My apologies to those who are offended by a common-sense application of UTC as civil time. I apologize for not taking your argument seriously but adding it to the medical irritations in my life. I have no right to comment on the amount of traffic in this list.
I measure caliber by correctness, completeness and consistency of people's contributions. None of the high-caliber people on this group have consistently contributed to this thread. Would that I had been so wise. I have spent 40 years in process control, not all of it in programming. My major work was done in FORTRAN, about the time that UTC was born. It was all control algorithms, not time code, but I have read some interesting routines written by high-caliber people. I'm finishing a book on process control for the only association of control people in the US, and I've contributed to some international standards on process control. The adjustable rate time system was added because customers wanted monotonically increasing time. It was a matter of economics, not purity. I also wrote part of the specification for the network that connects field sensors and actuators so that they can run distributed applications. Time synchronization is imperative. Data link time, scheduling time and application time all run from a synchronized oscillator in each device. Only scheduling time is monotonically increasing. NTP is a fine way to sync all of the oscillators using leaping UTC. Application time is user wall clock time, so it has correction factors applied to the display of its counter. I believe that I have grasped the timing issues that apply to the field of process control very well. I am unable to grasp the esoteric point that underlies this discussion. It certainly is not about civil time. Perhaps it is about cryptography. The issue is clearly the abolition of leap seconds. The reason for doing that has not been explained. Adjusting UTC to stay with astronomical time is a feature, not a bug. I have no idea why six months is inadequate notice for a leap second. My request for information did not receive a reply. But then, I didn't start reading this thread until the number of messages grew large. The initial message asserts that leap seconds are harmful. The argument remains unfocused because the nature of the harm has not been specified. Unfocused arguments die of old age after many messages. I don't use kill files. People are entitled to their opinions, as they are entitled to change their minds on further discussion. The next discussion could be quite different. Regards, Bill Hawkins _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list time-nuts@febo.com https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts