Meet the Guy Whose Software Keeps the World's Digital Clocks In Sync (ieee.org)

New submitter Wave723 quotes a story on IEEE: In many cases, the internal clock that ticks away in a laptop or desktop computer is synchronized to an official time service maintained by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This free service shares Coordinated Universal Time with personal devices, web browsers, financial trading software and e-mail programs throughout the world. The service receives 150,000 requests per second (roughly 16 billion a day) from systems that repeatedly ask, 'What time is it?' "If you have a PC, it's probably synchronized to the time service," says Judah Levine, the man who originally built servers and programmed software to send time over the Internet for NIST back in 1993.

Comments

Re:Nut in charge of the nut house.

[msauve]

Leap seconds aren't "artificial," any more than standard time zones are. They're directly related to the earth's natural rotation, as timekeeping has been for millennia. They are to the earth's rotation as leap days are to the earth's orbit. Additionally, time is monotonic, with or without leap seconds (or DST, for that matter, which merely involves a switch to a different timescale).

The biggest source of problems is POSIX, which some design-by-committee decided should define a day as having a fixed length, ignoring the existence leap seconds.

If you don't care about second accurate time, you don't have to deal with leap seconds, and your complexity problem is solved.

Re:Nut in charge of the nut house.

[msauve]

Standard timezones were introduced as a practical convenience, so people in close proximity could share common (standard) time, as opposed to every town having their own 12:00 high noon. But, the timezone itself was still locked naturally to Sol, only the borders were artificial/political. Similarly, the leap second allows clocks worldwide to tick simultaneously based on an artificial human definition of the second, which was previously 1/86400 of a solar day. Leap seconds exist because the second itself is now an artificial construct, and they're needed to stay in sync with nature.