Re: Leap Seconds

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <9f0ciq$itb$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, Marin David Condic says...
>
>Further research into leap-seconds indicates that effectively, they are
>unpredictable. The International Earth Rotation Service sort of announces
..
>Now I'm wondering what I'm supposed to do with the requirement that I count
>them??? :-)

I once worked on a project where we had a requirement to never loose an
inter-process message, and to hold the client and all recipients until we knew
it was received by all designated recipients. The more astute of you out there
will immediately recognise this as a variant the "Byzantine Generals Problem".
We were not so astute, unfortunatly.

I find the best thing to do in these situations is to find some desirable extra
that you were going to add anyway, or would be trivial to add (there's always a
few of those once development starts), and "trade" it for the impossible
requirement with your customer. Do this after pointing out to them that they
have asked the physically impossible, preferably using supporting material from
scholarly sources (eg: the website you mentioned). This is also a good way to
get rid of other requirements that are way more expensive to implement than they
are worth (in that case, you use a good estimate of the financial impact of
adding the feature as your supporting material).

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