[tz] New Yorker article on David Mills and NTP

[dpatte]

I follow numerous astronomy lists, and there is serious discussion at the IAU (International Astronomical Union) to get rid of leap seconds altogether, and possibly replace them by something else, perhaps leap minutes (or even leap hours) - making them far less common. I believe they expect to make a decision soon, though they have been discussing it for years and had planned to make a decision 2 or 3 years ago.

In this case we would add or drop a minute (or hour), when UT1 and UTC were more than a half-minute (or half-hour) out of sync. The concept with hours is that it would work more like a day-light savings transition, and named UTC1, UTC2, etc.

Had this been done originally, there would have been no leap-second transitions up to now at all, in fact. 



----- Original Message -----
 From: Fred Gleason via tz [mailto:tz at iana.org]
 To: "Time Zone Database discussion" <tz at iana.org>
 Sent: Tue, 4 Oct 2022 13:05:49 -0400
 Subject: Re: [tz] New Yorker article on David Mills and NTP


On Oct 4, 2022, at 12:07, Steve Allen via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:



The implementation of time in computing systems is fragile because itis based on an unrealistic notion that clocks are always right andnever need to be reset.
I suspect that one of the primary reasons that such time resets have been so fraught (and hence bitterly opposed by many ‘operations’ type folks) is their relative rarity. There have been only 27 leap seconds introduced since 1972, which means that deployed systems rarely have to cope with one and thus get the inevitable bugs identified and shaken out.
 
It would almost be beneficial if such an event would occur at least once per annum, to allow the ‘reset’ logic to be regularly exercised.
 
Cheers!
 
 

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