Google's New Public NTP Servers Provide Smeared Time (googleblog.com)

Posted by msmash on Thursday December 1, 2016 @02:47AM from the fixing-things dept.

Google says it has built support for the leap second into the time servers that regulate all Google services. An anonymous reader shares a blogpost by Google:No commonly used operating system is able to handle a minute with 61 seconds, and trying to special-case the leap second has caused many problems in the past. Instead of adding a single extra second to the end of the day, we'll run the clocks 0.0014% slower across the ten hours before and ten hours after the leap second, and "smear" the extra second across these twenty hours. For timekeeping purposes, December 31 will seem like any other day. All Google services, including all APIs, will be synchronized on smeared time, as described above. You'll also get smeared time for virtual machines on Compute Engine if you follow our recommended settings. You can use non-Google NTP servers if you don't want your instances to use the leap smear, but don't mix smearing and non-smearing time servers.

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Re:Hey look the flow rate is a little high. by MightyYar · 2016-12-01 05:42 · Score: 4, Insightful

Just make the stocks trade in time-coordinated batches. The batches can still be relatively fast - even every second - just so it is slow enough to stop the stupid games with the speed of communications.

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W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Re:It's not that easy by Xylantiel · 2016-12-01 05:50 · Score: 4, Insightful

It's funny to me that they say the Earth's rotation is "determined" by IERS. No, it is *measured*. A subtle implied difference, but a critical one. The problem here is actually with unix time, not UTC. TAI as an alternative to unix time actually makes pretty decent sense. When was the last time you manually converted from seconds since epoch to day/month/year?
I think the point is that since time zones are actually updated more frequently for political purposes than leap seconds occur, it makes sense, for network-connected computers at least, to just stuff the leap seconds in the same distribution channels (already done actually) and abandon trying to hack around the clumsy (non-monotonically increasing) definition of unix time.