Not to mention, people have different times that are acceptable. And they travel. So at home I'll get up around 11am to 2pm, local time. When visiting SF, I'm usually up and about by 10am. I work with people all over the world, and they keep different enough schedules that I can't go by their location. And they travel, too.
So the author is right that in some weak contrived scenario, using a highly interruptive comm service, maybe zones help. Event they don't, cause Google could trivially give you the "apparent solar time" going by geography, anyways.
Timezones are an annoying hack. Daylight savings is even more obnoxious. Especially in poorly run counties that make up DST rules on an ad hoc basis.
In the context of programming, you should almost always be using UTC, maybe with an offset. Several times I've run into companies that keep call billing records in local time. Compete with extra hours and time traveling calls around DST jumps. Moronic. (And leap seconds can go get fucked, too. I'm saddened that we have to put up with such s pointless, annoying thing. Maybe we could switch to leap hours. No noticeable effect for millennia, at which point relativity should be a much larger issue with timekeeping.)
So the author is right that in some weak contrived scenario, using a highly interruptive comm service, maybe zones help. Event they don't, cause Google could trivially give you the "apparent solar time" going by geography, anyways.
Timezones are an annoying hack. Daylight savings is even more obnoxious. Especially in poorly run counties that make up DST rules on an ad hoc basis.
In the context of programming, you should almost always be using UTC, maybe with an offset. Several times I've run into companies that keep call billing records in local time. Compete with extra hours and time traveling calls around DST jumps. Moronic. (And leap seconds can go get fucked, too. I'm saddened that we have to put up with such s pointless, annoying thing. Maybe we could switch to leap hours. No noticeable effect for millennia, at which point relativity should be a much larger issue with timekeeping.)