[LEAPSECS] The relation between calendars and leap seconds.

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <20081112014446.GA30364 at ucolick.org>, Steve Allen writes:

>On Wed 2008-11-12T01:12:58 +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp hath writ:



>The humans will adapt to the name change, even getting it fixed in

>most documents and ancillary software long before the difference

>between TI and UT gets to a few seconds.


Living in a country that legally still uses 'mean solar time on the
15the eastern longitude' I find this very hard to belive.

We have not even come close to eradicating usage of GMT as an
alias for UTC.


>Yes, it has to be something that can be made to happen -- politically.

>The operational systems, the technical aspects, are not the stumbling

>block.  The stumbling is coming from things like "we only need one

>time zone" People's Republic of China suddenly taking the same

>position as the UK and objecting to any change to UTC by WP7A.


I think it is safe to say, that adding a new timescale will not
result in its widespread adoption.

The other thing I find ironic by the TI proposal, is that the
timescale named "Universal" is only fit for this planet, whereas
the one called "International" is much better suited for other
planets.

Details like that tend to make historical persons look pretty silly.

Poul-Henning


-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.