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The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

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Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#101

Post by nostromo »

adamsb6 wrote: post #50

Currently software has to be built to accommodate leap seconds. They happen frequently enough that you'll find out within a few years whether your software breaks when time suddenly skips forward or backward. If we kick the can down the road such that eventually we'll need to add a leap minute, we're going to end up with software that was never written to expect time to change in such a way, hasn't had a real world t…

Nobody really cares about clocks being celestially "off" by a minute either.

So this isn't a once-a-century thing, it's adding-a-leap-15-minutes-once-a-millenia issue.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#102

Post by throw0101a »

4str0n0mer wrote: post #66
Akronymus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't work afaict. You'd have to get rid of the mass, not just explode it.

If you would detonate the moon, break it up into small pieces and smear them out over its orbit, tidal friction would cease. Tidal friction is a major component of the earth's rotation's slowdown.

> If you would detonate the moon, break it up into small pieces […]

Close to the plot of a recent Stephenson sci-fi novel:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#103

Post by hoytech »

In 2015 I was working at a "fintech" company and a leap second was announced. It was scheduled for a Wednesday, unlike all others before which had happened on the weekend, when markets were closed.

When the previous leap second was applied, a bunch of our Linux servers had kernel panics for some reason, so needless to say everyone was really concerned about a leap second happening during trading hours.

So I was assigned to make sure nothing bad would happen. I spent a month in the lab, simulating the leap second by fast forwarding clocks for all our different applications, testing different NTP implementations (I like chrony, for what it's worth). I had heaps of meetings with our partners trying to figure out what their plans were (they had none), and test what would happen if their clocks went backwards. I had to learn about how to install the leap seconds file into a bunch of software I never even knew existed, write various recovery scripts, and at one point was knee-deep in ntpd and Solaris kernel code.

After all that, the day before it was scheduled, the whole trading world agreed to halt the markets for 15 minutes before/after the leap second, so all my work was for nothing. I'm not sure what the moral is here, if there is one.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#104

Post by MonkeyClub »

cptskippy wrote: post #73
adamsb6 wrote: post #50

Currently software has to be built to accommodate leap seconds. They happen frequently enough that you'll find out within a few years whether your software breaks when time suddenly skips forward or backward. If we kick the can down the road such that eventually we'll need to add a leap minute, we're going to end up with software that was never written to expect time to change in such a way, hasn't had a real world t…

In an enterprise environment, every leap second or TZ change invokes a ceremonious updating of anything using Java or a JVM. I suspect a lot of people would rather perform a once a century update than the bi-annual process they do now.

Did we just create a Cobolesque Y2K situation for Java?

I can just imagine Graybeards of the future rushing ahead of the leap minute to update the JVM lest the world goes in flames yet again.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#105

Post by throw0101a »

cactus2093 wrote: post #96
bombcar wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought that the best way would just have leap seconds every six months, and have it be ± 1 second no matter what - so sometimes you'd go back a second twice in a row, and then go forward a second to get back to correct. That'd test all the software paths.

> That'd test all the software paths. The daylight savings time bugs I've run into at pretty much every company I've ever worked at would beg to differ.

See also leap year bugs even though that concept has been around even longer than DST.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#106

Post by FeistySkink »

cactus2093 wrote: post #96
bombcar wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought that the best way would just have leap seconds every six months, and have it be ± 1 second no matter what - so sometimes you'd go back a second twice in a row, and then go forward a second to get back to correct. That'd test all the software paths.

> That'd test all the software paths. The daylight savings time bugs I've run into at pretty much every company I've ever worked at would beg to differ.

My favorite is comparing aggregated data across several time zones when DST changes happen.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#107

Post by cesarb »

kangalioo wrote: post #43
Hamuko wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely we won’t just get more and more out of synch with the earths orbit? Why does being out of sync with the Earth's orbit matter?

Because humans use time as an indicator for day and night

We already accept an error of half an hour (most timezone offsets are multiples of a whole hour) or more (many timezone boundaries are widened to align with state or country boundaries). A couple of minutes is nothing next to that, and if start getting too far, we can simply redefine the timezone offsets (which we already do twice a year in many places, and any device which might be moved across timezone boundaries already have to deal with that).

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#108

Post by krick »

ajkjk wrote: post #7
TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So not the world? Title is misleading.

It's a totally valid synecdoche. "The world votes..." doesn't mean "every human on earth votes...", it means "a worldwide body votes...".

It is "a valid synecdoche" only as long as we accept that doublethink and newspeak are desirable. Sure, calling black — "white", dictatorship — "worldwide democracy" and so on… everyone will adjust. And by "will" I mean "already do and always did" — there's nothing new about this, it's just the "truths" we are supposed to believe in are what changes over the centuries, not the way societies work. Perhaps it's even true that there is no other way (which doesn't make me like it any more).

So it's totally true that no one is actually mislead by this, but I absolutely understand those who try to pretend they are, and have a slight disdain for those who try to defend this bullshit.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#109

Post by Shared404 »

hoytech wrote: post #103

In 2015 I was working at a "fintech" company and a leap second was announced. It was scheduled for a Wednesday, unlike all others before which had happened on the weekend, when markets were closed. When the previous leap second was applied, a bunch of our Linux servers had kernel panics for some reason, so needless to say everyone was really concerned about a leap second happening during trading hours. So I was assig…

The moral is we get to hear your cool war story. Thanks for sharing!

...okay yeah that's not a moral, but still.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#110

Post by throw0101a »

ender341341 wrote: post #89
jylam wrote: post #59

It seems I've got an unpopular opinion reading the comments here, but having some leap seconds from time to time ensure we are able to manage them. But "no leap second should be added for at least a century" ensures there will be a y2k reckoning every century. Seems short sighted to me, even if it is not a game-changing issue, let's be honest.

Why have them at all? how many people do things where they actually matter? at the current rate it'll be ~9000ad before we hit an hour offset, and we do hour offsets twice a year, so if an hour off is okay why is 1 second off not?

> at the current rate it'll be ~9000ad before we hit an hour offset

And the leap year problems of the Julian calendar weren't a problem… until they were. And then good luck coördinating things:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar#Adoption_by...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_the_Gregorian_cale...

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