Leap Seconds Could Become Leap Minutes (nytimes.com) 103
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Later this month, delegations from around the world will head to a conference in Dubai to discuss international treaties involving radio frequencies, satellite coordination and other tricky technical issues. These include the nagging problem of the clocks. For 50 years, the international community has carefully and precariously balanced two different ways of keeping time. One method, based on Earth's rotation, is as old as human timekeeping itself, an ancient and common-sense reliance on the position of the sun and stars. The other, more precise method coaxes a steady, reliable frequency from the changing state of cesium atoms and provides essential regularity for the digital devices that dominate our lives.
The trouble is that the times on these clocks diverge. The astronomical time, called Universal Time, or UT1, has tended to fall a few clicks behind the atomic one, called International Atomic Time, or TAI. So every few years since 1972, the two times have been synced by the insertion of leap seconds — pausing the atomic clocks briefly to let the astronomic one catch up. This creates UTC, Universal Coordinated Time. But it's hard to forecast precisely when the leap second will be required, and this has created an intensifying headache for technology companies, countries and the world's timekeepers.
"Having to deal with leap seconds drives me crazy," said Judah Levine, head of the Network Synchronization Project in the Time and Frequency Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., where he is a leading thinker on coordinating the world's clocks. He is constantly badgered for updates and better solutions, he said: "I get a bazillion emails." On the eve of the next international discussion, Dr. Levine has written a paper that proposes a new solution: the leap minute. The idea is to sync the clocks less frequently, perhaps every half-century, essentially letting atomic time diverge from cosmos-based time for 60 seconds or even a tad longer, and basically forgetting about it in the meantime. The proposal from Levine may face opposition from vested interests and strong opinions in the international community -- notably, the Russians and the Vatican. "The head of the IBWM (or BIPM in French) said in November 2022 that Russia opposed the dropping of leap seconds because it wanted to wait until 2040," reports Ars Technica. "The nation's satellite positioning system, GLONASS, was built with leap seconds in mind, and reworking the system would seemingly be taxing."
"There's also the Vatican, which has concerned itself with astronomy since at least the Gregorian Calendar, and may also oppose the removal of leap seconds. The Rev. Paul Gabor, astrophysicist and vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group in Tucson, Arizona, has been quoted and cited as opposing the deeper separation of human and planetary time. Keeping proper time, Gabor wrote his 2017 book The Science of Time, is 'one of the oldest missions of astronomy.'"
"In the current Leap Second Debate, there are rational arguments, focused on practical considerations, and there is a certain unspoken unease, emerging from the symbolic substrata of the issues involved," Gabor writes.
The trouble is that the times on these clocks diverge. The astronomical time, called Universal Time, or UT1, has tended to fall a few clicks behind the atomic one, called International Atomic Time, or TAI. So every few years since 1972, the two times have been synced by the insertion of leap seconds — pausing the atomic clocks briefly to let the astronomic one catch up. This creates UTC, Universal Coordinated Time. But it's hard to forecast precisely when the leap second will be required, and this has created an intensifying headache for technology companies, countries and the world's timekeepers.
"Having to deal with leap seconds drives me crazy," said Judah Levine, head of the Network Synchronization Project in the Time and Frequency Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., where he is a leading thinker on coordinating the world's clocks. He is constantly badgered for updates and better solutions, he said: "I get a bazillion emails." On the eve of the next international discussion, Dr. Levine has written a paper that proposes a new solution: the leap minute. The idea is to sync the clocks less frequently, perhaps every half-century, essentially letting atomic time diverge from cosmos-based time for 60 seconds or even a tad longer, and basically forgetting about it in the meantime. The proposal from Levine may face opposition from vested interests and strong opinions in the international community -- notably, the Russians and the Vatican. "The head of the IBWM (or BIPM in French) said in November 2022 that Russia opposed the dropping of leap seconds because it wanted to wait until 2040," reports Ars Technica. "The nation's satellite positioning system, GLONASS, was built with leap seconds in mind, and reworking the system would seemingly be taxing."
"There's also the Vatican, which has concerned itself with astronomy since at least the Gregorian Calendar, and may also oppose the removal of leap seconds. The Rev. Paul Gabor, astrophysicist and vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group in Tucson, Arizona, has been quoted and cited as opposing the deeper separation of human and planetary time. Keeping proper time, Gabor wrote his 2017 book The Science of Time, is 'one of the oldest missions of astronomy.'"
"In the current Leap Second Debate, there are rational arguments, focused on practical considerations, and there is a certain unspoken unease, emerging from the symbolic substrata of the issues involved," Gabor writes.
Does slashdot have any editors? (Score:4, Insightful)
Another article on the same subject posted 8 hours prior and it's still on the front page.
Re:Does slashdot have any editors? (Score:5, Funny)
8 hour leap!
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For reference, there have been 18 leap seconds added since 1980, when the GPS time base was started. There have been 28 leap seconds since the Unix Epoch began in 1970.
The GPS system maintains a list of leap seconds so it can coordinate between GPS time and UTC. Unix just ignores leap seconds so Unix time is about 30 seconds off from UTC. Does that matter? Depends on what you are trying to do. Coordinate with others around the globe? Yeah, 28 seconds is important if everyone doesn't agree on how to han
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Unix time is not off from UTC, it's just bumpy around a leap second.
Unix time is simply-but-wrongly defined as having 86400 seconds per day, regardless of leap second presence. From your second link: "Leap seconds have the same Unix time as the second before it." Historically this was true; now, some implementations "smear" the leap second across a day-long period, making each second 1/86400th longer on average.
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Thanks! I saw the word "smear" in the discussion but didn't understand until now exactly what that meant. I love learning new things!
Re: Does slashdot have any editors? (Score:2)
Does slashdot have any physicists? (Score:4, Interesting)
The argument from the Vatican is scientifically utterly meaningless because thanks to relativity there literally is no "human time": every human has their own time because the universe itself does not define a single universal clock common to every frame of reference. You'd think they of all people would have more respect for the fundamental nature of the universe.
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The Vatican chiming in makes more sense when you remember it is not a meritocracy. If anything the structure of the church goes through great effort to drive great numbers of talent away and amplify the views of those who largely through circumstance have risen inside a popularity contest. It's not about the pursuit of "better" but the upholding of an in-group. See the endless amount of sex scandals, facilitation of child abusers and geriatric freakouts at suggestion of any resemblance of female parity of a
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The Vatican chiming in makes more sense when you remember it is not a meritocracy.
I know that the Vatican is not a meritocracy: it's a hypocracy, I was just pointing that out. Still, steeped in history and tradition as they are you might have thought they'd remember Galileo and try to avoid repeating the same mistake.
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So they definitely have some history with time keeping.
Yes, so do the druids at Stone Henge but we would hardly listen to what they have to say about _modern_ time keeping any more than we should listen to the Vatican. Claiming that there is some "human time" that needs to be kept in sync is a stupid, unscientific argument.
So the narrative that the Church is anti-science is not really based on facts.
I never said it was anti-science. It is simply pro-Catholic church above all else...including Christianity, let alone science. Yes, Galileo was more than a bit of an arrogant jerk but nowhere near as bad as the pope at the time! Galileo was
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Slashdot has a tradition of repeating big stories 8 hours and 16 hours later in order to reach all users.
Another point, this is so mainstream this made the NY Times.
I absolutely do not get why this is an issue... (Score:2)
I absolutely do not get why this is an issue... Humans don't really care until it messes with the sunset.
Machines just count time. We already create machines to deal with the shit-show that is DST. Create the machines to give the 23rd hour of the day 61 seconds instead of 60.
"oh but we don't know when that's going to occur"
You can't create a protocol for dealing with interrupts for machines?
Re: I absolutely do not get why this is an issue.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: I absolutely do not get why this is an issue. (Score:3)
First of all, absolute time exists and second, we live in a circle-based system, base12 is perfectly reasonable and functional for all sorts of maths with circles
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Or if that isn't enough one day is based on one rotation of our planet and the year is based on one Earth revolution around the Sun.
-circles all the way around
Re: I absolutely do not get why this is an issue. (Score:1)
60 has more useful factors than 10 or 100.
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Quick and without a calculator, what's 60 to the power of 12?
Re: I absolutely do not get why this is an issue. (Score:2)
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True, that's why we have multiple units of time with increasingly unwieldy names and quite arbitrary relationships. Much like we do with inches, feet, miles...
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Be honest, when did you ever need a fraction other than half an hour or a quarter hour? And when someone tells you that they're ready in 5 minutes, do you keep track?
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If we have somewhere we're supposed to be that was arranged beforehand and 5 minutes is within the fudge factor allocated for by our departure time but 10 minutes is cutting it close and 15 minutes is right out, then yes I keep track.
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I'm not saying DST was implemented perfectly, but at my longitude it has a very positive impact on life.
Your suggestion about the 23rd hour of the day having 61 seconds would be difficult to implement - as wall clocks, grandfather clocks, alarm clocks, microwaves, non-digital wrist watches, etc. would all start to be wrong. Changing these manually twice a year seems like the easier approach to me.
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You changing your work schedule will have the exact same impact without forcing everyone else to mess up a natural standard.
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I agree. The same argument can be applied for abolishing time zones.
Re: I absolutely do not get why this is an issue.. (Score:2)
Most systems already do a 61st second in some form, representation of the leap second doesnâ(TM)t matter. The problem is people canâ(TM)t be bothered to program in the leap second so shit breaks when your OS provides you the perfectly reasonable 23:60 or however you want to do that. Everyone should just use Unixtime in their database and do library conversions only when humans need to see it; the problem is too many people parse time as text.
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Yeah, sure. That's really fucked up. They used to define it both as seconds since 1970 and 86400 second days, then they realized that was self-contradictory, so now POSIX says:
So, if to-the-second actual time is importa
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No, Unix time starts in 1970 and has every second since excluding leap seconds, which are simply a second that lasts 2 SI seconds (or can be represented with milliseconds if you need the accuracy) so as to maintain the 86400 seconds per day representation.
For MOST of what people need to do, Unixtime with a proper date library is way more accurate than anything else out there unless you need astronomical type precisions. The problem with leap seconds only represents itself when you need to revert from a huma
Re: I absolutely do not get why this is an issue.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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The leap second causes a lot of software issues that we keep stumbling on. As pointed out by Linus [wired.com], there are code paths in the Linux kernel that just never run until we hit on specific combinations of particular operations and leap seconds. Pretty much since 2012, every year a leap second is added, a new bug is found. The one in 2012 was found to be with hrtimer, the 2016 one was a set of particular conditions made the leap second a non-monotonic operation which bubbled up to DNS TTL issues.
So yeah we c
Leap Seconds find Bugs. (Score:4, Interesting)
>> every year a leap second is added, a new bug is found.
Good. So leap seconds are actually useful for finding time related bugs, making code cleaner.
With leap minutes, the bugs would accumulate undiscovered, and all explode at once.
Re: Leap Seconds find Bugs. (Score:2)
The bugs appear because the leap second scenario exists. And yes, the leap minute scenario with its existence will cause bugs too. But it's a 60-1 ratio. No scenarios, no bugs.
While the minute based bugs are a little bigger, the increase in impact is just a little more than the second's version. Also, you have more options with a leap minute; you can put out a single patch to address that singleton; you can just turn off the system for that minute and let it catch up to everything first before it starts
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>> just turn off the system for that minute and let it catch up
HAHAHAHA. Yeah. No.
You never worked with anything in a critical system.
"just turn off the ventilator, and reboot the patient a minute later..... perhaps....."
>> With the second, you more or less have to maintain a separate lineage of code that can be impacted with every component update downstream.
Nope, wrong.
1) it is more than one line.
2) you have to maintain both leap seconds, and leap minutes (even if it is only to maintain much n
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Having read all of the comments posted above as of this moment, let me respond.
Ignore celestial time: That's just retarded because the most important thing to everyone is: When is day time (to get stuff done)? If daytime was constantly creeping out of sync with what we would consider 'normal daytime' it would be a mess. Yes, it would be a slow creep but, why? Humans care about that, machines [generally] don't. Let the machine have the creep.
Metric time: That's retarded too and was already tried. Even the
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"All the world would have to do is make work hours from 7-4 and you'll get the same effect as year round DST. If you want to keep the changing time, go back to the old concept of summer vs winter hours.)
I had a job that did have 7-4 as the working hours. And the hardware store already has summer and winter hours. It's in a farm town, the sun rules. So yes, other rules work fine.
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The entire problem is basically lazy programmers who want to pretend unix time is utc and let someone else deal with the problems*. It isn't. Changing to leap minutes actually makes this problem worse because it is even easier to ignore. Also the it being too easy to ignore is genuinely getting worse even with leap seconds. The idea was that there would be a leap second around once every 1-3 years, so everyone would deal with them regularly and it would be no big deal. But the Earth's rotation unexpect
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The entire problem is basically lazy programmers who want to pretend unix time is utc and let someone else deal with the problems*. It isn't. Changing to leap minutes actually makes this problem worse because it is even easier to ignore. Also the it being too easy to ignore is genuinely getting worse even with leap seconds. The idea was that there would be a leap second around once every 1-3 years, so everyone would deal with them regularly and it would be no big deal. But the Earth's rotation unexpectedly stopped slowing down, and then in 2020, started speeding up. (see this plot where the jumps are leap seconds [wikipedia.org]) So there was no leap second between 1999 and 2006 and there hasn't been one since 2017 and there is unlikely to be one soon. There is actually discussion of whether we will need a negative leap second. That is in the spec, but has never been used and is almost never implemented because nobody thought it could happen. So the whole discussion of a leap minute is either essential or almost irrelevant because a negative leap second would break everything but we may not need one for 15 years or more.
* The problem being that the number of SI seconds between unix time of noon Jan 1 2020 (1577880000) and noon Jan 1 2010 (1262347200) is not (1577880000 - 1262347200) = 315532800, it is 315532803 SI seconds (including three leap seconds). i.e. you cannot subtract unix times to get a long time interval. Just like you can't subtract year*365+dayofyear to get the number of days between two dates. Unix time is not the number of SI seconds since 1970, it is the number of (utc) days since 1970 times 24*60*60. Exactly when those ticks happened on any given day is not well defined in the spec and different implementers have made different decisions (some repeat the last second of the day, some stretch the second for some amount of time before and/or after the leap second, sometimes the issue is ignored and the clock was just reset at some arbitrary time). Even the man page for "date" is misleading because the author was too lazy to sort this out and explain it. The simple fact is that a unix second and an SI second are not the same thing and the unix second is not even a uniform measure of time.
I am a fan of leap seconds, since I think they are a good solution to the problem caused by the rotation rate of the Earth not being uniform. Also, I agree that the difficulty in implementing leap seconds correctly is due to lazy programmers. To alleviate this difficulty, I have written a software library which manipulates time values, taking leap seconds into account. Lazy programmers are welcome to use my library, which I have made available under a free license. See Avoid Using POSIX time_t for telli [systemeyes...rstore.com]
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Given that some of the weirder shaped timezones have places where midday is hours away from 12:00, it's already enough of a mess that increasing the divergence by a fraction of a second each year would be negligible in comparison.
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Relativity greatly complexifies UNIX time. It would be a perfectly valid solution otherwise. The effects are already important in an airplane, and still more so in GPS, both of which do have means of correcting for it.
Of course it adds to the complexity of other ways of measuring time as well, on top of their own complexity and/or inaccuracy.
Vatican opinion (Score:2)
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This is a ridiculous statement. The Roman Catholic Church have not been known for their knowledge or acceptance of science (for example, read up on Galileo). They should have no say on further changes, especially since they are not scientists, and only a portion of the people alive today are practising their religion.
Although the history is more complex than this, if I recall it was the ancient Egyptians that decided on a 24 hour day. The division of the hour into 60 minutes and of the minute into 60 second
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It was invented by Greg Brady - with contributions from his sister Jan.
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We are NOT talking about calendars here (name of months, how many days they have, how many days there are in the year, etc.). We are talking about adding a minute to a day. No changes to the calendar are required.
I don't know how you could confuse my statement "ancient Egyptians that decided on a 24 hour day" to me stating that the Egyptians defined the Gregorian calendar (which we know is not true). You clearly lack reading and comprehension skills.
Take your religious propaganda and shove it.
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I'm an atheist, BTW. The idea of "leap intervals" came out of the various Roman calendars. I didn't even think that's something controversial.
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So to summarise:
The Egyptians decided on a 24 hour day.
The Babylonians decided an hour should have 60 minutes, and each minute should have 60 seconds.
The catholic church came up with the Gregorian calendar.
The catholic church did NOT define how many hours/minutes/seconds there are in a day.
The leap second concept was first introduced in 1972 by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) and had NOTHING to do with the catholic church.
This post is about removing leap second adjustme
the railroads came up with time zones! (Score:2)
the railroads came up with time zones!
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Your history is almost correct. Leap second were originally the responsibility of the International Time Bureau (BIH), then passed to IERS at the start of 1988. IERS was created in 1987; it added the "and Reference Systems" to its long name in 2003 but kept its acronym.
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The idea of "leap intervals" came out of the various Roman calendars. I didn't even think that's something controversial.
It actually was controversial in Roman times. Originally, their priests were in charge of announcing when intercalation periods were needed, based on astronomical observations they were supposed to make. (Their nominal year was many days short of a real year, and they were supposed to add a whole leap month as needed.) Unfortunately, the priests also had political affiliations, and tended to adjust the service terms of officials by adding or omitting leap months. Due to these shenanigans, the Roman calendar
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We are not talking about large leap intervals by adding months/weeks - which changes the entire calendar.
We are talking about changing from semi-frequent leap seconds to more-rare leap minutes.
Decisions made by people many hundreds+ years ago by now are irrelevant as we know how exactly long it takes the earth to rotate around the sun, and we're also aware of the different passing of time on earth vs. on orbiting satellites. The Vatican is irrelevant to this topic.
Your original post title is "Vatican opinio
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You do know which church is in the Vatican right? And you still think their opinion matters on this topic?
Are you being intentionally combative? Yes, our "Western Calendar", the Gregorian Calendar [wikipedia.org], came from what we currently call the Roman Catholic Church. Compensatory and periodic adjustments to the calendar originated from this system. It wasn't in seconds, but originally in years (the leap year)
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Are you being intentionally combative?
No, just logical. In the total absence of your logic.
I will also now point out again, that when I said "The Egyptians decided on a 24 hour day" has nothing to do with your statements:
Where know exactly where the GREGORIAN calendar came from, and it wasn't from Egypt.
And your new statement:
It wasn't in seconds, but originally in years (the leap year). This isn't something that came from Egypt.
I never said these things.
I will also point out that leap years/months/whatever decided hundreds+ of years ago are irrelevant now. We currently use leap seconds, and it has nothing to do with the Gregorian calendar. The Vatican's opinion is completely irrelevant, and they deserve no seat at any table wher
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It requires changing what a "day" is defined as.
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The Gregorian calendar was an improvement on the Julian calendar. If you keep going back in history, you might end up in Egypt.
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Well, if that's a criterion now, we gotta invite some other religions too, considering the names of weekdays and months...
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Compared to other other denominations catholicism is a lot more science accepting.
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Why? Does a God second need to be added somewhere too?
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Depends on how you define "our calendar." The Gregorian calendar was a tweaking of the Julian one (which is still in use in some places, along with other calendars). It just deleted an occasional leap day. But, if we're counting leap time in what's "our calendar," then the use of leap seconds is a tweaking of the Gregorian calendar, which makes that no longer "our calendar" by the same logic that would make the Gregorian distinct from J
God's opinion (Score:2)
The Roman Church created our calendar
Yes, but God created relativity (whether the Vatican likes it or not) and that says that time is relative and there is no universal clock that is the same in all inertial frames so at a fundamental level there is no one "human" time. Perhaps the Vatican should reflect on that a little before we have another Galileo moment.
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Why should they have a say in it even assuming it's something they "created"? Do they hold IP? Or are they in any way holding the countries of the world hostage? Or, can we interpret "some say" as freedom of speech? How much sway does "some say" represent? Something on the order of magnitude of a Slashdot post? That's "some say" too.
How will this affect (Score:2)
our timeline? If we're out of phase alignment with the others....it could spell trouble. Or worst, disaster.
add an minute each day? that is bound to brake aut (Score:1)
add an minute each day? that is bound to brake automaton in some way and force people to manual update clocks each day that don't auto sync.
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Instead, how about a minute every few decades like the article suggests? It corrects the same source of accumulated error but at frequency that is an order of magnitude longer.
Time is a huge pain in the ass. As we experience time under gravity on Earth slightly differently than time in other parts of the universe. We measure TAI (International Atomic Time) by taking a bunch of atomic clocks and averaging them in an agreed way. It is nice for measurement because it doesn't have any leap seconds. But it's kin
Re: add an minute each day? that is bound to brake (Score:2)
Because programmers will just pass the buck for managing time properly to the next generation, kind of like Y2K and Y2K36 and other variations on the theme. The entire problem here is in a nutshell that we do not have a (nice) standard for representing variable time representation from a continuous time source. The best weâ(TM)ve come up with is a lookup table and not everyone uses it. The proposal of leap minute is just sticking your head in the sand and hoping it averages out far enough into the futu
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Because it's a fucking stupid idea. It doesn't "fix" any perceived problem, it just kicks the can down the road and gives people (primarily software developers, who can't seem to figure out timekeeping) an excuse for not fixing their shit now. And, when the "leap minute" would come, it would be a BFD. Do you think Google will still be around to smear that leap minute across an hour (that was another fucking stupid idea made to avoid actually
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In my opinion, leap smear is a practical solution.
Outside of advanced University-level science experiments, nobody need a second to be exact same length of time as long as everyone agree with each other what time it is. The business world only needs everything report the same (UTC) time. Leap smear lengthens a second, but the amount it lengthens is still within what possibly occur to any cheap quartz watch in reality. Without atomic clocks, we can't even perceive leap smear.
The current leap second sche
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Leap smear is a terrible solution for anyone who cares how long a second is, and if anyone doesn't implement it the same way then they end up an unpredictable amount off from everyone else, which is important for high-resolution timestamps.
The simpler solution is to use TAI internally and use the leap second table when converting to/from civil time. Or to just drop leap seconds entirely because it doesn't matter that much if the sun is directly overhead of Greenwich observatory or Big Ben or the Great Pyra
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Leap smear is a terrible solution for anyone who cares how long a second is, and if anyone doesn't implement it the same way then they end up an unpredictable amount off from everyone else, which is important for high-resolution timestamps.
The simpler solution is to use TAI internally and use the leap second table when converting to/from civil time. Or to just drop leap seconds entirely because it doesn't matter that much if the sun is directly overhead of Greenwich observatory or Big Ben or the Great Pyramid when the clock strikes noon UTC.
I utilize several communication systems, and many of the ones that operate at/below the noise floor need as much accuracy as we can muster.
Quick description - when doing noise floor comms, the intelligence is usually split into tones, and transmitted repeatedly. "Hello World" is taken by the codec, and transmitted some agreed upon number of times, then reassembled by the receiving station(s). The number of times it is retransmitted determines just how deep into the noise floor it can pick up a message.
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Why would you use UTC for anything precise. Do you care that much about the rotation of the Earth? I'd care more about frequencies and focus on TAI instead. When you present data in a user interface you can also patch in the leap seconds/minutes from a table to humanize it.
Leap smearing is already defined, and there is an range of integer seconds where leap seconds applies. Once the leap process is done you're back on the integer second delta from TAI that is easier. During the smear you can calculate the e
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Why would you use UTC for anything precise.
Given that the transmissions are worldwide, everyone needs to be on the same time worldwide. So UTC works just fine. We don't need super precision, we just all need to be a bit sub-second. We use UTC synced so that worldwide, all stations are receiving during the same receive interval and transmitting during the transmit interval.
Depending on how deep we are working into the noise floor, the receive and transmit times are rather long. some several minutes in duration for digging real deep. If you aren't
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If leap smear is standardized to be the default, TAI will remain available for tasks that care sub-second precision of how long a second is or how far away is 2 timestamps.
Yeah, but why? We have something that works, it is an intrinsic property of some systems and will break them. So it hardly makes sense to reduce accuracy, and have two separate systems. We spend years gaining accuracy and throw it away because some programmers want to avoid work?
You could maybe write a paper on how this will be an improved and more accurate system. I'll read it.
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You already need extra code to handle leap second if you don't use TAI. So with leap smear standardized, most software that don't need such sub-second accuracy in the first place will no longer need to worry about software breakage due to leap second, while those who need the accuracy can switch their code to handle leap smear, or use TAI.
Leap second was introduced by 1972, whereas UNIX started development in 1969. Before 1972, the international standard for UTC was "rubber second", an uglier form of lea
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More explanation:
In distant future, either we fixed the Earth and make it spin with the desired speed with mean solar day get 86400 SI seconds perpetually, or 1 leap second per year will not be enough. Software that assume there will be at most 1 leap second per year will break, just like how currently software that aren't aware of leap second will break if you feed it a time data with leap second.
The only way for future-proof system is separate those that care sub-second accuracy using the time as cal
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> Not quite.
Let's all try to stay on the same page here instead of debating semantics of words like "derived" versus "basis".
UTC is the time-scale maintained by the BIPM, with assistance from the IERS, which forms the basis of a coordinated dissemination of standard frequencies and time signals. It corresponds exactly in rate with TAI but differs from it by an integer number of seconds. The UTC scale is adjusted by the insertion or deletion of seconds (positive or negative leap- seconds) to ensure approximate agreement with UT1.
— ITU-R TF.460-6
So yes. UTC and TAI are related in their rates. I never denied that.
UT1 is used in this Recommendation, since it corresponds directly with the angular position of the Earth around its axis of diurnal rotation.
At the end of the day, UTC is not physically measured but it is defined by a standard. You can calculate it from TAI, which has components that are physically measured.
Little and often or lots and rarely? (Score:1)
Leap seconds happen every few years and while they may be a chore, they are a familiar chore and we can learn how to deal with them.
What are the chances that if we move to a leap minute every century or so we'll spend the next 75 years kicking the problem down the road, 20 years panicking about the upcoming massive change and 5 years working to replace or fix all the systems that don't support a leap minute? Y2K again anyone?
Better to properly handle leap seconds now and for evermore I think.
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Leap seconds happen every few years and while they may be a chore, they are a familiar chore and we can learn how to deal with them.
What are the chances that if we move to a leap minute every century or so we'll spend the next 75 years kicking the problem down the road, 20 years panicking about the upcoming massive change and 5 years working to replace or fix all the systems that don't support a leap minute? Y2K again anyone?
Better to properly handle leap seconds now and for evermore I think.
Exactly. What is worse, this concept of "It's just too harrrrd" is lame, and wrecking a world wide system that just works for the sake of making some guy get less email.
And as we see already, with all the different responses, we stand an excellent chance of returning to early railroad days, where every town had its own time system. Well, probably not that bad, but stuff I do requires people all over the world to be on one system, accurately timed - that runs successfully - leap seconds and all.
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If we go to leap minutes, odds are pretty good that the people who did the last one will be retired by the time the next one rolls around.
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"Updating the clock" every several-th year means it's an issue most PHBs/ system managers will encounter several times "on the way up" - probably drawing the "short straw" to be at the data centre over New Years Eve/ Day, "just in case something goes wrong with our systems". And when they're promoted, they will fix the short straws so their replacements draw the New Year graveyard shift on a regular basis. Because shit obeys the law of gravity.
Move that to something that happens onc
Kicking the can (Score:3)
"We don't want to deal with it, so we propose that we all ignore it. Let someone else deal with it long after we've all retired."
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Aka "2 digits for the year is enough, by the time Y2K rolls around, I'll be in retirement... or better, close to it and get a shitload of money to fix ancient code that none of the young developers can even read anymore."
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That is not even close to how it was decided to use a 2 digit year.
I was there at the time, the choice was either a 4 digit year or much larger disks. When disk size were in Kb, the choice was was easy. When Mb disks came out, going to YYYY still was not a choice unless you want to spend millions in today's USD for more space. Also no one ever thought their programs would still be in use in 1999
When we finally got 256Mb disks, where I was, standards were made to slowly move to YYYY for new development in
Re: Kicking the can (Score:2)
Nope
The usage of two-digit years was a leftover from the days when 80 column punch cards were the primary means of data entry and often storage. That hard limit meant those two characters saved could be added to length of last name or dollar amount field.
Those cards were also the reason for COBOL's 80 (72) character per line format and the green screen 80 columns.
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Aka "2 digits for the year is enough, by the time Y2K rolls around, I'll be in retirement... or better, close to it and get a shitload of money to fix ancient code that none of the young developers can even read anymore."
Damn straight! My own version of that is "No one uses radios any more, so no point in learning anything but digital."
Of course they forget that that smartphone they are welded to is a radio, and everything wireless is a radio, and those digital signals in your computer - RF that tries to be a radio.
We're having problems getting an intern for me. Ya gotta know some electromagnetics to get started. It's the old problem - people with some RF skill often don't have the social chops, and people with the s
Can I propose the leap article? (Score:2)
just make it a leap hour already (Score:2)
Time zones are generally one hour wide. ...
So people are used to one-hour offsets, computers have one-hour offset code,
The people who care about a 1-second offset between wall-clock time and astronomical orientation are likely to use finer angular offsets anyway.
Leap seconds are added complexity for all that do not achieve the objective for the few.
KISS
Where's the Daylight Savings Time biannual article (Score:2)
\o/ (Score:1)
In the past, people were looking forwards, attempting to make the best furniture or timekeeping system the current tech allowed.
Now we have the antique mindset, where we look backwards to use old techniques even though better ones exist.
If atomic clocks were available back then, they would have been
Fuck it (Score:2)
Re: Fuck it (Score:2)
No, because there's no way to fit that into the immutable TimeCube.
UTC and local time (Score:2)
If Leap Seconds become Leap Minutes (Score:2)
If Leap Seconds become Leap Minutes it is a sign that inflation is totally out of hand.
why not just divide everything into units of ten (Score:2)
....since metric advocates seem certain that's always the best way to measure everything?
Just stop sincic. (Score:1)
Keep your own time (Score:2)
I'm not sure about the merit of leap minutes, but if obstruction from russia is the only issue, let the murderous, genocidal, imperialist country keep their own time however they want. They're free to be off a few seconds from everyone else and noone in the other countries will give a damn. And they can get the fuck out of Ukraine. Same goes for the vatican, they have divine authority over their own time. Noone else will care