[LEAPSECS] Meeting with Wayne Whyte

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Tue Feb 1 06:35:09 EST 2011


In message <AANLkTikpq3XyEZhso+d=pB98mBhVr2V3MwAosjkcTkYy at mail.gmail.com>, Step
hen Colebourne writes:


>Poul, this is not true for JSR-310. A year is 365-366 days long. A day

>is a fundamental unit. Thus we know exactly how long each are.


I'm not talking about JSR-310, I'm talking reality.

Thanks to leap-seconds we do not know how long (certain) minutes
are, until Daniel tells us.

By extension it follows that we do not know how long the hours,
days, years, decades, centuries & millenia which ocntains one of
these minutes are.

"UTC is unpredictable" is the core of the problem, and a problem
that must be solved, either by extending the predictability horizon
from six months to at least 10 years, or by making UTC predictable.

--
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.


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