I agree about leap minute, I really don’t see why they leaped (ha) straight to an hour.
Well, I kinda do - working with whole-hour offsets is kind of a solved issue (timezones, DST) whereas there isn’t really a solution for a minute. The clever people at Google (IIRC) came up with the “smear second” as a pretty elegant way to implement a leap second, but the same approach wouldn’t scale all that well to a full minute. You’d have to smear it over 2 months or something.
But if the time does come to implement a leap hour, that’s going to be just as hard to deal with! You basically have to redefine UTC to be what was previously UTC+1:00, and then what? Computers can’t deal with that any more than that can deal with 61 seconds in a minute.
I agree about leap minute, I really don’t see why they leaped (ha) straight to an hour.
Well, I kinda do - working with whole-hour offsets is kind of a solved issue (timezones, DST) whereas there isn’t really a solution for a minute. The clever people at Google (IIRC) came up with the “smear second” as a pretty elegant way to implement a leap second, but the same approach wouldn’t scale all that well to a full minute. You’d have to smear it over 2 months or something.
But if the time does come to implement a leap hour, that’s going to be just as hard to deal with! You basically have to redefine UTC to be what was previously UTC+1:00, and then what? Computers can’t deal with that any more than that can deal with 61 seconds in a minute.
There are already timezones with 15 min offsets. 15, 30, 45. India standard time for example is +5:30 from GMT.