April 13, 2004
12:02 a.m.
Markus Kuhn writes:
Keeping a computer synched to something like TAI would only be practical in the real world if a leap-free timescale (e.g., the existing TAI or GPS time) were widely enough available, along with a regularly updated UTC-TAI offset table.
http://cr.yp.to/clockspeed.html converts from NTP's wobbly timescale to TAI, and sets the UNIX clock accordingly. The tz library, in ``right'' mode, then produces accurate local-time displays from the UNIX clock, even during leap seconds. Welcome to the real world. ---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago