[LEAPSECS] Standards of time zones -Brooks Harris

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <80159B27-DFC6-431C-819F-99107A1430B8 at noao.edu>, Rob Seaman writes:


>The "metaphor for the day" tag had my hopes up that this would be a metaphor

>for the concept of "day"...no such luck.  Not sure one should put much faith

>in a religious metaphor from a site called "antipope.org" :-)


Charles Stross is one of the most gifted and insightfull Science
Fiction writers of all time, and if you ever have a chance to hear
him give a presentation on the near (10-20 years) future, you should
not miss it for anything.  Afterwards, you will find yourself
grasping for any flaw you can insert into a crack in his argument,
eventually failing and resigning yourself to hope, feverishly, that
he is way too pessimistic.

A good introduction to his is this short story about coffee:

	http://www.antipope.org/charlie/fiction/coffee.html

After that, read "The Atrocity Archives" and "Rule 34"



>That said, POSIX is more like the Illuminati...or perhaps the

>Spanish Inquisition as in one of the comments.  Comparing it to the

>clarity and poetry of the Nicene Creed is absurd (and rather offensive).


No, from a organizational/comparative point of view, he is spot on.


>It commits the sin of despair to suggest that computing is too splintered to

>ever again have a prayer of putting things right.


When was the last time the car industry could agree to any substantial
change, unless some bigger power twisted their hand on their back ?

If the US Government imposes a standard it might happen, but as I
understand it, USGov is working dilligently to make time conform
to POSIX, not the other way around.

BTW: Who do you think was behind POSIX to begin with ?


> Rather, there have been ecumenical discussions throughout the

>history of Unix - for example my own modest experience of porting

>a large astronomy package to a "dual-universe" SysV/BSD hybrid in

>the mid-1980s.


A Pyramid by any chance ? :-)

I think their place would roughly similar to "Jews for Jesus" :-)


>Future community infrastructure - future computing communion, if you will -

> cannot be built on faulty physical models of the universe.


I'd agree to "should not", but evidence from all other technological
areas indicate that there is no mistake big enough that it cannot be
overlooked and rationalized.

(CH3CH2)4Pb in gasoline was just about the most efficient way to distribute
leads neuro-toxilogical effects to all children in the world for several
generations.

Industrialized junkfood is almost perfectly optimized to eliminate
all but sugar, salt and fat and starch from our diet.

And don't even get me started about television and a thought-paralysing
means of mass-subduction.


In an ideal world, run by people who all have the surname "phd",
this crap would not have happened.

But then again, in all likelyhood neither would a lot of other stuff
have, and certainly not Verdi Operas.

-- 
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.