On Thu 2016-07-21T10:27:57 -0700, Tom Van Baak hath writ: > Time to mention this again...
> Every UTC-aware device would 1) know how to reliably insert or > delete a leap second, because bugs would be found by developers within > a month or two, not by end-users years or decades in the future, and > 2) every UTC-aware device would have an often tested direct or > indirect path to IERS to know what the sign of the leap second will be > for the current month. This idea pushes extra complexity into every implementation of low level kernel-space software, firmware, and hardware. That's nice as a policy for full employment of programmers, but it's hard to justify by any other metric. Instead those low level places should be as simple as possible, and that means making the underlying precision time scale, and thus any broadcast distributions of a precision time scale, as simple as possible. The complexity for translating precision time in seconds (for machines) to calendar time in days (for humans) belongs in the less-critical and easier-testable outer layers of software which do user-space presentation, internationalization, and GUI which can be broadly shared between many hardware implementations. -- Steve Allen <[email protected]> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260 Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
