NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Time up for the leap second?
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2012 Jan 17, 10:47 -0800
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2012 Jan 17, 10:47 -0800
While time may be "up for the leap second," I find this "explanation" riddled with errors.
Most glaring is the claim that "computers must be manually adjusted for leap seconds" Balderdash.
The Internet allows the exchange of data between computers. We are familiar with some of them -- email, web pages, and the like. Some we occasionally stumble over (or they trip us) -- things like DNS, which is the telephone book for the Internet and will, when I press "send" on this message, translate fer3.com to a specific numeric address on the Internet.
But there are other standards and messages, too, including one that synchronizes time between computers. And that, to the best of my knowledge, requires NO manual
intervention. You just have the program running in the background and it keeps your computer's time-of-day clock accurate. In fact, most of our computers do just that to keep our time-of-day clocks accurate (but Windows, in its wisdom, only runs the program briefly once a week, so PCs can get off by a few seconds or more between runs).
Anyway, the obvious inaccuracies in the article on matters I know about lead me to question how much else of it I can trust.
Lu Abel
From: Robert Bernecky <bernecky@sbcglobal.net>
To: NavList@fer3.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2012 9:08 AM
Subject: [NavList] Time up for the leap second?
From http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-time-up-for-the-leap.htmlFrom the short blurb:
"After years of debate, delegates with the International Telecommunication Union will decide Thursday whether to abolish the leap second."It sounds like the telecommunication industry is going to tell the astronomers to go pound sand....----------------------------------------------------------------
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