The Future of Time: UTC and the Leap Second

rlseaman writes "UTC ("Coordinated Universal Time") is very close to being redefined to no longer track Earth rotation. Clocks everywhere — on your wall, wrist, phone or computer — would stop keeping Solar time. 'American Scientist' says: 'Before atomic timekeeping, clocks were set to the skies. But starting in 1972, radio signals began broadcasting atomic seconds and leap seconds have occasionally been added to that stream of atomic seconds to keep the signals synchronized with the actual rotation of Earth. Such adjustments were considered necessary because Earth's rotation is less regular than atomic timekeeping. In January 2012, a United Nations-affiliated organization could permanently break this link by redefining Coordinated Universal Time.'"

Copypasta

[Gothmolly]

Taco, all you did is quote the article summary. I can spin up an RSS reader to do that.

Re:Copypasta

[csnydermvpsoft]

Do you normally read all American Scientist articles? I don't, so I appreciate this article being brought to my attention (though I'm not planning to pay to read it). The purpose of /. is to point out interesting information so that we can read it further. The summary is supposed to be an accurate summary of the article; since an abstract is already provided, why shouldn't it be used?

It's about time

[Dolphinzilla]

Seriously this has been an issue for along time - GPS time does not include leap seconds and I am tired of having to write software that let's user adjust for the variable amount of leap seconds - nobody really cares if the earths rotation is synchronized with " UTC"

While we're at it

[vegge]

... could we also get rid of Daylight Savings Time?

Wall clocks

[bugs2squash]

will simply ignore UTC and continue to show the time based on the earth's rotation. All this means is that UTC loses any small shred of relevance that it once may have had to the common man. So go ahead, redefine UTC and we can all just go back to using GMT for our reports, syslog messages, traps etc. that all have far more to do with the time as experienced by users than the time as experienced by a cesium atom. I expect that soon after the decision is made someone will start gmt.pool.ntp.org and utc.pool.ntp.org and we'll have a choice.