Re: Predictable Internet Time
2017-01-03 13:49:58
On 3 Jan 2017, at 12:55, Stewart Bryant wrote:
On 03/01/2017 18:38, Cyrus Daboo wrote:
Hi Stewart,
--On January 3, 2017 at 6:30:19 PM +0000 Stewart Bryant
<stewart(_dot_)bryant(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
Only the UI needs the TZ information, the machine can operate just
fine
with any timescale. That is you present the time in local time, but
operate in global time, and this is definitely an application that
will
not care about leap seconds.
No that simply does not work. Repeating events or alarms may not
involve any UI at all, but the device may need to trigger those at a
specific local time - that means time zone information has to be
taken into account somewhere. This is a crucial fact of any
calendaring and scheduling system that those of us who have been
using iCalendar (RFC5545) fully appreciate.
Hi Cyrus,
I think that depends on what you consider to be the infrastructure and
what you consider the application.
I think you and Cyrus are disagreeing about the definition of "UI".
Maybe "application" is better. At some point in the flow of things, a
system that is going to interact with humans, whether it presents a UI
on a screen or turns on a beeper or flips a relay that starts a
sprinkler system, is going to have to know the current civil time for
the action it is performing, and that's going to have to be machine
calculated.
I would like to see the CPU clocks, and in particular the time
transfer protocols just work on non-jumpy constant-duration-second
time since that has to scale from sub-femtoseconds to millennia with
sub-femtosecond accuracy without glitching and with unambiguous
duration measurements.
If we distribute time in the infrastructure as non-jumpy
constant-duration-second time , then the iCal system can surely do the
conversion to/from whatever format the human needs? Whether it talks
to itself in human time or machine time is for those of you that
design iCal to determine, but it sounds from what you say that it
talks to itself in human time. Whether it does the conversion from
machine time to human time, or whether the OS does it for outside the
scope of the point I am making.
Agree, but note the dependency: calendaring depends on some other entity
to get the agreed universal time, and then it can do a conversion based
on the time zone database information.
On 3 Jan 2017, at 12:51, Ted Lemon wrote:
This is true, but any specific local time will always occur at a
specific universal time, so this isn't actually a problem.
Oh? Which specific universal time corresponds to 6pm local time on July
1 2020 in Urbana, IL? It *will* occur at a specific universal time, but
it does not *now* occur at a specific universal time, because Illinois
can always change the law which tells you what "6pm local time on July
1" means.
None of this is an unsolvable problem; we just need to be clear that at
some point (and likely at many points), the computer is going to have to
calculate a civil time from whatever agreed universal time you have, and
it's not just "to present to the user at this particular moment".
pr
--
Pete Resnick <http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. - +1 (858)651-4478
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- Re: Predictable Internet Time, (continued)
- Re: Predictable Internet Time, Stewart Bryant
- Re: Predictable Internet Time,
Pete Resnick <=
- Re: Predictable Internet Time, Stewart Bryant
- Re: Predictable Internet Time, Joe Touch
- Re: Predictable Internet Time, Stewart Bryant
- Re: Predictable Internet Time, Tony Finch
- Re: Predictable Internet Time, Joe Touch
- Re: Predictable Internet Time, Tony Finch
- Re: Predictable Internet Time, Joe Touch
- Re: Predictable Internet Time, Tony Finch
- Re: Predictable Internet Time, Joe Touch
- Re: Predictable Internet Time, Tony Finch
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