Leap Second To Be Added Dec 31, 2008 255
ammorris writes "Don't be the laughingstock of your friends when you shout 'Happy New Years' a second too early ... The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service has announced that a leap second will be added on December 31, 2008 at 23h 59m 60s, meaning that this year will be exactly one second longer. The last leap second occurred Dec 31, 2005; they are added due to fluctuations in the rotational speed of the earth. You can read all about leap seconds on Wikipedia."
Re:Gee, thanks for the notice (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:2008?!! (Score:1, Insightful)
2008?
I live on the eastern hemisphere, you insensitive clod! Hooray for longer 2009!
Re:Second! (Score:0, Insightful)
Offensive?
Seriously, it's a bit of fun that you may or may not see, depending on when you post (i.e., has he been modded to hell already?).
Oh wait, you're browsing at -1 and complaining?
He also does have a very good point, in that you're actually leaving a shit and not taking a shit.
Re:Gee, thanks for the notice (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean that in a critical field-of-work a system that fails more often than "doesn't work on leap days" gets past the acceptance tests?
I now understand where the pressure to remove leap seconds comes from. From the idiots that can't specify systems that handle them correctly.
Re:Second! (Score:1, Insightful)
If you find that offensive, what are you doing on the internet?
why rely on hh/mm/ss instead of millis elapsed... (Score:3, Insightful)
Uhh, wouldn't it be nice if we were given a little bit more of a warning? Say, something like, oh a week?
You may laugh, but I work in Air Traffic Control. We rely on absolutely precise timing in a system distributed over 1000s of kilometres. Many components can be marked as non-functional by the system if they appear to have an incorrect clock.
Every time we add a leap second we get issues raised. I have to say it is a real PITA.
What I find baffling is that architects/developers working in such a life-critical field managed to conceive application relying on days/minutes which are NOT fixed values. (a minute can have 59 or 61 seconds while a day can have 23 or 25 hours).
That said, the clock of a Un*x system is usually calibrated in milliseconds since the epoch and this has absolutely zero, nada, zilch, nothing to do with leaps seconds. The fact that we decide that 31 dec 2008 with have a 61 seconds minute change *nothing* to the correct calibration of the clock.
How distributed systems across the globe came to rely on hh/mm/ss speaks, well, a lot about the plain dumbness of many people.
But do they really? I pity the poor sick, under-brained people who designed those GPS if they're really that deeply flawed.
Re:Second! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like raising a puppy. The worst punishment possible is to pay no attention.
The Internet is full of idiots/trolls/criminals/mentally ill. Banning is not a solution. After banning they just start to hide and use a proxy.
Ignoring is the best way.
Re:Second! (Score:0, Insightful)
Complication? (Score:3, Insightful)
Leap seconds get added all the time. They can't be predicted years in advance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second [wikipedia.org]
If you are running NTP or have a radio-controlled lock they will handle this just fine.
If you have a real atomic clock you don't care, atomic clocks never get reset.
Otherwise, you have a couple days to fix your bugs.
Re:Gee, thanks for the notice (Score:3, Insightful)
You may laugh, but I work in Air Traffic Control. We rely on absolutely precise timing in a system distributed over 1000s of kilometres. Many components can be marked as non-functional by the system if they appear to have an incorrect clock.
Every time we add a leap second we get issues raised. I have to say it is a real PITA.
Leap seconds were invented in 1972. You mean your systems didn't get leap second support addressed when you got your Y2K fixes?
Re:Gee, thanks for the notice (Score:3, Insightful)
Only if you celebrate New Year's at 23:59 GMT. All other time zones will have New Year's take place exactly on schedule to the second including Times Square in New York.
Call me geeky, but isn't that the only true way to celebrate it? That's when all my servers are celebrating it...
Re:Second! (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually, the average Slashdotter only objects to censorship they disagree with. They're red hot on censoring people who dare to point out that, actually, Vista isn't as bad as, for example, AIDS.
Re:Gee, thanks for the notice (Score:2, Insightful)
The 64-bit NTP timestamp spans 136 years with a resolution of 232 picoseconds, the 128-bit NTP timestamp spans 584 billion years with a resolution of .05 attoseconds - so right from those points, NTP is good enough for your applications.
What's still problematic is a problem that NTP also tries to compensate: the network latency.
When you're receiving just two packets with exactly the same latency, you can't be sure that the third packet will be there with the same latency, so you're having an possible error rate of 33%. However, if you've seen a million packets with the same latency, your possible error rate is very close to zero, and that's why NTP can sort out the network latency problem only over time.