In message <42F1AC33.4000403_at_moorecad.com>, Scott Moore writes:
>I agree, it would require that computers keep an "almanac" of the past.
>I don't think that's onerous for a computer. First of all, the operating
>system only needs one copy of it, since all file times would be in
>TAI. The form of it can be a table, or can be a polynomial approximation,
>or a combination thereof.
>
>This is already true. If you take Unix time, a 32 bit signed number,
>or about 2 billion seconds, which is corrected to read the current time,
>its going to be wrong for the Unix Epoch (Jan 1, 1970) by about 24 seconds
>(according to the nearest table I could find of leap seconds).
Most if not all modern UNIXes already have the table of leapseconds.
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Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
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Received on Wed Aug 03 2005 - 23:19:09 PDT