Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

You Can Look Forward To 8 More Years of Leap Second Problems (cio.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the leap-groundhog-saw-his-shadow dept.

itwbennett writes: As previously discussed here, the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) met "for nearly the entire month of November, and one of the hot-button issues [was] what to do about the leap second." But, as they did at the 2012 conference, the WRC voted to postpone the decision — not just until the next WRC in 2019, but until the one after, in 2023, while the International Telecommunication Union conducts further studies into the impact of tinkering with the definition of Coordinated Universal Time.

6 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. How is it a problem? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    NTP handles leap seconds, where's the issue?

  2. Someone needs to ... by PPH · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... wind up the earth.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  3. This is stupid ... by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Leap seconds are an artifact of our timekeeping system, and actual physical properties of our orbit.

    For the ITU to be voting on if we keep leap seconds is kind of like politicians voting to determine that pi==3 ... it has nothing to do with reality.

    Like it or not, you have to solve the problem. You simply can't get a bunch of tech people on a damned committee getting together and saying "we're no longer having leap seconds". That's just stupid.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    1. Re:This is stupid ... by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Interesting

      See, the problem is most people don't understand where our system of time keeping comes from or why it's important.

      The reason we adjust for leap years and leap seconds is our calendar is a close approximation to our orbital period ... but it's not exact.

      At noon, on the day of a solstice or an equinox, the sun is in a known position in the sky. We use it for important things like navigation and timekeeping, and knowing when the hell things like eclipses, sun flares, high tides, and comets might happen ... or that asteroid which might kill us.

      It's a real physical property, which we kind of need to keep track of. It's NOT some thing you can say "oh, well, what does it matter if you're off by a couple of days?".

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:This is stupid ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      We use it for important things like navigation and timekeeping, and knowing when the hell things like eclipses, sun flares, high tides, and comets might happen ... or that asteroid which might kill us.

      I'm a professional astronomer, who occasionally needs to time things to sub-second precision over multiple years - and the leap second is, to me, nothing but a pain in the arse. Let's run down your list:

        * "navigation" - No one navigates by the sun and stars any more - at least, certainly no one who needs sub-second precision.

        * "timekeeping" - Atomic clocks keep time irrespective of the sun.

        * "eclipses" - Eclipses don't care whether the sun's at the meridian or not: they only care about the relative position of the sun and the moon, which you can calculate perfectly easily with an arbitrary time standard.

        * "sun flares" - Solar flares don't care whether the sun's at the meridian or not.

        * "high tides" - The sun makes a small contribution to the tides (which are dominated by the moon), so the leap second *does* help you keep track of this contribution - but who the hell needs to know the high tide to the nearest second?

        * "comets" - Comets don't care if the sun is at the meridian or not.

        * "that asteroid which might kill us" - That asteroid doesn't care if the sun is at the meridian or not - but there *is* a chance that someone might miscalculate its orbit and not realise that it's going to kill us, because there was a bug in their code dealing with leap seconds.

      So, this is something that genuinely puzzles me: who actually *wants* leap seconds? You seem to think that I should want them, but I certainly don't.

    3. Re:This is stupid ... by petermgreen · · Score: 4, Informative

      Leap seconds are an artifact of our timekeeping system, and actual physical properties of our orbit.

      The latter we are stuck with but the former is something humanity has the power to change. There are basically three choices.

      1: Disconnect the civil time second from the SI second. Allow the civil time second to vary slightly to match the mean solar day.
      2: Allow civil time to drift relative to solar time
      3: Make periodic adjustments to civil time to keep it close to solar time.

      Each choice hurts different people. Choice 1 hurts anyone who needs to convert between civil time and "atom time". Choice 2 hurts people who rely on civil time as a navigational aid and future historians. Choice 3 puts a rarely excersised special case into computer systems leading to systematic failures.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register