I made a post to the moderated Usenet newsgroup sci.astro.research,
"Julian day numbers and leap seconds", and there are so many
responses, I cannot summarize them here.
The question of finding a good time suitable for distributed
computing as well as in astronomy and sciences, plus syncing it with
legal time is very complicated, and probably requires a committee of
scientists and experts from a number of fields.
But one suggestion might using say TAI (International Atomic Time,
with letters in French grammatical order), or possibly GPS time. It
might be synced with say JD counted in seconds so that the difference
becomes 0 today. Then leap seconds can be then be viewed as a feature
of the UTC legal time.
TAI is the mean of highly accurate Cesium atomic clocks (the SI
second is defined in terms of Cesium transitions), accuracy better
than 10^-7, and is broadcast, so it can be used in computers via
radio-controlled clocks (which are now commonly sold). see <http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time>.
As for POSIX, I know that in some quarters, for example NASA when
there is a satellite launch, one is very concerned over the problem
not knowing which time the computers are set to. So it might be good
to fix this gap in the POSIX standard.
Hans Aberg
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