17 ms·
I'm honestly amazed to see so many people agree with this. Timestamps are exactly what we define them to be. There is no correct and incorrect. One option is
by zJlG 4y ago
I'm honestly amazed to see so many people agree with this.
Timestamps are exactly what we define them to be. There is no correct and incorrect.
One option is to have a system with arbitrary unpredictable leaps to keep it synchronized to within 1 second of the mean solar time over Greenwich, England. Every computer system that has to deal with time accurately needs a lookup table for leap seconds that is occasionally amended, with only a couple months warning in advance.
Another option is to just let the clock run at a constant rate. In this case only astronomers have to keep track of the difference between solar time and clock time (which they already do anyway).
The fact that the difference will increase to an hour after several hundred years is utterly irrelevant. If people in the future care, they can simply adjust the timezone definitions to compensate, since timezones are already adjusted all the time.