[time-nuts] IEEE Spectrum Magazine interviews one of our own...

[Christopher Quarksnow]

About Steven Cherry, here is a famous example of system outage due to leap
seconds :
http://www.dba-oracle.com/oracle_news/news_leap_second_causing_new_years_rac_node_crashes.htm

Also Google Android is plagued with an issue visible on phones like the
Motorola Droid or HTC EVO 4G, where the time displayed is GPS instead of
UTC, as possibly someone did not know of leap seconds :
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5485

Concerning leap seconds, I spoke to Dr Daniel Gambis last month (he is the
one who decides to insert them), and he suggested that despite astronomers
having to incur costly retooling, it seems to him that ITU under U.S.
pressure might do away with leap seconds soon. He pointed me to the
following article :
www.agi.com/downloads/resources/user-resources/downloads/whitepapers/DebateOverUTCandLeapSeconds.pdf

As far as leap years every 4 years, that does not apply to multiples of 400
like year 2000.

Just my 2¢

Christopher Quarksnow



On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 02:30, cook michael <michael.cook at sfr.fr> wrote:

> Le 25/05/2011 04:00, Tom Holmes a écrit :
>
> <snip>
> Steven Cherry is exaggerating when he says " most systems go down for
> planned maintenance instead of trying to deal with leap seconds in real
> time."
>  As someone who has been supporting major industrial, banking, airline
> systems for the last 30 years, I remember NO down time, or outage due to
> leap second insertion. In fact, I don't know of any  commercial
> applications, that care about it. Most systems administrators that I had
> contact with didn't know that th leap seconds existed, and did not
> configure, check or update their ntp servers  to enable them to be taken
> into account.  There were of course outages and errors due to clock updates,
> but they were all attributable to operators trying to change the clocks by
> large increments manualy or bad ntp configurations, such as allowing large
> step changes instead of slewing .  We have up till now been faced only with
> positive leap second insertion, but negative updates are also possible.
> Testing I have done on unix based operating systems show no adverse effects
> to negative leap second insertion either.
>
>
>
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