Steve Allen <[email protected]> wrote: |An op-ed in favor of the leap second from last Sunday |https://beta.welt.de/print/wams/kultur/article157946393/Wie-die-Zeit-vergeh\ |t.html | |There have been op-eds against the leap second, but someone please |remind me if any of those have been poetic.
Journalism is hard Latte Macchiato is expensive luxury so here's the why the press is free to live a life of fee The article starts with "Lesedauer: 6 Minuten" (time to read: six minutes). I wonder if that indicates a general problem. Amazing that mankind gets weak and sentimental when they have babies, especially daughters: Each second is precious; Humans should care, humanly; You can die in a second, or fall in love. As if you could get a system going with plain soppiness, and keep it ticking the right way. Especially now that alternative home planets come into sight one should really look ahead for the great future that is to be expected. New watches can also adhere to more sophisticated rules, like mars time, for example. Just like the head of the Tibetians, the Dalai Lama, said in the interview for his 50th anniversary in Indian exile: it is all there, you just have to see it. Maybe leap seconds should simply be celebrated, for example with a vegetarian barbecue at Stonehenge. It is a bit unfortunate that the article doesn't find -- or haven't had -- the time to describe that it is a problem of definitions rather than a problem of time by itself. It mentions Qantas and the Linux kernel bug, but only mentions a complete switch over to TAI as an alternative. My opinion on this is that systems should gain a CLOCK_TAI, and that protocols should start providing this, if they don't do already. Now, i know the proposal [1] of Markus Kuhn, and that is almost two decades old. [1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/posix-clocks.html Eventually we get there, that so much damage has been done because of the slowness of democratic plus systems is a real problem. E.g., just think about the immense amount of oil that has been wasted because sequential cylinder deactivation, overrun cut-off, combined turbo and compressor, downsizing etc. hasn't been enforced politically over 25 years ago! In, e.g., Japan, 600ccm engines with about 70 hp are fostered since about 35 years so (or others are disadvantaged), and see how the Japanese car industry broke down due to this decision. And then fuel cells with wheel hub engines and a sandwich vehicle floor that hosts the tank, that also was possible back then. (The tanks were not capable of storing the hydrogen for a long time, iirc, but for one that is just a problem that could have been worked around, and it has been solved in the meanwhile.) So that would mean hundreds and hundreds of millions of these middle age combustion engines are in the wild, and will stay for many more decades to come. Instead of just improving a few dozen refineries. A different story, but the same s..t, or never made, decisions. So i would still hope for some nice NTP which distributes all that easily, a standardized CLOCK_TAI that users which need it can easily access, and a normal UTC clock for normal human behaviour, which eventually is adjusted to adhere to our home planet. You need a table of past adjustments, but that is all wrong anyway. E.g., who knows whether a file time of a tar archive member from the early ninetees is really correct. You wouldn't know even if it were TAI, most likely. Having _TAI is only useful with a set of routines which can be used to create datetimes etc.: isn't it a pity that even ISO C 2011 didn't follow a bit of the other proposal [2] from almost twenty years ago? [2] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/c/ It is plain that i was joking once i saw, just one or two years ago, an ultra-right Japanese politician holding a glass of diesel (murky) in one, and a glass of petrol (clear) in the other hand. --steffen _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
