Re: [LEAPSECS] Wall Street Journal Article

From: Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn_at_CL.CAM.AC.UK>
Date: Mon, 01 Aug 2005 12:17:09 +0100

Poul-Henning Kamp wrote on 2005-07-31 08:12 UTC:
> >They're not broken.
>
> It was my distinct impression from reading
> http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html
> that in a mere couple of thousand years, we will have more
> than 12 leap seconds a year.
>
> That sounds broken to me.

I don't see any technical problems for existing mechanisms to deal with
leap seconds until we need more than one leap second per day. On the
contrary, weekly or daily leap seconds will simply make it less
necessary to insert test leap seconds when you design clock drivers, as
the real thing will happen often enough. I have yet to see any piece of
code or message format that assumes about the time of a leap second
anything other than that it happens at the end of a UTC day.

Humanity is facing far more interesting challenges before the need for
intruducing 23:59:61 becomes acute in a few ten thousand years from now,
(including, hopefully, the abolishion of our archaic base-60 time notation).

Markus

--
Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ || CB3 0FD, Great Britain
Received on Mon Aug 01 2005 - 04:17:27 PDT

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