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U.S. Scientists Call for a Time Change
saqmaster writes "The BBC reported yesterday that U.S. scientists want to change the current system which keeps clocks in sync with solar time by adding a leap second every 18 months or so. This has rattled a few cages with the scientists and operators involved in GMT-related projects and facilities as it would effectively remove the importance of the meridian from timing. "
Why not just forget about time zones, day light savings and create a new universal global time. So what if it makes my 8am-5pm job change to 1am-9am or if it means I eat lunch during the night. It just seems like we are slowly outgrowing the need for this, as many people work normal hours that used to be considered odd (such as graveyard shifts)
Ave Molech Setting
They were "spinning". By the time you got to the actual proposal, you already had a tainted opinion of it, only to have them tell you that the scientists in question don't want to comment about it.
It was a rather heavy handed approach to it, I might add.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The first half of the article is very parochial - kind of ooh the nasty Americans want to diminish the importance of Greenwich.
Which seems to be simply the delusion of the author, and has nothing to do with the subject of the discussion. The author has cast the entire thing as a US versus UK contest, with the noble UK scientists defending the importance of Greenwich, and the evil US overlords trying to steal it away and disrupt the lives of the common folk. First of all, I think if you polled US scientists, you'd find the vast majority of them quite content with the current system, and not calling for any change. In fact, you have to read halfway down the article to find out that the only people proposing a change are "US members of the International Telecommunications Union", without specifying which company they are referring to. Then somehow a handful of people at a telecommunications company issuing a proposal is amplified by this author to represent all US scientists and the views of Americans in general.
This is just a classic case of crappy sensationalist reporting.
The problem is that you don't know in advance when http://hpiers.obspm.fr/International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) is going to introduce another leap second. They monitor Earht roration and could do it with only 6 month notice. The latest leap second was anounced this summer and we had to spend few weeks to add it to our data files and test the app before the release. If we had a release a month earlier we would not have included it and it would result in a small, but unacceptable errors unless users upgrade our software. It basically means that there is no way to build an embedded software and leave it running disconnected from anything and maintain high time accuracy at the same time. You either have to create a system for automatic updates of code and data, or rely on human operator to make changes. Both methods introduce unnesessary risks and inconviniences.
You would say "We get to work at 1:pm, what time to people in hong kong go to work??" thus still doing the same math.
This seems like something that only people that don't play internationally think is a problem. It doesn't matter when they get to work. If the meeting is at 84:25 Global Time, then they will either be there, or they will request a time change. I couldn't care less if I schedule something at high-sun where I am and it is dawn, dusk, or some other time elsewhere. If they aren't going to be in the office, they suggest an alternate time.
This is much simpler than the current system. Ever have a conference call with people in 4 or more timezones? "We'll get back on tomorrow at 4." "Wait, is that East, Mountain, Hawaii, Alaska, or Pacific?" "Um, how about your time?" "Who said that, are they in East Coast time?" "No, Mountain." "Ok, so that's 4 p.m. Mountain tomorrow" "Wait, that's like 6 p.m. East, can we move it up a little?" and so on and so on. Then, when you finally get off the call, you have to do the math yourself anyway to figure out the local time and mark you calendar.
Yes, I have done business internationally, and I deal with people outside my time zone more than within my time zone. It would be much easier to have everyone work of Zulu time or somesuch. But, it doesn't matter if that's what I'd prefer, for if everyone else doesn't know what Zulu time is, they can't use it. But the simple fact is that it would have greatly reduced my math, not increased it or kept it the same.
Learn to love Alaska
You can't maintain a highly accurate clock without external synchronization. Why doesn't your external synchronization source include leap-second information (including when the next one is going to occur, as soon as it is known)? It's no more error prone than having the clock data itself be wrong.
The application itself should be tested against leap-seconds, there's no reason you should have to test to see if a particular leap-second is going to cause a problem (just as you don't have to test it for each time the clock rolls over from 23:59:59 to 00:00:00). You add ONE LINE to a leap-second file, if you did it right, or just let NTP do it for you if you did it even more correctly.
Note that the NTP epoch implementation is itself arguably done incorrectly. A reasonable kernel can handle it better by having the NTP daemon update a leap-second file, keep a fixed Unix epoch and correct to UTC in the libraries while keeping a constantly running clock going.