In message <[email protected]>, Harlan Stenn writes: >Warner, I think your position is only valid form the point of view that >says a timescale can only be used to count fixed-length seconds.
That is not really what timescales are about. Timescales, as concept, are for communicating unambiguously the duration of the time interval between two or more events. Given the many and varied circumstances of human lives, it follows that many kinds of timescales are in routine use, from counting to 'safe days' to splitting pico-seconds for science. Most of these timescales are local, they apply only to one particular woman or one particular experimental setup in a lab. The "coordinated" in UTC is all and only about, through international coordination, providing a timescale which is local to the entire planet, in order to enable world-wide communication about events on a global scale. It should come as no surprise that such a timescale originated from the TELCO community, when international communications boomed. It follows pretty obviously, that the important thing about UTC is that everybody can agree what time it is, with a trivial overhead spent on "coordination" Thanks to improvements in timekeeping technology and computer networking, leap-seconds now impede communication rather than aid it, because you can't predict them more than 6-8 months ahead, and they have a unreasonable cost of coordination. Either the cost and impediment to communication must be reduced vastly, or leapseconds must go, because the benefit they provide is utterly marginal. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [email protected] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
