[tz] New Yorker article on David Mills and NTP

Guy Harris gharris at sonic.net
Fri Oct 7 06:38:05 UTC 2022


On Oct 6, 2022, at 1:41 PM, Brooks Harris via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> 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

"Computer time" meaning what?

Time represented as a number of ticks since a fixed epoch, for various definitions of "tick" (which may or may not involve a fixed number of SI seconds per tick, and may not involve every N SI seconds, where N is not necessarily an integer and not necessarily >= 1, being counted)?

Time represented as year/month/day/hour/minute/second-possibly-including-fractions-of-a-second?

Or some other representation?

> and UTC with leap-seconds

Which, as far as I know, is the only type of UTC we have now.  (No, POSIX time, handed to localtime(), does not, as far as I know, yield anything corresponding to UTC, so it's not UTC without leap seconds.)


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