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A comment on European Parliament requests recommendation to end biannual clock change. Parent comment

Re:European Parliament requests recommendation to end biannu... by sudhirj on Thursday February 08, 2018 @12:09PM (#16333630)
Local time is very idiosyncratic - the hands of the clock on your wall move forwards, backwards, repeat the same hours, skip hours and dance at the will of your people and politicians.

Needless to say, this may cause issues in computers. The only clocks that stay consistent and dependable are the ones in UTC land.

So the people mirror the clocks of their local government, but computers mirror the UTC clocks.

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Re:European Parliament requests recommendation to end biannu... by dragonwriter on Thursday February 08, 2018 @12:37PM (#16333899)
> The only clocks that stay consistent and dependable are the ones in UTC land.

UTC is closer to “consistent and dependable” than local time, but still has leap second issues. TAI is where you go for consistent and dependable.

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Re:European Parliament requests recommendation to end biannu... by baq on Thursday February 08, 2018 @12:32PM (#16333862)
Leap seconds would have a word with you. The only time that's fixed is GPS time, or so I heard.
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Re:European Parliament requests recommendation to end biannu... by tripzilch on Friday February 09, 2018 @07:17AM (#16339629)
Legend has it there's a secret order of monks that have been going "one mississippi, ..." since 1970. They say it's the only way they can be really sure.

But nobody knows how, when or why they came to be 23 minutes off ...

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Re:European Parliament requests recommendation to end biannu... by sudhirj on Friday February 09, 2018 @02:47AM (#16338609)
Re leap seconds, smearing seems to have solved that rather effectively. The last leap second was a non event thanks to it.
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Re:European Parliament requests recommendation to end biannu... by welterde on Friday February 09, 2018 @06:12AM (#16339374)
If people do leap second smearing anyway, I wonder if it were possible to just directly use UT1 instead of UTC (the leapseconds are just there to keep UTC synchronized to UT1 to within one second).
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