In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Magnus Danielson write s: >> And btw, it probably would not even be a leap-second for him, since >> general relativity would take its toll. I'm not sure my grasp of the >> math is good enough to figure out how long his leap-second would be. >> >> Instead, if we abandon leap-seconds, then we finally have a _truly_ >> universal timescale. >> >> It will not be locked to any more or less random piece of geophysics, >> anyone with a cesium clock and a set of gen-rel coordinates will be >> able to figure out what time it is, and time intervals can be measured >> and compared without weird gottchas. > >No. You are missing a detailed refinement in the definition of a second, it is >assumed that the Cesium clock is at sea-level.
Sea-level on this planet, yes. If you are on a different planet in a different orbit and a differnet rotation period (and axis!), general relativity takes a toll. If you bring a HP5071A to Mars, it will give you a wrong length of seconds. >Considering how time-zones is set, I start to wonder. Look at the time zones >in South America and you see what I mean. Just look at Europe :-) >> The other half is that leap-seconds are just not testable in a computer >> setting, and therefore I am sure that any cost of dropping them will >> be totally offset by the savings in the IT industry. > >I am not even sure that the IT industry is really spending a whole lot on this >issue. Most of them is to the best of my knowledge fairly ignorant to this >among other problems. Just having charging systems track UTC through NTP would >be a huge step forward IMHO. Well, I think the disruption is obscured by the lack of implementation. As more systems implement leapseconds (through NTP or otherwise) we will see more applications which didn't do it quite right. -- 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. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list [email protected] https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
