On Tue 2009-02-17T20:53:43 +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp hath writ: > This is a variant of the UUID madness that somebody came up with > because they didn't want to run a registry or use the existing > well-structured process (ISO OID's) and though that the eventual > collisions "probably doesn't matter much".
And the upshot is software that believes that the system clock is always right. Or, more weakly, saying the system clock must be monotonic -- but that is basically saying that if the clock ever gets fast then it must stay fast. So if the clock gets wrong it must stay wrong, or else at least it must get right in a fashion that is consistent with that software's notion -- despite any side effects that might have on the requirements of other systems that depend on time. The fallacy that "my sense of time is always right" is what led to a different kind of collision, the grounding of ships off Scilly in 1707, and the development of marine chronometers. The navigators who used marine chonometers knew perfectly well that those chronometers did not keep the "right" time as measured by clocks on land being reset by telescopes. Instead they knew that if their chronmeters were treated well they kept uniform time, and those navigators knew that getting the "right" time meant keeping a log of the difference between the "right" time of the clocks on land and their chronometer. -- Steve Allen <s...@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 University of California Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
