Internet time

I think this game would be a really good place to use Internet Time... You know... that thing that Swatch developed a few years ago. Instead of having confusing timezones, use a standard time.

Having to convert between Swatch beats and standard hours and minutes would be even more harrowing.

We already have an international standard for time: UTC. It's well recognized, time zone conversions are a piece of cake, it doesn't play the Daylight Savings Time game, and it doesn't use the @ symbol just because some marketdroid thought @ = Internet.

I'm all for using UTC. I keep the "second timezone" on my watch set to UTC so it doesn't make much difference to me. Anyone without such a feature can merely add or subtract timezone offsets from UTC. (North American Pacific Daylight Savings Time is, for example, just UTC-0700.)

I agree on the UTC.

A few years ago another online community I was involved with decided to pick their own time zone. To cater to the international membership they picked a spot in the mid-Atlantic to be the official time, since it didn't correspond with any real time zone used by humans it was called Virtual Time. Like the Swatch time, these various "made-up" time schemes do nothing but guarantee the maximum number of people will be inconvenienced by having to do constant time conversions.

UTC however is something that is well established. Many computer clocks are actually set to UTC with an offset factor in place to generate local time when needed. When comparing dates on files created around the world, or for packet synchronization that makes the internet work, UTC is the time of choice. While it may be "fun" to come up with a Secondlife specific time standard, such a thing will only be USEFUL for people in the time-zone that it corresponds to.

If the times for events etc are going to be advertised using PST, then let's just call it PST. If we want to use UTC, or EST for that matter those names are fine (it would be nice to settle on something though).

As far as Swatch time goes, I haven't heard a lot about it lately. I think it was more than anything else a marketing gimmick to sell those funny watches.

PS: I just noticed/remembered that even these forums are timestamped based on GMT/UTC with an offset.

Or we could settle on a new system called Linden Time and sell watches set to this standard <cackles and strokes goatee like an evil business tyrant>

Great, thats all you guys need, more power.

Nah, I believe either a time based on the Linden Day, or internet time should be used. It would keep everyone synched to the same time. If you live in a different time zone, I'm sure showing up 3 hours early for a 4:00 Building session would be very annoying.

Oooohhh, I have an idea.

*Strokes bald chin and remembers he shaved*

Umm.. what about GMT?

GMT = UTC

more or less.

http://sts.sunyit.edu/timetech/gmt-utc.html

There is no other worldwide time standards that I know of, and I can't imagine why anyone would want to invent one.

Oh, that is, unless you are these people:

http://www.zetatalk.com/

In which case, you think that the world has stopped turning by now.

Metric time. 1 Day, 10 decidays to the day (dd) (2.4 hours), 10 centidays (cd) to the dd (.24 hours = 14.4 minutes), 10 millidays to the cd (1.44 minutes = 86.4 seconds) etc.

Going the other way 10 days to the week, 36.5 weeks per year, nows where it breaks up though - 10 week months and only 3.65 of them per year? Or 3 week months (thats 30 days, 12 months per year with 1 month with 35 days.

But what about weekends? Well we gotta add three days - Eightday, Nineday, Tenday. To stay equal we need about 100 days a year as 'weekend' - thats about 3 days a week. I say Sunday, Nineday and Tenday - three day weekends with 7 day work weeks? I split that work week somehow and keep 2 day weekends? Maybe get Thursday off so its 2 days off, work 3, 1 day off, work 4, repeat. I dunno, Friday could work too.



I'm for GMT posting of times with automatic conversions. I think the site and game should know I'm in PST and when I post an event it looks to me like I'm posting it in PST. But it also knows that joeUser is in EST, and when he looks at the events he sees it in EST (adjusted the 3 hours automatically for his view). It should clearly state when viewing and inputing what timezone is being displayed/entered and GMT/UTC should probably be in parenthasis afterwards.

Computers are overgrown calculators. They should be doing the math for me.

I honestly don't mind converting 2 hours difference, but what chaps my hide about the event calendar here on the site is this...

I take the time to look at several different days' events listed, to see what day or days has an open time slot that works for me. When I come across a good day, I'll hit the Add Event. Why oh why can't that form already have the date of the day that I was viewing when I hit the "Add" button? Half the time I forget to change the date and end up posting an event for today that's really meant for next week.

#!

I agree completely.

I probably shouldn't be complaining then cuz I never have to adjust at all, I'm in PST. However there are people who are further off than that. And manipulating data is what computers are good at! It really should be as I described. Really. I mean besides the fact that the whole universe should work the way I think it should work. It just makes more sense.