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'Leap Seconds' May Be Eliminated From UTC
angry tapir writes "Sparking a fresh round of debate over an ongoing issue in time-keeping circles, the International Telecommunications Union is considering eliminating leap seconds from the time scale used by most computer systems, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Since their introduction in 1971, leap seconds have proved problematic for at least a few software programs. The leap second added on to the end of 2008, for instance, caused Oracle cluster software to reboot unexpectedly in some cases."
Now waaaaaait just one second! Oh, scratch that...
We could fix this tricky programming issue by regularly adjusting the earth's orbit....
Eh, let a future generation fix Oracle's code.
Leap seconds, in contrast, are completely pointless. They exist because the SI day is slightly shorter than the solar day, by a tiny fraction of a second. This means that, after a few years, the sun will not quite be at its apex precisely at midday. How much is the variation? We've had 24 leap seconds since they were introduced in 1972, but a lot of these were to slowly correct the already-wrong time. In the last decade, we've had two. At that rate, it will take 300 years for the sun to be a minute off. It will take 18,000 years for it to be an hour off. These numbers are slightly wrong. The solar day becomes a bit under 2ms longer every hundred years, so we'd need leap seconds more often later.
Well in that case it's probably easier for Oracle to just buy the Sun.