Quoth Shaul Karl on Sat, Sep 27, 2003: > On Fri, Sep 26, 2003 at 10:56:33PM -0400, Vadim Vygonets wrote: > > > > Well, it has to count time from some point (the epoch), which > > happens to be 1990-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. And it counts it in > > seconds (or 2**-32 seconds). But it has no notion of any time > > periods greater than a second (days, years), > > > My understanding of http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/UT.html it > that UTC is an attempt to define 1 second by means of atomic phenomena > but still make it not be very different from the Earth's time. As such
The "atomic" seconds are used in TAI as well. UTC is a time count which differs from TAI by an integral number of seconds to keep it close to UT1, so UTC second and TAI second are the same. >From the POV of software, NTP counts time units, and UTC is a representation of such value in human-readable format. > As a result, that site claims that > > UTC is equivalent to the civil time for Iceland, Liberia, Morocco, > Senegal, Ghana, Mali, Mauritania, and several other countries. During > the winter months, UTC is also the civil time scale for the United > Kingdom and Ireland. Of course. But if you can claim with straight face that 3295358673 is the civil time in Iceland when it's 2003-09-27 20:24:33 in Israel, well... At that moment, it was 3295358673 *everywhere*, but it was 17:24:33 UTC (and the same time in Iceland), 20:24:33 in Jerusalem and 02:44:07 the next day in Tokyo. (It's 3295358673 and not 1064683473 because NTP epoch, unlike UNIX epoch, is 1990.) > As far as I know, making constant changes to its TZ is not specific to > Israel. Some other countries do it too. One example is Brazil. Indeed. Also, borders move, new countries are created, Eastern European countries adopt EU DST rules (and join EU), ex-USSR bounced timezones several times in the 1990s, countries change DST rules and move from one timezone to another... Vadik. -- Question Authority -- and the authorities will question you. (K) ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
