[LEAPSECS] Leap second mess at NASA

[Steve Allen]

On Thu 2011-06-02T23:01:30 +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp hath writ:

> I suspect a lot of those "somebody" have "phd." after their names,

> 99.99% or more of the worlds programmers do not.


They don't need PhD to get a system with no leap seconds, all they
need is a devil-may-care attitude about strict compliance with POSIX
or conformance to ITU-R recommendations.  With that they can buy
a Meinberg or Symmetricom NTP server, configure it to produce GPS
time instead of UTC, and live with being 15 seconds fast.

That's what Android phones do, and I suspect that the existence of
the GPS-time feature in Meinberg and Symmetricom is used by more
than just Android phone cell towers.

So if the ITU-R were to rename the time scale and then omit the leaps
all the non-PhD programmers in the world could simply and automatically
conform to UTC with no leap seconds in the kernel by doing this:

http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/right+gps.html

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