On 12 Jan, 2012, at 05:33 , Tom Van Baak wrote: > Here's a plot that shows how a non leap second UTC would > look if the cesium resonance were other than 9,192,631,770. > > http://www.leapsecond.com/pages/ut/ut-ani-v2.gif > > In retrospect it's too bad |DUT1| had to be so tight. If Essen > and friends had made it 10 s we wouldn't need leap seconds > in a lifetime.
I'm not sure that would be better, though, since I think the problem that makes leap seconds hard is their rarity. You can write and test code to handle leap seconds now, but you might have to wait three or four years to see how that works out in real life. If we had a leap second every other week we'd have gotten so much real life practice that depending on the code and procedures to handle the leap wouldn't seem so scary. Frequent leaps probably wouldn't help the "let's disseminate a timescale that precision time services will actually use" problem, but might help a lot with the "leap seconds break my system's software" problem. Dennis Ferguson _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
