone that you have to be concerned about. This means humans like timezones, because it is easy to understandSo can I call my sister in Sydney? edt(utc) -> 4:00AM, nope I can't call her. You can use any other timezone as input as well to get the actual time in an other timezone.I think it is pretty easy to conceptualize for humans, this is why we have timezones. The suggested system does not feel right to me.

spiralpolitik超过 10 年前

If you remember back to the early 2000s Swatch as a marketing gimmick proposed something called 'Swatch Internet Time' which was "designed" (and I use that word in the loosest possible sense) to solve this very problem. I think a couple of Ericsson handsets had support for it.Wikipedia has the gory details for those interesting in that bit of trivia. I've used it as a programming exercise when interviewing candidates a couple of times.

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snissn超过 10 年前

The last time I lost way too much sleep and felt funky from day light saving time I created this concept of a continuous day light savings time. What you need to do is pass in a gps location and from there it comes up with the current time as if you were the center of a time zone. It sets high noon according to the actual celestial noon.It kind of goes back to the reason that time zones were created in the first place -- when trains came into popularity it became very hard to coordinate times between trains arriving from different towns that calibrated themselves to their sun dials. The time zones helped standardize the time so that you knew when the train would arrive.This introduced towns that would wake up earlier and later than noon and introduced big problems in season variations.So here's a silly demo: <a href="http://mike.rs/highnoon/" rel="nofollow">http://mike.rs/highnoon/</a>

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henrikschroder超过 10 年前

Anyone entertaining the idea to abolish timezones has to realize that it is even harder to do, than to make the US convert to the Metric system, and that conversion is actually a good idea.But it won't happen, because in the latter case you need to convince a few hundred million people to change their language, cultural references, and worldview, and they just don't want to do that. (The former case, obviosuly, means you have to convince a few billion people to do the same. Good luck.)

WalterBright超过 10 年前

As someone who has suffered as Daylight Savings Time has blasted his programming kingdom, I'd give DST the boot first.

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Avshalom超过 10 年前

In this thread we learned: computers are no longer powerful enough to deal with the complexity of timezones for us so we should make humans do extra work.

gojomo超过 10 年前

The answer will be that your device shows you at a glance whether your uncle likely wants a call.It does this mostly through automatic indicators…• whether uncle has his device in 'do-not-disturb' mode• how many hours it's been since uncle has woken or arrived-at-work or seen the local sunrise• whether he's in a loud or quiet place, stationary or moving• a live video feed of his public-facing workspace, or perhaps the view from his windowBut it might also have indicators from subtle learned cues: the device senses if he's in a meeting, or currently in a spirited f2f conversation with others, or in the time/place when he usually engages in phone calls. So if it thinks "now is not good", it can also predict and show the likely next workable time.In fact, you might even just press a button (or vocalize a command) telling your device, "let me know when it's a good time to chat with uncle". It'll negotiate a time with uncle's device, only bothering uncle for decisions if/when it's locally appropriate. Then it will offer to connect the call only when it's almost certain to be welcomed by both ends.All these technologies are likely to arrive, even without a single global time. But once they arrive it'll be easy for more people to prefer UTC. And it'll seem silly that anyone ever needed to write 2,200 words about how hard single-timezone coordination would be, because for people living with such assistive technology, that coordination will be effortless.Sun-locked time-zones were a useful transitional coordination technology, but cheap computing and telecommunication will offer much better options.

RadioactiveMan超过 10 年前

I'd like to share my favourite timezone lookup tool: <a href="http://xkcd.com/now" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/now</a>

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ak217超过 10 年前

I'm not sure what this article is about. At a minimum it is misguided. I don't think anyone is seriously arguing for abolishing time zones. Also, while zoneinfo is great, it doesn't help with the more serious issues that arise from arcane/archaic timekeeping.There are several major, common issues with timekeeping that cause huge engineering headaches:- Frequent or arbitrary changes to time zone standards- Daylight savings time- Time zones with fractional hour offsets- Frequent or arbitrary adjustments to UTC (universal time) in an effort to keep it more astronomically correctThe good things I can imagine happening to timekeeping are:- Abolish daylight savings time- Separate universal terrestrial time from "astronomically correct" time, with infrequent synchronizations fixed in time (e.g. once every decade or century)- Abolish fractional hour offset time zones and encourage countries to consolidate time zones

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deerpig超过 10 年前

I wonder why so many commenters seem to think that abolishing time zones requires a totalitarian government. The United States or Canada could do exactly the same thing, if they had the political will to do it.... afaik there is nothing in either constitutions enshrining time zones.

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mjevans超过 10 年前

Different meaning of 'time'.Why can't we have two scales of 'time', one for marking what we'd now call 'absolute time' (an arbitrary clock that is the same all over, E.G. UTC) and another for 'time of day' (in a given location); they should also be displayed uniquely so that it's not possible to confuse one with the other.Let's pick an arbitrary time. As a high tech society no longer ruled by sun dials we should instead make the start of the scale 'dawn' (on average). 'noon' would be at 25% of that scale, 'sunset' at 50%, midnight at 75% and 'dawn' again would be 100%/0% where it loops.I think 00 Monday might be good shorthand for 'dawn' Monday, though most would still say 'dawn Monday', however 10 Monday would be a good marker for when you might want to meet someone for your daily dose of caffeine. 40 through 60 might be when you'd prefer to eat dinner.

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lostcolony超过 10 年前

Waiting for the follow up, "So you want to abolish Daylight Savings Time".Because that one I actually do.

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grandalf超过 10 年前

Time zones make sense, daylight savings time does not.

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andrewliebchen超过 10 年前

Having the sun at its highest point as close to noon as possible is a human right.

autarch超过 10 年前

I think most people who say that we should eliminate time zones are confusing time zones with daylight saving time changes. Eliminating DST shifts is a fantastic idea. Eliminating time zones is pure stupidity.

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Sami_Lehtinen超过 10 年前

I'm a technical person. I also hate time zones, month names and weekdays. Those are utterly meaningless. YYYYMMDDHHMMSS (UTC only) is the format I'm using with all projects. It's just compacted form of 2015-01-17T07:18:16Z aka ISO_8601. When working with globally distributed teams and comparing event logs etc. One single time indicator is the way to go. Alternate format is classical UNIX time which is nice and can be stored as INT if second resolution is enough. 1421479099 but isn't so well human readable. Yet it's trivial to convert of course.

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nmeofthestate超过 10 年前

I feel like I'm losing my mind reading this comment thread. How can there be any people that think abolishing timezones is a good idea? The article covers the obvious problems pretty well.

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kidsil超过 10 年前

This is mostly nonsense.The am pm thing isn't everywhere, in Europe they often say "19 o'clock" so that's just an accuracy issue (honestly it's a made up problem since am pm will still be used).That Monday/Tuesday thing is also made up since there are offices, bars and clubs with overnight opening hours and they still separate the days, made up problem.Lastly, the entire issue one has with not knowing if the offices are open in Australia is still happening today, and we mostly solve it via Google, like we can solve this one too

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cdent超过 10 年前

Clearly the solution is to not call people. Synchronous communication sucks.I do like the time shifting to maximize daylight in the high latitudes.

ajuc超过 10 年前

People use 24h where I live (Poland) and it's much better. I never remember if am in English is morning or evening and I have to check each time I need it (it's a few times a year so the next time I don't remember again).Please, USA, quit making easy things difficult, switch to SI, put dates in correct order and move to 24h time.

doragcoder超过 10 年前

I'm thinking that clocks to time would be more like GPS to maps. You could just simply ask what position is the sun in a particular location, at a fingers touch. So it would be too much of a big deal for most people. But it would make programmers and things that deal with logical time much easier.

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vinceguidry超过 10 年前

That was a very fun dissection of an idea I'd thought that nobody was foolish enough to actually suggest. Apparently I was wrong, so wrong that enough people had to ask the author about it enough times to provoke this wonderful essay. I wish being wrong was always like this.

dghughes超过 10 年前

I only read a bit of that I drifted off recalling when I first started using the Internet in the early 1990s and started communicating with people around the world.I'm from a small town and never travel so it was a real eye opener for me. Of course I knew about the world, time zones and all that jazz I was excellent in geography and live maps, the world, cultures.What I quickly realized is it's nearly impossible to have any relationship with a person who doesn't isn't in your time zone. Even e-mail is awkward since you know it's going off to someone who won't see it until they are awake, have time to read it, want to respond or may wait a few days.It's like another world, I'd hate to see what happens when we discover intelligent life in a place where light takes years to reach.

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EdiX超过 10 年前

If we could instead abolish leap seconds, DST, time zones that are a fraction of one hour and forbid any country from changing timezone we would be much better off than abolishing timezones.

duaneb超过 10 年前

This entire problem seems to be solved by using asynchronous communication. Bam.

Frozenlock超过 10 年前

No no no no no.The author is making it easy for himself with a contrived example with a key information already available.> I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there?In a world with timezones, if your uncle is on the Internet and says "call me at 13h30" but doesn't tell you where he is, you can't call him, because you dont't know when is 13h30. (Think about that... he just gave you the time, but you still don't know the time...)With timezones, you can't just give the time, you must also give a location. "Time" doesn't exist with timezones, only "time-location".It's as if a physicist couldn't give you the mass of something without giving you the color."This table is 10kg-blue, which is the equivalent of 20kg-pink." (Because kg-colors aren't equal everywhere.)On the other hand, with a universal time (UTC for example), 13h30 is the same for everyone, everywhere. The time can be given without any other information. If someone says call me at this number at 13h30, I can just do that without having to know where he is.Let's look back at the initial problem: > I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Well, if I have a universal time, it's very easy: it's the same time as where I am! I don't even need to ask google! Beat ya!But of course the author want to know if he can call someone out-of-the-blue by knowing where he is. Well, if you can use google to tell you what is the time in another timezone, you can use google to tell you what is the usual waking hour in this location. You don't need additional information in this example.With universal time, the worst case scenario is needing the same amount of information as we do today (current time + location). The best case scenario is having a sane way of communicating time.

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anon4超过 10 年前

Time zones are ok, I'd much rather abolish daylight savings time.

cyborgx7超过 10 年前

I feel like the author completely ignores the simplest answer to wether or not it's ok to call their uncle. Just use the exact same process they would use now. Instead of "It's that time for him" he would think "It's the time of day for him that corresponds to that time for me" but that's all that would change.

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