Re: [Gnu-arch-users] s/GMT/UTC/

[Andrew Suffield]

On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 06:38:51PM +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> Andrew Suffield wrote:
> 
> > > All civil time systems use UTC.
> > 
> > Other way around. They mostly use GMT because they have to. A few use
> > something strange that is neither GMT nor UTC.
> 
> Am I correct in understanding that you mean that they have the same
> idea of the current time as UTC, but pretend that leap seconds never
> happened when computing past or future times?

Sort of. More precisely, they use the GMT model (which has a few
quirks of its own). But broadly yes.

> > This is only true from a rather skewed perspective. For example, NTP
> > ensures that the *current* time of your clock is correct... but the
> > output of:
> > 
> > ctime(time() + 10000000)
> > 
> > Will be wrong. Thusly UTC is quite impossible to use for civil
> > purposes. It denies you the ability to talk about times in the future.
> 
> That's hyperbole.  In most situations, the possibility of the absolute
> time three months from now being one second different from what you
> think it will be is irrelevant.

Add some more zeros. Sooner or later it will become significant.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
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