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Easy, we just kill off the idea of leap seconds. Someone please convince Russia and UK to agree so we can do it.
by feld 11y ago
Easy, we just kill off the idea of leap seconds. Someone please convince Russia and UK to agree so we can do it.
- LeoPanthera 11y agoNo thank you. Just store times on computers as $epoch+$offset and then convert to UTC when displayed to the user. That way, only the display routine has to care about leap seconds and it won't break anything.
- repsilat 11y agoIf you mean "UNIX time", you'll be disappointed -- UNIX time is not the number of seconds since the epoch, it is also leap-second adjusted. It stops when a leap second happens to make sure there are exactly 86400 UNIX seconds between every midnight (so you can do divmod calculations on timestamps.) Maybe you were suggesting an improvement to UNIX time, though, in which case I think the grandparent and I would get behind your proposal.
- LeoPanthera 11y agoYeah I know about unix time and that isn't what I meant. It never made sense to me. Just have a monotonic timer and an epoch, and worry about UTC and leap seconds in the view.
- cbd1984 11y ago> Easy, we just kill off the idea of leap seconds. OK, now everyone who cares how much time has passed in terms of the Earth's rotation needs to keep a time separate from everyone else. Astronomers come to mind, for example.
- repsilat 11y agoIf anyone needs to know about the Earth's rotation that precisely they probably - don't rely on their laptop's system clock, - don't use UTC either because of minor rotational noise/drift and the discontinuity around the leap-second, and - find the whole 24-hour clock thing a little useless, not being seasonally adjusted etc. I bet they'd prefer TAI to UTC (or even "Google time"), because they've probably got their own timekeeping systems that will probably interact more smoothly (heh) with it. More to the point, there are approximately zero astronomers on Earth, and approximately seven billion non-astronomers. Even if astronomers do prefer UTC, it's better to make them have their own systems to add or subtract twenty-something seconds from TAI than forcing all of my timekeeping devices to have a database of historical leap-seconds and an internet connection to hear about new ones. Not to mention the fact that I can't write down what the time will be in UTC in 86400 * 1000 seconds... Absolutely ridiculous.
- Dylan16807 11y agoIn terms of Earth's rotation, you start out hopelessly off because of time zones, so worrying about a few seconds either way is not a problem.