News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Metric Time.

Re:Metric Time by SeoxyS on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @07:38PM (#6060736)
Swatch already tried this with the Swatch Beat ("Swatch Internet Time")[1]. I actually owned a beat-capable watch for a while.

I think the beat was better in that it was easier to reason relative to the day: a day was 1000 beat, and a beat was a little over 1 minute. There would be no daylight savings time, and no timezones. The entire world would run on the same beat.

As a software engineer, the idea fascinates me. The complexity of time is a constant struggle for computers. Every time DST comes around, things have a tendency to crash. Not to mention Y2K.

But then again, this can easily be solved by standardizing on 64-bit UTC unix timestamps.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Beat

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Metric Time by dangerscarf on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @09:00PM (#6061063)
The French actually beat Swatch by a a couple centuries - during the French Revolution they spent about twenty years fooling around with metric/decimal time. Ten hours a day, 100 minutes an hour, and 100 seconds per minute (each second ended up about 14% shorter than a "normal" second). They real fun is in the calendar, with 12 months of 30 days each, and rules like "every tenth day is named after a mineral." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Deci... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Ten_...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Metric Time by ArekDymalski on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @09:04PM (#6061083)
Beat was an amazing concept. I still have this watch and love it. That's a pity it didn't get popular, but I partially blame the design of the watches.
[ Parent | on HN ]