[LEAPSECS] a big week for leaps at SG7 and WP7A

[Warner Losh]

On Sep 30, 2014, at 8:27 AM, Michael Spacefalcon <msokolov at ivan.Harhan.ORG> wrote:

> Tony Finch <dot at dotat.at> wrote:
> 
>> And I seem to remember from reading the materials that they also ignored
>> the cultural damage that was done by the introduction of leap seconds in
>> the first place, breaking a multi-thousand-year tradition of base 60
>> fractions, making all mechanical clocks obsolete, and so on.
> 
> Red herring, the problem you are describing only occurs if you feed
> the leap seconds "raw" directly to end users, which one should NOT do;
> instead the LSs need to be passed through a smoothing function like
> UTC-SLS or Leap Smear before being presented to non-technical end
> users.

So you are saying that the UTC standard is so broken that you have to
invent your own, which is not standardized by any standards body[*], to
get around it? UTC is the required time base for business and has some
odd quirks which mean that to comply with it you have to be an expert
on the esoteric quirks of UTC, like the 61 second minute. Saying that it
has to be sanitized before feeding it to the end user says implies that the
standard isn’t really a standard and you have to “fake it” by some weird
means to keep user’s happy.

Sounds rather damning indictment of the standard, if you ask me.

Warner

[*] UTS-SLS is not a standard, never has been standardized and a number
of variations based on who reinvented the idea and has no sanction for the
international standards bodies.
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