August 4, 2000

2:37 PM

Sometimes, I just want to throw my hands up in the air, cry out in disgust, and give up. Apparently, these people in Britain have never heard of NTP, the Network Time Protocol, clients for which have been available for Win9X for *years*... and which *works*

Can we *stop* inventing the wheel, now? It rolls, already.
posted by baylink (2 comments total)

If you take a look at the Greenwich Electronic Time site you'll see that they *are* using NTP, the Java applet mentioned uses NTP to set the computer's time and they're setting up new NTP servers (for no good reason).

GeT just seems to be a new brand name for GMT on the Internet set up by some people worried that Swatch might take over the world with their Internet time (Beats). You can see this in strange incomprehensible things like "The GeT concept was forced into existence by the emergence of single company marketing driven positioning on time who sought to establish a brand based time baseline for E-time" on the GeT site.

So what was I trying to say again? I don't think they're reinventing the wheel, they're just trying to make us call the wheel something different.
posted by sl at 8:10 AM on August 5, 2000

I still prefer Virtual Reality Time. The timezone chosen for VRT is out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Nobody lives there. So VRT is equally inconvenient for everybody. The ultimate in fairness and levelling the playing field.

Unfortunately, Active Worlds has gone the way of Multi User Domains. So. I don't think it will ever quite catch on.
posted by ZachsMind at 12:43 PM on August 6, 2000