Originally Posted by
dhuey
Yes, and along those lines, I think there is a natural inclination for people everywhere to have, roughly speaking, the point in their day when the sun is at its highest in the sky be called "noon", "12 pm" or something similar to a midpoint in how they measure daily time.
But for any idealized time zone there's an hour solar time difference from one side to the other. For real time zones in North America it's much more than that.
For dealing with international projects, time zones are really no more convenient than having everybody on UTC, it's more that it's just what people got used to because clocks were invented long before ways to communicate at lightspeed across long distances, or easily synchronize those clocks across those distances.
I have a popoout sidebar on all my computers that shows clocks for all the many time zones I deal with. The numbers don't really matter to me as much as the day/night indicators, which could be shown just as easily if everybody were on UTC. And then we should also take latitude into account - people near or past +-66 degrees may be largely indifferent to clock time much of the time. If their sidebar "clock" shows that it's (nearly) always day or always night for them, it would be a good idea to check when they're available UTC.