[LEAPSECS] Bloomberg announced its smear

[Stephen Scott]

Hello Tom, Stephen;


On 2016-09-24 08:26, Tom Van Baak wrote:
> Stephen,
>
>> As I've been saying for years, what we need (desperately) is a
>> standard for smearing, aka 86400 subdivision days.
That's sort of where we were before there were leap seconds. The second 
used for UTC clocks was shifted slightly from the second SI.
> But that's part of the charm in smearing -- that there's no one way to do it, and you're free to modify it as you wish.
That's called anarchy.
>
>> My preference is UTC-SLS, but I don't really care so long as it is an agreed standard.
> UTC-SLS has always been a good example why an inflexible academic standard is a bad idea.
>
>> I know that many find smearing offensive, but its timet o move on and
>> get the standard written.
>>
>> Stephen
> Smearing is fine. It's a practical solution to an intractable problem. But forcing everyone to implement it the exact same way misses the point. You can't create a standard for your favorite set of time applications and then try to force it upon everyone else's time applications.
Smearing is fine if you don't depend on a second being a second.
I work in the broadcast industry where time synchronization is critical. 
Television is fundamentally developed as a synchronous process from 
glass to glass. Radio and TV broadcasts are a major means of 
disseminating time.

The problem is not the leap second. The problem is that every local 
authority is free to incorporate the leap second when and how they wish 
and even then end users deviate from that is that is not convenient. 
There is no international standard or even a convention that could be 
followed. The lack of these standards is what is promoting Smear Type 1, 
Smear Type 2, Smear Type 3, etc.

IMO the Microsoft Azure approach of shifting the UTC timescale forward 
or backward so that the leap second is incorporated at the end of the 
day in every local time zone. The timescale will have the exact same 
mathematical progression for all UTC offset time zones. Also the leap 
second will not be incorporated at a human activity critical time points 
such as the opening of a financial trading center.
>
> /tvb
>
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