Re:Swatch Internet Time (1998)
by pedroaraujo on Tuesday February 06, 2018 @09:36AM
(#16316412)
While timezones are not 100% reliable, they still provide us with a pretty good picture of the state in the region you want to know the time for.
The problems you describe are due to cultural mismatches and these can't really be solved by any other system.
The danger of a leaky abstraction is that the leaky abstraction makes it easy to ignore the edge cases, and then when you have to handle them, they come as a surprise.
I did say that there were edge cases. Is encoding no regional information in local time better than encoding some that works pretty well in many common cases?
> Obviously, this means that you can’t rely on timezones to determine business times.
Of course you can, you just need to know in which timezone they are (except for the China case, maybe).
Obviously, this means that you can’t rely on timezones to determine business times.
And then there’s cultural differences, in some countries people will eat dinner between 21:00 and 22:00, in others around 18:00 – this has obvious consequences for business dinners.