In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Steve Allen writes: >On Thu 2005-08-04T09:27:20 +0200, Poul-Henning Kamp hath writ: >> So one feasible option is to predetermine all leapseconds (or >> leap minutes ?) for the next 50 years in advance. >> >> That means an UT1-UTC difference that could go as high as 20-30 >> seconds but it is still locked and bounded (by our knowledge of >> geophysics, admittedly, but bounded nontheless). > >This was one of the options presented by McCarthy around 1999 during >the early ruminations about changing UTC. It was quickly excluded >from the list of possible options, even before the Torino conference >when Arias further discussed the predictive capabilities. > >It would be interesting to know why this option was excluded, but then >it would be interesting to really know why any of this is happening.
That question I can answer conclusively: The reason this is all happening is that far too many computing devices and systems have been rolled out since 1999 without knowing how and if they would deal with leap seconds, individually and on the interfaces. I belive the USA proposal tried to avoid any more leap seconds happening, thereby saving a lot of contingency work primarily on DoD systems. Evidently that didn't work out the way they had hoped. -- 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.
