[time-nuts] The future of UTC

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Fri Jul 15 14:51:32 UTC 2011


In message <CACTjVNyewpkSnJbt3DSf5KDvTq0JPwxM6X2RUXdXTcrp3jC7Hw at mail.gmail.com>
, Steve Rooke writes:

>Sorry to barge in here but I thought the leap second need was about a
>two year thing so wouldn't that mean a ten second jump at the twenty
>year mark.

No.

"schedule them 20 years in advance" is not the same as "schedule
once every 20 seconds".

If the time-lords want a leap second 2031-12-31, the have to say so
before before 2011-12-31, if they want one 2032-06-30, they have
to say so before 2012-06-30, etc.


-- 
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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