On 01/28/2011 06:11, Stephen Colebourne wrote:
On 28 January 2011 05:33, Tom Van Baak<t...@leapsecond.com> wrote:
There are many forms of "SLS"; from those that spread the
leap across one second, or two seconds, or 30 seconds or
a minute, or an hour, or a day. Spread it across a year (or
however long it's been since the last leap second) and you
have UT1. And that's just the versions of SLS that use linear
ramping. You can imagine nicer ones that take off and end
slowly instead of the abrupt quantum rate change as seen
in the utc-sls write-up. 1200 might make a better choice if
there are 50/60 Hz effects (1000 is not divisible by 60). Or
300. 1024 or a smaller power of 2 is nicer for low cost, low
power devices. 1200 has more common prime factors than
1000 which can come in handy in some cases. You get the
idea. Lots of ways to do it.
And thats fine. But since the %age of users that care is
infinitessimally small, I need one number and no configuration. The
only well-written document (proto-standard) is UTC-SLS which uses
1000.
Now if this list or others wants to get together and writeup a
replacement for UTC-SLS in the next few months that it prefers with
justifications as to why its better and a process for making it a real
standard, then so be it. Otherwise, UTC-SLS with 1000 will get used
simply because it exists now. And by virtue of being used in Java it
would then be a de facto standard.
@Gerard, The point about making UTC-SLS more certain than one webpage
is well made.
The larger point is that nobody implements this in the real world.
UTC-SLS is largely just a paper standard that the vast majority of
people completely ignore. It seems unwise to code such a tenuous thing
into the Java standard libraries. Not only does UTC-SLS need to have
better availability of the standard it is based on, it also needs to
actually be implemented by people...
Warner
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