[LEAPSECS] tinkering with time ?

[Rob Seaman]

The threads are coming fast and furious and one has to choose what to reply to.

On Jan 31, 2011, at 11:25 PM, Tom Van Baak wrote:


> The issue here is one man's distant horizon is another man's pending disaster and the list has shown there is no convincing either side.


I'd say rather that we continue to demonstrate lots of movement in the talking points.  What we aren't convincing each other to change is our point of view on the relative importance of different facets of the problem.  I'm convinced if we focused first on characterizing the common problem we'd be able to make a lot of progress on defining a consensus solution.  Instead it is inevitable that ad hoc solutions tendered from completely different directions will continue to fail to meet up in the middle.


> I would instead design something that works well for the users you have today and leave their grandchildren out of it.


Note that lots of astronomers use Java...

Successful programming environments model the behavior of the real world, not artificial constructs.

Perhaps some progress could be made on the "predictable leap second scheduling" front?  How would Java (or any software systems) gracefully accommodate a published schedule with a long lead time?

Ignoring the "grandchildren" is what led to Y2K.

Rob