On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 10:38:03AM -0700, Steve Allen wrote: > On Thu 2003-06-05T17:46:38 +0100, Markus Kuhn hath writ: > > William Klepczynski: In safety-critical navigation systems, leap seconds > > will over time cause catastrophic system failures that will cost many > > lives. This long-term risk should justify even considerable one-off > > expenses to fix permanently the problem of a commonly used non-uniform > > precision timescale. > > I rebut that any system whose designers cannot implement a > specification as clearly spelled out as the current scheme for UTC has > much worse things to worry about than leap seconds.
You presume that such systems are designed by folk who even know that there is something to be careful about... In my experience the vast majority of people, including intelligent hardware and software engineers, don't grok the nuances of UTC --- even to the extent of not realizing the existence of leap seconds. I can easily envision some complex system whose overall design and manufacture was exquisite except for the simple detail that the designer failed to understand that the reference time signal they were feeding as input was _not_ an unsegmented time. "But it is the official time broadcast from the folk who maintain our atomic clocks", I can hear our belatedly enlightened designer moan. This is more of an argument for better education to the public, especially the technical sectors of the public, than an argument to abolish leap seconds. Or perhaps a good argument for having hybrid time signals (some form of TI and some form of UT), which would make anyone designing against the signal to realize that a distinction exists which needs to be worked with. But to casually dismiss the existing widespread ignorance of the fact that there is even a distinction between a standard time (e.g., what is broadcast on WWVB) and unsegmented time (what is desired for any system which computes intervals between timestamps) as an issue of engineering incompetence is a gross oversimplification, IMO. --Ken Pizzini