[LEAPSECS] [time-nuts] Leap second to be introduced at midnight UTC December 31 this year

[Tom Van Baak]

Steve Allen wrote:
> This idea pushes extra complexity into every implementation of low
> level kernel-space software, firmware, and hardware.  That's nice as a
> policy for full employment of programmers, but it's hard to justify by
> any other metric.  Instead those low level places should be as simple
> as possible, and that means making the underlying precision time
> scale, and thus any broadcast distributions of a precision time scale,
> as simple as possible.
> 
> The complexity for translating precision time in seconds (for
> machines) to calendar time in days (for humans) belongs in the
> less-critical and easier-testable outer layers of software which do
> user-space presentation, internationalization, and GUI which can be
> broadly shared between many hardware implementations.

Hi Steve,

Wow, that's most succinct two paragraph argument I've read for why we shouldn't have leap seconds at all. Where were you the past decade when this level of passion and clarity in the ITU debate was needed ;-)

/tvb