[time-nuts] Re: UTC - A Cautionary Tale

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Sat Jul 16 03:07:57 EDT 2005


In message <1DEC687C-BFEB-4813-8822-AC0B6B14A0C9 at noao.edu>, Rob Seaman writes:

>No - by standardizing the meaning of the terms, we made it possible  
>to easily convert between all the flavors of solar time using closed  
>form algorithms accurate to whatever precision is required.

No, you can not tell me today how many seconds between now and
2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC and that is the whole problem.

>Civil time should remain based on time-of-day.  Failing that, civil  
>time should be called anything *except* UTC.  They can call it UBT  
>for "Universal Bureaucratic Time" if they want.

Considering that we have finally managed to beat UTC into the skull
of people and all but made them forget GMT, changing the name would
be the most pointless and waste-full excercise I can imagine.

The entire point here is to make UTC be a usable timescale without
having to put all military personal, all civil servants, all school
teachers, all emergency response personel and all programmers through
a reeducation.

-- 
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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