[LEAPSECS] joint BIPM/ITU meeting

[Ian Batten]

On 13 Sep 2013, at 14:57, Steve Allen <sla at ucolick.org> wrote:


> In stark contrast to the usual ITU-R pattern and the previous workshop

> held by BIPM at the Royal Society, the presentations for next week's

> workshop in Geneva are being published

> 

> http://www.itu.int/oth/R0A0E000096/en

> 

> As Mike Meyers used to say "Talk amongst yourselves".


The Japanese presentation is genuinely deranged.  A massively overblown sequence of slides intended to make you believe that running a signing service for documents is akin to launching a mission to Mars, and then the shocking and disturbing list of problems that leapseconds cause:

* an IRIG device output an extra second, 

* a groupware product that isn't referenced anywhere else in the presentation and appears to have nothing to do with the presentation at all had some problems the day before a leapsecond and that's obviously a leapsecond issue.  Do platforms supporting user-space groupware applications _really_ take different codepaths in the day prior to a leapsecond?  I wonder how many operating system instances running anything other than precision timing applications even know a leapsecond is impending?

* A Japanese social networking site which again isn't referenced anywhere else and appears to have nothing to do with the rest of the presentation ran a bit slow and was difficult to log in to the following day.  Again, no real evidence as to what this had to do with the leapsecond: as it's a LAMP application is seems a trifle unlikely that a social networking application would have leap-second dependant codepaths that are not taken  by other LAMP applications.

There are all sorts of reasons to debate leapseconds and their implications.  These aren't those reasons.  Why are the ITU discussing something so flimsy?

ian