[LEAPSECS] Google, Amazon, now Microsoft

[Tom Van Baak]

> Perhaps one should point out that local midnight is pretty much the worst
> possible time for astronomers to accommodate such a change?

Hi Rob,

Oh, you're such an old earth+photon guy. Ask any space probe, neutrino, or gravitational astronomer if they share your sleep problem. ;-)

I understand that's why JD rolls over at noon instead of midnight. But, for the other 7 billion people on the planet, it's nice that the calendar, and local legal time, and even MJD rolls over at midnight instead of noon.

I can totally sympathize with Microsoft's "fix" for leap seconds. Laugh if you want. But out of history, ignorance, compatibility, or dogma their first fix was never to accept or display a 61st second in the first place. Windows is more POSIX than POSIX, when you think about it. This recent "fix" avoids another side effect of leap seconds -- where it affects the Far East much more than Europe or even the US. Now every timezone gets the same treatment as London. Yes, I know it's "against UTC rules".

I'm also looking forward to reading the unpublished research papers that discuss the negative side of having 24+ different leap second events around the globe. What a mess. On a positive note, this means one could actually experience more than one Windows non-leap-second on June 30. Maybe this year I should try to celebrate the leap second twice, in Mountain and in Pacific time. Time to pull out the road map.

/tvb