Posted on 07/29/2005 6:03:12 AM PDT by OESY
Welcome to Free Republic.........
I must have missed that part in the article. The part I read had to do with the gps and computer systems hanging up-- those things are a lot of work to program.
Mine says, "12:00... ...12:00... ...12:00... ...12:00... ...12:00... ...12:00... ...12:00" 8^)
Dang! All I ever get called is a "transnational beancounter". I'll have to follow your posts for a while so I can pick up a few pointers....
That would be the original thin-skinned troll, Cain, who slew his brother Abel in the world's first recorded peronal attack. 8^(
It's gotta be a smokescreen.
There's no credible evidence that transnational business interests have any real concern over national security issues. The truth is, they scoff at the concept of defending national sovereignty. Much too "protectionist" for them.
This is the real issue -- there is LOTS of stuff that uses GPS as its time source, cell phone systems being one example, and lots of finance/money transfer applications as well.
The GPS system uses "GPS Time," which is anchored back on 1/6/1986. No leap seconds are added to GPS time ... it simply diverges from UTC.
It causes no problems for anybody. If you're a bank, you don't need to account for leap seconds -- a big plus. If you're a person, you'll never, ever notice. And if you're an astronomer, all you have to know is the conversion between GPS and Terrestrial Dynamical Time, which takes into account all sorts of things besides leap seconds.
Much ado about nothing.
You don't have a clue on this one, Willie. Perhaps you forgot your /sarcasm tag?
You might not understand the advantage if you've never had to make time-dependent software operate through a leap second. I have, and it's a pain in the ass.
All they're doing here is defining a "legal day," which has a specified duration. People who need to account for the actual rotation of the Earth don't use UTC anyway, so this has no impact on the technical community.
Well then please give us a clue...
These lame personal attacks get boring pretty quick.
Let's see if you have any substantive offerings on the topic.
I've already offered a couple of them above. There is a tremendous amount of benefit to be gained here, and really no downside -- technical folks don't use UTC anyway.
Then why did The Clueless One secretly dispatch one of his government drones to the UN to force the rest of us into synchronization?
Probably because they anticipated responses like yours.
When leap seconds are added, this would require manual changes which I'm sure cost lots of money to change, test, verify, etc. Kind of like a mini Y2K, where they spent lots of money merely to make sure that things didn't change.
Who would care if they didn't add the seconds? Just ignore it.
Many GPS receivers have a "1pps" (one pulse per second) output line that gives a one second tick that's nanosecond accurate. This is what's used to syncronize stuff.
Bank transactions are apparently pre-scheduled to occur at time such and such, so as to match another corresponding transactions going in opposite directions.
The GPS UTC conversion value downlinked to receivers is the *current* GPS to UTC difference in seconds. When that's changed, the change does not happen instantly. So at a minimum, when the leap second is added, all bank transactions would have to be halted to wait until the new GPS to UTC difference to be recieved by everyone.
Since leap seconds are added at random times (because there are all kinds of irregularities in earths rotation), time changes are a manual process where systems people would have to shut things down, then bring them back up after the time was changed.
It wouldn't surprise me that the whole thing would cost tens of millions to do, worldwide.
Sorry Willie, but it's silly to spend that kind of money just to make you feel good about the time.
Leap seconds weren't "invented" until 1972. On January 1 we'll see the first leap second in 7 years -- have you noticed the lack thereof? Prior to 1999, did you notice the yearly leap seconds? Of course you didn't.
Perhaps you ought to educate yourself on the topic of leap seconds.
The underlying issue here is the need for a uniform and stable, monotonically increasing time scale that will not regularly disrupt the very large number of applications that require it. You won't notice the difference -- unless your bank happens to crap out on a leap second, and you can't get to your money for a couple of days.
They probably don't convert to UTC for the transactions themselves -- why step out of your internal time source? They very may well convert to UTC for output purposes, however, and that's a far easier thing to handle.
This part isn't true. The addition of a leap second happens at midnight January 0, or midnight July 0, and is announced several months beforehand. It's already been announced that there will be a leap second added on January 0, 2006.
The future of mankind is a man with a blue helmet in your kitchen with his boot in your face pointing at a microwave oven with the clock blinking 12:00. ;-)
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