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Leaping seconds and looping servers

Posted Jul 7, 2012 11:45 UTC (Sat) by lab (subscriber, #51153)
Parent article: Leaping seconds and looping servers

For those interested in the more deep background, I can highly recommend this post, by an authority on the matter (my countryman Poul-Henning Kamp): http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/5/107699-the-one-secon.... It's a fascinating read.

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Posted Jul 8, 2012 0:14 UTC (Sun) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

Fascinating indeed, and quite apocalyptic, too:

But Linus Torvalds' observation that "95% of all programmers think they are in the top 5%, and the rest are certain they are above average" [...] When a large fraction of the world economy is run by the creations of lousy programmers, and when embedded systems are increasingly capable of killing people, do we raise the bar and demand that programmers pay attention to pointless details¹...?

Heavens, yes!

¹ This experience has shown us that how Linux handles leap seconds is not a "pointless" detail.

Leaping seconds and looping servers

Posted Jul 8, 2012 10:45 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Couple of amusing typos in that.

"Some systems have resorted to slowing down the clock by 1/3600th for the last hour before the leap second, hoping that nobody notices that seconds suddenly are 277 microseconds long."

I think that might be noticed! Seconds being 277 microseconds longer, though, is less likely to be noticed except by people who really care.