[LEAPSECS] Standards of time zones -Brooks Harris

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <20140110064412.GB20400 at ucolick.org>, Steve Allen writes:


>I have asserted that POSIX does not want to know astronomy, does not

>want to track geophysics, [...]


You are right about that.


> that POSIX really wants to count atomic days

>rather than mean solar days,


And wrong about that.

POSIX want to track the timescale underlying civilian and legal
timekeeping, the timescale known as UTC, aka GMT, aka Worldtime,
aka Weltzeit etc, because computers are used to implement the
civil and legal society.

The idiots who standardized POSIX ignored leapseconds, (one of far
too many ways they qualify for the "idiot" IMO), and combined with
the 1000+ fold explosion in amount of shittly written software from
the confluence of the dot-com bubble and the leap-second hiatus is
why we have the trouble now.

Given sufficient resources, nothing prevents us from fixing this
"the right way", pressuming we can ever agree what that is.

Unfortunately "sufficient resources" are not available, not even close.

Therefore people, primarily the US DoD who has a lot of shitty
software of that vintage, including appearantly the entire control
system for at least one part of the nuclear triad, are pushing the
cheapest and simplest solution they can find:  "Drop leap seconds".

The only people identified which really care abut DUT1 are people
who point telescopes and dishes at extraterrstial objects.

-- 
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