[tz] New Yorker article on David Mills and NTP

[Brooks Harris]

I would add that Posix relies on the c standard, and tillions of devices 
have only 86400 holes into which only 86400 seconds per day can go. It's 
infeasible to retrofit an extra hole into those systems to accommodate 
that 86401th positive leap-second. And some hole will be left empty if 
there is a negative leap-second. Computer time and UTC with leap-seconds 
are incommensurate and we're probably just going to have to live with it 
for quite a while.
-Brooks

On 2022-10-03 3:58 PM, Steve Allen via tz wrote:
> On Mon 2022-10-03T15:45:59-0400 Garrett Wollman via tz hath writ:
>> And of course both communities end up having to paper over the mistake
>> that the POSIX committee made with regard to leap seconds, but do it
>> in different, not entirely compatible ways.
> The POSIX committee did not make a mistake about leap seconds.
> They had no choice.
> Doing anything else would have required the existence of an authority
> who had already created a robust scheme for communicating the list of
> past and future leap seconds.  No such authority was ever funded, and
> that was because the leap second itself resulted from earlier
> instances of failure to communicate.
>
> --
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