[ntp:questions] Re: no more leap seconds?

Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder grazdan at fortytwo.ch
Tue Aug 9 18:17:39 UTC 2005


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Clinging to sanity, moi mumbled in his beard:

>>     [...]
>>     "Safety of life is an issue," said William Klepczynski, a senior
>>     analyst at the State Department in favor of the U.S. proposal,
who
>>     asserts that programmers who ignore the need to add leap seconds
>>     present a "risk to air travel in the future" because a glitch
>>     might shut down traffic-control systems.
> 
> Bogus. critical systems should not even need precise time, but be
based 
> on the ordering of events in time. Given the propagation delay on
> wide-area (or even networked) systems, even a "radio silence" of one
> second should do no harm.
> Local transaction-oriented distributed systems should have this
solved, 
> by now, anyway.

Ordering of events is very, very difficult to do properly in a world
wide, very much decentralised system.  Tagging all events with a
timestamp is a realistic solution to this problem - and obviously needs
a proper definition of the time base used.

If omitting leap seconds (which are, right now, reasonably well-defined
AFAICT) would actually simplify this kind of system enough to justify
it is imho questionable.

- -- vbi

- -- 
Klein bottle for rent -- inquire within.

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