F-ckin Leap Seconds, how do they work?

Majdi S. Abbas msa at latt.net
Thu Jul 5 18:58:33 UTC 2012


On Thu, Jul 05, 2012 at 01:07:04PM -0400, Jared Mauch wrote:
> This is a local/states rights issue imho :)  AZ ignores DST and as a result
> I never know what time it is there ;)

	AZ actually tried DST for a year, and then came to a couple of
conclusions:

	1) The state with the highest insolation in the country really
has no need to conserve daylight.
	2) It actually wastes energy here by driving more business
air conditoning use.

	As for how it actually works:

	It's very simple.  I never touch my clocks unless I'm setting or
winding them.  It's fantastic.

	Where this falls down:

	Outlook will still attempt to scramble your calendar based on
other people's silly clock change.

	Your phone will tell you it's updated the clock for DST...when
it hasn't.  Or worse, despite being set for no DST change, it'll do it.
Some will even lock up.  There's lots and lots of broken time of day
code out there.

	People don't understand the distinction between, say, Mountain
Standard Time, and Mountain Daylight Time (Equinix, I'm looking at
*YOU* -- your MST setting in the portal is not, in fact, MST.  There's
no option appropriate for me at all.)

	Everyone keeps asking you what time it is 'there' because they
can't wrap their brains around a static -7 offset.

	Anyway, given the number of software bugs around the DST change,
the leap is the least of our worries.  Perhaps we should stop rewarding
people that write bad code.

	--msa




More information about the NANOG mailing list