Leap Second planned for 2016

Saku Ytti saku at ytti.fi
Sat Jul 9 09:14:03 UTC 2016


On 9 July 2016 at 04:39, Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick at ianai.net> wrote:

Hey,

> But time _DOES_ flow. The seconds count
>         58, 59, 60, 00, 01, …
> If you can’t keep up, that’s not UTC’s fault.

Check the implementation on your PC. This is why code is broken and
people don't even know it's broken. You have to use monotonic time to
measure passage of time, which is not particularly easy to do
portable, in some languages.

> As for stopping the leap seconds, talk to the planet Earth. It’s the one who will not conveniently rotate properly. Either that, or run REEEEEEALLY Fast in that -> direction every once in a while. :-)

In practice this does not appear to be significant problem. Several
thousand years must pass until clocks have shifted one hour, and we
have experience on shifting clocks one hour within a year, so I'm sure
we can tolerate slippage caused by not having leaps. I'm holding my
thumbs up for 2023 and sanity prevailing.

-- 
  ++ytti



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