Nero Imhard wrote: >So here's a proposal for making UTC more workable in the long run: let's >alternate positive and negative leap seconds! ... >Somewhow I can't imagine mine is a novel idea.
It's not. In the message at <http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/navyls/0197.html>, Ed Davies proposed leaping every month subject to maintaining |UT1-UTC| < 0.9 s, thus hitting about 80% of months given current scheduling lead time. About two months ago, Tom van Baak proposed leaping *every* month, at the expense of a moderate increase of the |UT1-UTC| bound. It's probably come up on other occasions too. The basic concept, of having leap seconds at every opportunity, achieves its goal of providing plenty of real-world opportunities to test leap-second-sensitive systems. The concept also fits nicely with Rob Seaman's proposal at <http://iraf.noao.edu/~seaman/leap/> to explicitly abandon the preference for leaping in particular months, and schedule strictly to optimise |UT1-UTC|. However, it doesn't fundamentally make leap seconds any easier to handle. It *only* makes it easier to test whether the handling has been implemented correctly. -zefram _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
