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'Leap Seconds' May Be Eliminated From UTC

Posted by Soulskill on from the time-and-time-again dept.

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."

1 of 470 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Oracle sholuld simply fix their software... by nacturation · · Score: 5, Informative

    Isn't the problem with Oracle here? It should not be that difficult to fix their software. What's the difference with Summer time change?

    The difference with spring/fall time changes is that although the local time may change, the UTC time does not. In other words, your offset from UTC (eg: GMT-8) may get adjusted depending on your location's observance of daylight savings time but UTC itself simply marches on oblivious to anything. The leap second is the one exception.

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