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Actually, they're one of the copy-cat companies which jumped on the idea when the originating company published their idea. That company is still alive, though struggling. The biggest setback was chips. You're supposed to pay using your chip now, swiping is reserved for the restroom. These multi-card cards don't have chips.

Some do.
The idea is that you're not trying to *copy* the data from the source card's chip to the multicard's chip.
The mutlicard's chip has it's own private credential on the chip.
What you do is you register said credential as yet another acceptable ID at the other company.
(So the company isn't accepting only info of Card A - that also got copied on card B. But the company is accepting any of the private key on the chips of either card A or card B).
I can open a shared car with my train pass, because the carsharing company accepts to recognize the train pass as also identifying me.

This concept has been popular for ages for ski passes across european ski resorts : nearly all companies accept each others wireless cards (to the point that it even ended up in wrist watches).

That's why 'plastic' could never mimic a chip card; because to mimic the behaviour and 'signing capabilities' of such a card would require knowing that secret information along with associated algorithms

Or, inversely, it could hold its own sets of secret information, and the plastc compagny would register these as an acceptable form of ID / as altenate accepted signing to the other companies.

(I.e.: when you "copy" a credit card or an access card to it, what actually goes behind the curtain, is that in the DB of the bank or some other company the plastc is added as yet another accepted form of ID for you next to whatever contactless card / RFID fob you were already using).

At lest that's how it is actually implemented in the realworld by other companies that didn't go bust like plastc.

The way actually successful implementations of this idea work, is that the card is yet another chip with its own identity and keys, and you can register it as an authorized id at the other companies.

i.e.: you do not *copy* 20 different credit card on it, you ask your 20 credit companies to accept also the key inside this card as ID proof.

that works nicely because wireless NFC / RFID (and contact smartcards for the LUDDITES! still using that ;-) ) is standardized, meaning that in practice it really all boils down to "accept yet another key", there is no real need to modify hardware.

---

(And yes my second example is a plain watch which also has an RFID chip. Not a smartwatch with software controlled NFC. It completely predates the Apple Watch craze by a few years. And actually works with way much more different ski resorts accross europe than advertised).

Interesting. It might just work.

The website is still there, and still features a local-to-SIT converter. More than that I do not know.

Are we going to have to use Swatch Time with this calendar?

All kidding aside, they mention:

MINUTES, SECONDS, & FRACTIONS OF A SECOND
Both minutes and seconds have a range from 0 to 59. If including a fraction of a second, write it as a decimal at the end: 41.13.27.23.59.59.999 TC .

... so no handling of leap seconds. I know some people would be happy about this, but if you're not going to care about solar noon, why deal with leap days and such, too?

(and for those who complain that UTC shouldn't have leap seconds ... I say go and use TAI or GPS, but don't change UTC because you don't want to deal with the complexity)

$900 for a battery powered Swiss watch is a long way from cheap.

http://www.swatch.com/zz_en/internettime/itime_converter.html

Remember that?

http://www.swatch.com/zz_en/internettime/itime_howitworks.html

No international time zones would be helpful too; set everyone's clocks to the same time around the world. Sure it might confuse some, but I'm sure people would get the hang of it after a while.

It's been tried, about a decade ago. They called it "Internet time." And no, it didn't catch on, in spite of being promoted by lots of heavy hitters (CNN included it in their online masthead.) I think the biggest problem was that Swatch let their ego go just a little too far, and they attempted to move the prime meridian to Switzerland. If they had aligned with Greenwich, it might just have caught on.

It depends on the language being used.

In Danish the number "one point four one eight" (1.418) is literally "one comma four one eight" (1,418).

As such it is quite confusing when (as someone else pointed out) you see "1,418 million" written in a Danish text and how that's an insane amount of money to spend on building an office building, because some nitwit merely copy/pasted the numbers from somewhere else. If they wanted to make it "one thousand four hundred and eighteen million" the right way of typing it would be "1.418 million" because we used the period as a thousand separator in Danish.

This issue is often compounded by the fact that we use a different but similar counting system for large numbers than US English

1,000,000 is million/million (DK/US)
1,000,000,000 is milliard/billion (DK/US)
1,000,000,000,000 is billion/trillion (DK/US)
1,000,000,000,000,000 is billiard/quadrillion (DK/US)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 is trillion/quintillion (DK/US)

This can result in some fairly absurd statements when ignorant journalists translates a US article into Danish. Let's use the US federal budget for 2008 as an example.

The budget is $2,979 billion ($2,979,000,000,000). Now someone translates that into Danish without knowing what he's doing and he gets it right, purely by chance, because the comma acts as a decimal point. (2,979 billion = 2.979.000.000.000 Danish style).

If he gets his numbers from a slightly different source however, it might say that the budget is $2.979 trillion. In Danish that number is $2.979.000.000.000.000.000.000 ... makes for a slightly different budget, wouldn't you say?

And while the journalists are quick to change their online articles once you point out the difference, I'm yet to see any of them remember it the next time they simply copy/paste numbers from one language to another.

As for fixing it - that's just not doable. You might as well try to do away with counting time in sets of 60 seconds, 60 minutes and 24 hours and try to go to a decimal based time system, like Swatch Internet Time, where this post was written @178. It's very practical because if I say I'll call you at @178 you don't have to wonder if I'm thinking my time, your time, have I considered DST etc., but time (just like decimal points) are too ingrained into the spoken language to change.

Oh, I know! I know! Swatch time!

Internet time, ya know. http://www.swatch.com/us_en/internettime.html

First, I have to mention that I don't believe that you "hate to reference Star Trek". We can see your username, I'm sure you're a huge trekkie, don't be coy.

Also, swatch has already tried this in an effort to sell us a new kind of watch. http://www.swatch.com/internettime/

There was a decent amount of press when they started it, but of course its just a stupid marketing thing and nobody really cares. A universal time standard just doesn't add any real value. Timezones work out pretty well and people like the fact that daily schedules map pretty well to the same time no matter where you go. Oh, and I hate to break it to you, but we're not going to have to be dealing with interplanetary time synchronization for quite a few lifetimes.

http://www.swatch.com/internettime/

I think this is a perfect opportunity to propose the switch to metric time again, aka Swatch time! Or maybe we can adopt decimal time instead.

http://www.swatch.com/internettime/home.php Whip

If I were to wear an analog watch, I would definitely consider this one:

Swatch analog watch with visible gears (zoom in to see detail)

There's something about watching moving parts that inspires the engineer in me.

http://www.swatch.com/internettime/

Ofcourse, swatch has their own info on it as well.

Ooh, right, in that case, the webserver went down at @879 in Swatch Internet Time :)

Swatch's Internet Time proposal.

And we all saw how well THAT caught on...

Swatch recently tried to market something like this. Unfortunately, their site is flash, but go to here and search for ".beat". The idea was based on 1000 "beats" per day, all starting at 0 in Zurich, if I remember correctly (rather than Greenwich). Interesting idea to keep everybody synchronized, but not helpful if you want to know what time lunch is.

well, let's face it: if the current time keeping system were software we'd seriously be considering a rewrite.

my personal favourite for easier time systems is the swatch "internet time" beats. basically, the day is divided into 1000 "beats" (about 90 seconds each) and the current beat count is global. by being global the annoyance of time zones is eliminated. you just have to remember that you go to work 350 in switerzerland and 600 in michigan and that hocky night in canada is on at 120, 145 in newfoundland.

simple.

For metric time(and watches that run on metric time) go here: http://www.swatch.com/internettime/home.php

Swatch has their own "Internet Time" that divides the day into 1000 "beats" each beat being about 1m26.4s

hammy

Heh. Not that nice. I was thinking more along the lines of something like this.

=)

Didn't you mean 9.35 - 11.48 kilometers per liter? Only we obtuse USians use those mpg measurements, right? Every other reasonable creature on earth uses metric because it is easily divisible by 10. Oh well, it's almost time for me to go... What Swatch Time is it? ;-)

I hope to one day be much richer than I am know. And I don't plan on replacing my swatch. I think it actually looks pretty good, and does what I need and is so thin that it is very comfortable.

Generally speaking digital watches are fugly.

No. I like my swatch .beat and I think it's stylish.

Umm, perhaps you'll tell the Swiss.

1. Everybody interested is introduced to what internet time is

1. There would be no confusion as to what time this event will occur.

What if that trickle turned into a flood, not just from the North Carolina Piedmont but from all around the country? It would be a watershed moment in the Internet's rise as a force in American democracy.

Okay, someone *really* needs to stop watching the end of "Miracle on 34th Street" before writing his columns.

Watershed? No. It's called mailbombing -- and has happily been ignored by politicians both big and small since the dawn of time.

The day has already been divided into 1000 equal increments. Swatch has been trying to promote this for at least 3 years.

Swatch has devised and Internet time they call beats which has a neat feature for us netizens - no timezones. They divide the day into 1000 beats, but the factors of 1000 is 2 and 5 and that makes it rather inconvenient although 40 beats is close to an hour, 20 half an hour and 10 about a quarter of an hour. I use it sometimes, both my mobile phone and wristwatch can display it. Not to mention my desktop.

Well the guys over at Swatch already tried this with the Swatch time and now Internet time idea

hardly caught on has it???

First thing I thought when I saw "Isn't it Time for Metric Time", I thought about HEX Time. Which although makes sense in a technological sense, it's about as easy to convert as binary time and metric time. Yah, you can count on your fingers up to thirty five in HEX... or up to 1,023 in Binary but it's just annoying to switch.

Honestly, what else are you going to get out of switching to Base-2 or Base-6 or even Base-10 for time? Easier coding? Not really, instead of the computer doing the conversion, you will be for the next couple years until it makes sense.

Think of this, how long does it take you to quit writing checks for the previous year in January? Or when we switched over to 2000, how long did you write 1900? Things like this have been proposed, anyone remember Internet Time, ie: .beat or @time? I will give Swatch Time one big kudo, during the Dot-Com era, I did see it on CNN and MSNBC once or twice, it went a bit futher than any other time went.

None of the current ideas are "intuitive" to humans, not enough studying has been done, and no one big enough has adopted it and kept it.

Best of luck, good article though.

-M

Swatch is trying to do that with their Beat system... and we all know how populur that is..

Swatch is trying to do that with their Beat system... and we all know how populur that is..

How long is a Swatch .beat? In short, we have divided up the virtual and real day into 1000 ".beats". One Swatch beat is the equivalent of 1 minute 26.4 seconds. That means that 12 noon in the old time system is the equivalent of @500 Swatch .beats.

How is this possible? We are not just creating a new way of measuring time, we are also creating a new meridian in Biel, Switzerland, home of Swatch. Biel MeanTime (BMT) is the universal reference for Internet Time. A day in Internet Time begins at midnight BMT (@000 Swatch .beats) (Central European Wintertime). The meridian is marked for all to see on the façade of the Swatch International Headquarters on Jakob-Staempfli Street, Biel, Switzerland. So, it is the same time all over the world, be it night or day, the era of time zones has disappeared.

Internet Time is your friend.

It is a little larger then a normal Swatch and you can load it at umpteen or so ski resorts, where it can be used instead of a normal ski pass.

Swatch started this in 1998, and you can still buy Swatch watches that use it, but it's only marginally more useful than the binary watch.

(Disclaimer: The following is IMHO)

Well they got this one wrong. Seven-segment displays for binary numbers? So they might be taking the piss with that, but they could at least offer up a true binary watch at the same time.
All it would need is 17 binary indicators, or three seven-segment display units (which would leave 4 bits over, for ... oh, a game, perhaps?)

Swatch did ".beat"-time, but the maximum would be ".otherBeat" with 1024 beats per day ( ... new idea? GPL it. This post counts as prior art :)

Gah. If you want something done properly ...

1/1000th of a day is a Swatch .beat that they use in their 'Internet Time'. You can buy all sorts of Swatches that will display the time in .beats (@500 == 12:00 noon in their system).

you'd only have to set it once

as long as you stay in one time zone...

as long as it can intercalate to handle leap years, leap days, and leap seconds...

as long as swatch time never takes over... heh heh...

...Internet Time!
see Swatch homepage for more details

Speaking of vendor-propriatary time, check out Swatch Beat Time. (I must confess that I own and use one of these watches.)

-Waldo
-------------------

If we're going to use some sort of physical token I much prefer something clean like the Swatch Access than a messy, oily fingerprint that might not work if you scratch yourself while gardening.

On Saturday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the British government will throw their support behind a new initiative designed to create a universal time standard for global electronic commerce -- Greenwich Electronic Time or GeT. But GeT faces competition from at least two other timekeeping initiatives.

Try "Internet Time" from Swatch. It is cool.