Leap-second decision delayed by eight years
1–10 of 24 posts
Re: Leap-second decision delayed by eight years
#2Why are these options mutually exclusive? Is there some technical limitation here preventing us from having one monotonic clock and a separate orbital clock?
Re: Leap-second decision delayed by eight years
#3Why are these options mutually exclusive? Is there some technical limitation here preventing us from having one monotonic clock and a separate orbital clock?
Both of those already exist, and in fact the GPS system uses the orbital clock, for obvious reasons. People are arguing about the default... always fruitless.
Re: Leap-second decision delayed by eight years
#4Why are these options mutually exclusive? Is there some technical limitation here preventing us from having one monotonic clock and a separate orbital clock?
The UNIX 'zoneinfo' format is flexible enough to incorporate second offsets, so this can be done on many systems today (Linux, *BSD (the latter including, I assume, OS X)).
The system clock would be kept in TAI (or maybe GPS, which is a fixed number of seconds different than TAI?) and the local time is calculated by applying a timezone offset in seconds.
Re: Leap-second decision delayed by eight years
#5"Once the drift is appreciable, the argument goes, a correction could be added much further down the line, perhaps by adding a leap minute or hour."
Well.. if the leap second is any lesson, that should go smoothly and be really easy to implement.
Re: Leap-second decision delayed by eight years
#6as long as it is still monotonically increasing i don't really mind the labeling... =D
Re: Leap-second decision delayed by eight years
#7"Once the drift is appreciable, the argument goes, a correction could be added much further down the line, perhaps by adding a leap minute or hour." Well.. if the leap second is any lesson, that should go smoothly and be really easy to implement.
True, although for the same reasons that "fail fast" is sometimes better than the alternatives, a "leap hour"---being much easier to perceive than a leap second---may be easier to work with. At least then you'll know if someone's off because they didn't leap, vs some sort of clock drift or other error.
Re: Leap-second decision delayed by eight years
#8Why are these options mutually exclusive? Is there some technical limitation here preventing us from having one monotonic clock and a separate orbital clock?
No, but there's always going to be a standard time, and that one slowly becomes meaningless if we let it drift out of sync with the Earth.
Re: Leap-second decision delayed by eight years
#9UTC does not bear an appreciably worse relationship to my local solar time than GMT. For that matter, at the granularity of seconds my time zone is pretty far off from solar time and 20 miles down the road is about as bad but an hour earlier.
Clocks are useful for coordinating human events. The idea that they have some deep relationship to the cosmos is a conceit as useless as the geocentric solar system model.
Re: Leap-second decision delayed by eight years
#10"Once the drift is appreciable, the argument goes, a correction could be added much further down the line, perhaps by adding a leap minute or hour." Well.. if the leap second is any lesson, that should go smoothly and be really easy to implement.
True, although for the same reasons that "fail fast" is sometimes better than the alternatives, a "leap hour"---being much easier to perceive than a leap second---may be easier to work with. At least then you'll know if someone's off because they didn't leap, vs some sort of clock drift or other error.
Wait - for "fail fast" reasons, we're going to do something important every few thousand years, instead of about once a year?!