I know this is not the proper forum for this message. I lack sufficient
contacts to send this idea to. So I provide it to you here. There are /so/
many people (influential and otherwise) on this list that seeding this proposal
here seems like the best way to do it. I apologize now if you feel I am
abusing the IETF mailing list.
We currently (normally) store time as the number of elapsed seconds since
January 1st 1970 GMT. The resolution of time_t is poor. Given the high speed
applications we use today, timing based on time_t is next to impossible.
I have a solution.
Make time_t 64 bits wide. Make the most significant bit (bit 63) a sign bit.
Make the next 50 significant bits store the number of seconds elapsed since
January 1st 2000 GMT. The last 13 bits be of fractions of a second.
This method would make it EASY to make a clock chip. It need only operate at
a clock pulse rate of 8192 cycles per second (2^13.)
With 2^50 seconds storage you can date documents, artifacts and files (forward
and backward, thanks to the sign bit) up to ~35,628,841 years.
Of course the significand (the 50 bits) need not be this wide. We could
shorten it and add the bits not used to the fractional part of time_t to
increase resolution.
What do you think?
Sincerely,
Chad Christopher Giffin
a.k.a. "typo"
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