Re: [LEAPSECS] Precise time over time

From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk_at_HAVEN.FREEBSD.DK>
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 18:50:36 +0200

In message <Pine.GSO.4.58.0508111510010.15369_at_cass18>, Peter Bunclark writes:

>Surely the point about the slaughterhouse is the thought of the throat
>slasher getting a couple of seconds ahead of the brain stunner.

Because Denmark is so expensive in wages, automation is very advanced here
and from a regulatory point of view there is only one job which will
never be handed over to a industrial robots: Making sure that members
of the target species enter the process.

I have yet to see anybody come up with the thousand words that describe
even one glimpse. We're talking _really_ bad splatter-movies here.
One uncontrolled association while you are in there, and you don't sleep
for days.

>As for the issue of whether the slaugherhouse needs syncing to an external
>clock, the point is that with the prevelance of ntp, it is just
>as easy, or easier, nowadays to synchronize all devices to a global time
>standard than it is to set up a local arbitrary clock and synchronize to that.

Bingo.

>A proposal that seems to me to go half way to satisfy both pro and anti
>leapers is the one where computers switch to using TAI internally. We
>could start thinking about that now and possibly start implementing it.

Deal, you tackle POSIX, I tackle the reference implementations and
NTP.

In the meantime, lets hope the leap seconds don't wreck too much havoc.

--
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk_at_FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Received on Thu Aug 11 2005 - 09:50:49 PDT

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