Ask Slashdot: How Many Time Standards Are There? 214
jjoelc writes "Being one of those 'suffering' through the time change last night, the optimist in me reminded me that it could be much worse. That's when I started wondering how many different time/date standards there really are. Wikipedia is a good starting point, but is sorely lacking in the various formats used by e.g. Unix, Windows, TRS-80, etc. And that is without even getting into the various calendars that have been in and out of use throughout the ages. So how about it? How many different time/date 'standards' can we come up with? I'm betting there are more than a few horror stories of having to translate between them..."
Re:Really two very broad subjects (Score:3, Funny)
"1. How many different date/time standards has the human race come up with"
It doesn't matter, 6 months of the year, the clock on your oven will be 1 hour off, no matter where you live.
Total (Score:5, Funny)
There are in total 863 different time standard, including historical ones. That's the good thing about standards, there are so many to choose from.
Now, please someone post a link to that xkcd comic and we can move on to the next question.
Swatch Internet Time (Score:5, Funny)
Swatch Internet Time is truly the savior to all of this trouble. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time [wikipedia.org]
The whole time zone thing is just ridiculous in this age of information. When I'm too busy cruising the information super highway, I don't want to worry about whether the person I'm on IRC with is in London or Sydney. And for that matter, seconds? minutes? Relics of the past. Just divide the day into 1,000 beats and you're good to go.
So what if no one has any sense of what 10 beats is (14 minutes 4 seconds), and so what if it was created by a watch maker probably to sell more watches. Swatch Internet Time is the wave of the future, man! Throw your grandfather clocks away and dial-up to greatness on your 56k. You don't want to be left behind in the Swatch revolution!
Re:I created one for a game (Score:4, Funny)
It was absolutely awful trying to convert between the game-time and real-time. I took the easy route and still based everything on seconds, and built it up from there.
The main reason for doing it was because the game was based on real time, so even being away caused events to pass. And given a typical person, they'd play games more or less at the same time every day for a certain period of time. This is why I settled on what would effectively be 7 hour days. Out of sync with a normal day so a typical person would almost certainly come across every time period at some point. And 7 is short enough to experience in a day, but still long enough to feel "right". I can't remember how I done minutes or hours again, it was way back in 2005.
That project never got completed due to health reasons. I might come back to it one day, but it isn't a priority.
At least I never decided to make a language for it as well.
We're sorry about what this did to your sanity. Glad to see you've recovered.