[time-nuts] Re: UTC - A Cautionary Tale

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Sat Jul 16 13:53:18 EDT 2005


In message <D9105A6C-BDF2-4A01-A35A-2749443245A1 at noao.edu>, Rob Seaman writes:

>Why are you so convinced that there couldn't possibly be negative  
>ramifications associated with the unexamined assumptions underlying  
>the distinction between time-of-day and interval time?  Or simply  
>with the unwarranted assumption that one single timescale applies in  
>all cases?  Claiming that "leap seconds are bad, we'll be safer  
>without them" doesn't make it so.  Some systems will fail when DUT1 >  
>1s.

You answer the question yourself:  The system would have to have
some knowledge about UT1 before lack of leap seconds would hurt it.

There are two ways the system could get UT1:
    a) Somebody designs in a datacommunication channel for it
    b) Stare at something in the universe.

The sum of those two cases is epsilon compared to the total number
of computing installations which doesn't have correct leap-second
handling.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.




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