RE: [LEAPSECS] Draft Questionnaire

From: Seeds, Glen <Glen.Seeds_at_Cognos.COM>
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003 17:01:02 -0500

The way in which this questionnaire is designed does not collect the
information that is the basis of a large portion of the resistance to this
proposal: that UTC will no longer reasonably track local time in any usable
way, and this will inconvenience huge numbers of application users (as
opposed to vendors).

The costs of this are not readily quantifiable, and are not tied to specific
applications. The current UTC mechanism provides for a reasonable mapping
between TAI and local time. The proposal destroys that, and therefore brings
back the problem that UTC was introduced to solve. UTC will become an
emasculated artifact of history, serving only to clutter the universe and
avoid a switch from UTA to TAI of a number of existing applications that
should have used TAI in the first place.

 /glen

-----Original Message-----
From: matsakis.demetrios_at_USNO.NAVY.MIL
[mailto:matsakis.demetrios_at_USNO.NAVY.MIL]
Sent: January 14, 2003 6:16 PM
To: LEAPSECS_at_ROM.USNO.NAVY.MIL
Subject: [LEAPSECS] Draft Questionnaire


As many of you know, I am the Chair of a Working Group (WG) on UTC for the
International Union of Radio Scientists (URSI). Several years ago I
distributed a questionnaire as the chair of a similar committee of URSI
Commission J.

My WG is considering sending the following questionnaire to URSI-members.
The intent is to find out what the true costs would be if UTC is redefined
so that there are no new leap seconds after N years, and what the costs
would be of continuing with the same UTC definition we have now. I would be
interested in your comments, given the scope of the questionnaire and my
limited charter.

To my knowledge, very few of you are URSI members and therefore you will not
be asked this question by my WG. However I predict that any information
along the lines of the questionnaire would be received with interest by the
points of contact in any of the other relevant international bodies to which
you may belong.

Demetrios Matsakis

****************************************************************************
********
1. Name and Position

2. Contact information

3. URSI Commissions of which you are a member

4. If it were decided to change the definition of UTC so that no leap
seconds would be inserted after a specified date, 5 years in the future,
would any extra effort be required to adjust any system you work on?

5. If your answer to question 4 is yes, for each system affected please
provide the information in 5a through 5h. If these estimates are be
difficult to formulate, you may wish to indicate the range of answers.
Please feel free to contact a member of the Working Group to discuss the
level of detail to provide so as to best help us represent your needs to
URSI.

a. Name of system

b. Brief description of system

c. Hours of extra labor that would be required and for what general purpose,
such as a software review.

d. Extra equipment that must be purchased, and approximate cost to
purchase

e. Extra equipment that must be developed, and approximate cost.

f. Installation cost of extra equipment

g. Risks involved in modifying the system.

h. Costs in terms of system performance or final product once the
adjustments are correctly made

6. If the decision were made to insert no new leap seconds as of today,
please indicate which of your responses to questions and 4 and 5 would be
different.

7. Is there an implementation date that would significantly decrease the
costs indicated in your response to question 5? If so, please provide the
data and associated costs.

8. Please provide the approximate cost to your systems of incorporating
the next leap second, should one be called for in the year 2003.

a. Hours of labor
b. Equipment purchase
c. Probability that leap second will not be correctly adjusted for
d. Costs in terms of final product or system performance if the leap
second is not correctly included
e. Costs in terms of final product or system performance even if the
leap second is correctly allowed for.

9. Please use this space to make any comments or provide any information you
feel appropriate.

10. It is possible that we would like to publicly identify your system(s) as
relevant to the decision. In that case, do we have your permission to fully
quote your reply?

This message may contain privileged and/or confidential information. If you
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Received on Fri Jan 17 2003 - 14:01:29 PST