On 27 September 2016 at 14:40, Warner Losh <[email protected]> wrote: > >... > Eliminating leap seconds would be a great way to unify all these approaches :) > And it too is compatible with JTS.
Smearing seems like a clever way of papering over the problem of the leap-second, but as others have said, surely a standard needs to be defined, and that way everyone can compare and match their time - surely the whole point? I am interested that Google have chosen to linearly smear over 20 hours, thus increasing each second in that period by 13.8888... microseconds - surely such an irrational step is difficult to achieve? Could it be that they actually step 125 microseconds every 9 seconds, or maybe 25 microseconds every 1.8 seconds? I wonder if Christopher has any inside knowledge on the details? I'm also curious about the change from cosine to linear smear: the linear smear results in a very sharp step change in frequency, exactly what we DON'T do, whereas the cosine smear has a very smooth and gentle change, surely more easily followed. Could it be that this would need some very small (way sub 100ns) steps at the start and end which would be almost impossible to achieve accurately? I guess that if we know the time is changing at a fixed rate, we can easily allow for that when trying to hold a frequency? Again, does Christopher have any inside info on the thought processes? However, these new problems, and the Azure systems disagreeing between countries, all comes back to what Warner said - scrapping leap seconds solves all these problems, at the expense of - with due respect to Rob, Steve. etc. - the astronomers having to increase the range of DUT1 on their software. Peter
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