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

[Steve Allen]

On Tue 2014-09-30T10:29:26 -0600, Warner Losh hath writ:
> 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[*],

Yes.

That's what GPS did.
That's what POSIX did.
That's what IEEE 1588 did.
That's what BeiDou did.
That's what the ATSC did for US television.
That's what Google did.

I am not sure that ITU qualifies as a standards body.
It does not have a two-interoperable-implementations rule like IETF.
When ITU describes things that industry has already proved, it works.
In the case of UTC with leap seconds ITU prescribed something which
had never been implemented by time providers and time consumers.
The drama of this next year is whether they will do that again.

But I think the ITU is powerless in one regard.  The nature of UTC has
been a 50 year long flame war where various persons and international
organizations have chosen to ignore what others have said about UTC.
Unless all parties get access to some time scale that works for their
needs I doubt that it will ever be possible to create a unanimous
technical agreement that includes the term UTC.

--
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