[LEAPSECS] New terminology will be needed.

[Steve Allen]

On Thu 2012-01-05T17:40:09 +0000, Zefram hath writ:

> I think the point is to have a term for TAI - 35 s, or whatever the

> formula ends up being.  We'll need to distinguish between these time

> scales at least:


but wait, there's more

The ATSC-Mobile DTV Standard defines the AT epoch as
1980-01-06T00:00:00 UTC, refers to it as the GPS epoch, and uses the
language GPS seconds and GPS time.
http://www.atsc.org/cms/standards/a153/a_153-Part-2-2009.pdf

And the IEEE 1588 (PTP) uses TAI seconds from an epoch two seconds
offset from 1970-01-01 UTC such that PTP time is what is expected as
the value of POSIX time_t for a system which wants to use the "right"
zoneinfo files.

No matter what the ITU-R does later this month there are going to be
numerous parallel time scales in use.  It's just a question of how
many, and how their specification documents will next be rewritten
in order to clarify what means what.

--
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