[time-nuts] FW: Bulletin C number 30

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Tue Jul 5 10:40:54 EDT 2005


In message <6.2.3.4.0.20050705100343.0412ac70 at mjs.alientech.net>, Mike S writes
:

>No, you didn't. What you and Warner HAVE demonstrated is that you
>_chose_ the wrong time coordinate system for your systems/applications.

This made me laugh...

Ohh, how I wish I were in a position to tell POSIX: "Sorry, the
time_t definition is wrong (and useless), fix it now please!".

Heck, I would even love get the Danish parliament to fix the law
from 18mumble so it doesn't define legal time as "the mean solar
time of the observatory in Copenhagen".

But Mike, I live in the real world.

Out here in the real world people with little grasp of fine details
write specifications for turn-key systems which they belive will
solve all their problems.

The systems must use common-off-the-Shelf components for vendor
independence, follow all applicable standards, official, industry
and corporate.

And be delivered within budget, on-time, fully debugged and
documented.

And I won't even mention the uniform 3 second upper limit on
response time or the requirement to use OS/2, Oracle and VisualBasic,
(somebody from the golfclub probably recommended that).

When you point out the mistakes and misunderstandings, legal will
tell you that the specifications can not be changed "for contractual
reasons".

If you insist, legal briefs the Mgt and your project leader will
receive a memo from them saying merely: "Annex 9 shall happen as
written."

Two years down the road, the customer will tell you "If only
you had told us!" and sales will call it an "opportunity" and
thank legal for preventing the programmers from screwing up
our profit yet again.

This, Mike, is where the real cost of leapseconds are booked.

And you have no idea...

-- 
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.




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