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Leap Second To Be Added Dec 31, 2008
ammorris writes "Don't be the laughingstock of your friends when you shout 'Happy New Years' a second too early ... The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service has announced that a leap second will be added on December 31, 2008 at 23h 59m 60s, meaning that this year will be exactly one second longer. The last leap second occurred Dec 31, 2005; they are added due to fluctuations in the rotational speed of the earth. You can read all about leap seconds on Wikipedia."
No-one ever R's the FA, so the date on the bulletin is completely irrelevant. If it's not in a slashdot summary, we don't know about it.
Uhh, wouldn't it be nice if we were given a little bit more of a warning? Say, something like, oh a week?
You may laugh, but I work in Air Traffic Control. We rely on absolutely precise timing in a system distributed over 1000s of kilometres. Many components can be marked as non-functional by the system if they appear to have an incorrect clock.
Every time we add a leap second we get issues raised. I have to say it is a real PITA.
What I find baffling is that architects/developers working in such a life-critical field managed to conceive application relying on days/minutes which are NOT fixed values. (a minute can have 59 or 61 seconds while a day can have 23 or 25 hours).
That said, the clock of a Un*x system is usually calibrated in milliseconds since the epoch and this has absolutely zero, nada, zilch, nothing to do with leaps seconds. The fact that we decide that 31 dec 2008 with have a 61 seconds minute change *nothing* to the correct calibration of the clock.
How distributed systems across the globe came to rely on hh/mm/ss speaks, well, a lot about the plain dumbness of many people.
But do they really? I pity the poor sick, under-brained people who designed those GPS if they're really that deeply flawed.
It's like raising a puppy. The worst punishment possible is to pay no attention.
The Internet is full of idiots/trolls/criminals/mentally ill. Banning is not a solution. After banning they just start to hide and use a proxy.
Ignoring is the best way.