Time to change

Do you remeber Internet Time? It was intended to eliminate the hassle of time zones, as real time interactions across time zones started to raise dramatically. No matter where you are, or what time scheme is in place, everyone shares the same exact time. Under Internet Time, the day was divided into 1000 units (beats), starting at midnight European Central Time. It came out right after the internet boom, and it seemed like an awesome idea (at least to me) -if you've ever tried to coordinate an activity with someone in a different part of the world, you've surely gone through something like this:

A: OK, how does tomorrow at 10 AM work for you?
B: 10 AM your time or my time?
A: My time
B: You are US Pacific, right?
A: Yes.
B: OK, you're 8 hrs behind me so that's 18:00 my time
A: Is that military time? I'm not sure...
B: Right, sorry -that's 6pm.
A: Are you sure, we're on daylight savings time here
B: All right, why don't we set up the meeting on Outlook, that should adjust the time automatically for everybody's time zone.
A: Well, they changed the daylight saving time this year, and IT says there have been problems with the exchange update patch...

How about this, instead:

A: OK, how does tomorrow at @750 work for you?
B: Can we make it @815?
A: Sure, that works.

I don't know about you, but I know which conversation I like better.

I think the reason Internet Time never took off, is that people are resistant to change and easily confused, but we don't have to give up regular time, we can display both times side-by-side. How hard would it be to add a little bit of code to time servers and operating systems and save millions of headaches every week?

Internet movers and shakers, how about some moving and shaking here?

Netscape

Today, the life of Netscape Navigator oficially comes to an end. This posting is my tribute to this icon of the internet's dawn.

Though its real death came about in the late 90s, after loosing the browser wars to Microsoft's IE, it was given a new lease in life when it was acquired by AOL, though its market share continued to decline, and faded into irrelevance at the turn of the millenium. While Netscape was a better browser in the beginning, IE's eventual superiority became irrelevant in the face of its strategic advantage: IE was pre-installed on all new Windows PCs.

In the early years of the web, Netscape soon attained dominance over Mosaic, and was the first browser for most people back then. For those of us who lived immersed in the emerging web, it was like exploring a new world. There were no commercial websites, just individual pages with all kinds of weird content. Forget about media-rich pages, with neatly laid-out content designed by web-design firms. Back then, my idea of multi-media was colored text. The occasional GIF (picture) was a slow-loading event, at 9.6 kilobits per second on a dial-up connection. Every new release of Netscape seemed to introduce a whole new dimmension to the web. Tables, text alignment, the web-shattering support of JPG images... Every conversaton included rumours about how the next Netscape release -never more than a few weeks away- might change the web's landscape. It was hard not to see Netscape as the brave startup company that brought us the Web.

When I realized its days were numbered, sometime in '98, I couldn't help but to feel a little sad, not unlike parting ways with a travel companion, in the middle of an interesting journey.

So long, Netescape.

Leap Year 2008

I could not let today pass without a posting to mark the event. Happy February 29th, world!