Slashdot Mirror
Vote To Eliminate Leap Seconds
Mortimer.CA writes "As discussed on Slashdot previously, there is a proposal to remove leap seconds from UTC (nee 'Greenwich' time). It will be put to a vote to ITU member states during 2008, and if 70% agree, the leap second will be eliminated by 2013. There is some debate as to whether this change is a good or bad idea. The proposal calls for a 'leap-hour' in about 600 years, which nobody seems to believe is a good idea. One philosophical point opponents make is that the 'official' time on Earth should match the time of the sun and heavens."
Of course, the real problem is that the rotation of the Earth is not constant (the leap seconds are mostly driven by fluid motions in the core).
Originally, back in the 1960's, instead of the leap seconds, they (the BIH at the time) adjusted the rate of the UTC seconds with respect to TAI. This was widely viewed as not a good thing once it was tried and was dropped, IIRC in 1972.
Leap years are to deal with correcting the length of the year, which isn't an integral number of days. Leap seconds are to deal with the fact that the length of a day changes slowly and at a variable rate. It's not the same problem at all.
There were 240 pence to the old (pre-decimalisation) pound, comprised of 20 shillings each worth 12 (old) pence. Do you remember guineas, crowns, half-crowns, shillings, tanners (6-penny piece), threepenny bit, pennies, half-pennies, farthings (a quarter penny)? I do. I suspect that I am quite a bit older than you and I cannot ever remember there being 120 pence to the pound. So either please provide a citation or confess that you are mistaken/talking bollocks. :-)
But the main thrust of your post was correct with regards to dividing sums of money easily. Or at least it was until the education system decided that mathematics and mental arithmetic were not the most important subjects in life. I'm not sure how some of today's young people could cope with such problems.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
You're off by a factor of 3600. It's "leap hours" that are being proposed; We already have leap seconds. Of course, I'm not sure the math from TFA makes too much sense anyway, as I don't recall having an average of 3 or 6 leap seconds every year.
Worse, different systems have different implementations. There's bsd, sysv and vixie's implementations, plus numerous variations, and all seem to do their own stuff.
An example: You have four boxes located in the
Which of the three jobs will run on each box on March 30, 2008?
Which of the three jobs will run on each box on October 26, 2008?
Which of the three jobs will run twice on October 26, 2008?
If anyone (except perhaps Arthur D. Olson) can answer that without investigating, I'd be very surprised.
Sometimes the vendors themselves can't say for sure, due to the time adjustment occurring in a different process, and depending on availability of interrupts and CPU time on the system, the cron interrupt may see either the old time or the new time when it wakes. One of the above vendors thus recommends that jobs scheduled for the start/end of the witching hour are moved one minute outside it.
Anyhow, the parent to your post deserves to have the "+1 Informative" stripped, because it's plain misinformation.
Regards,
--
*Art