NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Robin Stuart
Date: 2016 Dec 29, 13:29 -0800
Frank,
Maybe you can shed some light on some questions related to the leap second that have me wondering.
Why don’t servers run on TAI and maintain a time stamped table of the integer number of seconds that need to be subtracted to obtain UTC when they need to speak to humans? It can’t be a matter of global millisecond synchronicity if Google can adjust its server rate for their leap second hack you described.
Is it really such a monumental intellectual challenge to program for leap seconds or is this a matter of programmers wanting to simplify their lives? Things seem to have worked fine so far so at least some of them must be up to the task.
Could this be seen as something like the Y2K problem arising from short-sighted design in the past (e.g. adopting UTC rather than TAI)? If so it seems unreasonable to ask civil society adjust it’s time keeping practices in order to fix it.
Regards,
Robin Stuart
