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2015 is getting an extra second
On June 30th at precisely 23:59:59, the world’s atomic clocks will pause for a single second. Or, to be more precise, they’ll change to the uncharted time of 23:59:60 — before ticking over to the more worldly hour of 00:00:00 on the morning of July 1st, 2015. This addition of a leap second, announced by the Paris Observatory this week, is being added to keep terrestrial clocks in step with the vagaries of astronomical time — in this case, the slowing of the Earth’s rotation. And it's a bit of a headache for computer engineers.
Leap seconds are like the Y2K bug in that they threaten to throw out of sync time as measured by computers and time as measured by atomic clocks. But while Y2K was a single instance (computer systems that were used to abbreviating the year to two digits were confused by "2000" and "1900"), the addition of leap seconds are a regular problem. The first was added back in 1972; this year’s will be the 26th, and they're not likely to stop coming. They're also broadly unpredictable: earthquakes, tidal drag, and the weather all affect the rotation of the Earth, and it’s up to the scientists at the International Earth Rotation Service to keep an eye on things and call the changes as they come.
Unfortunately, when the last leap second was added back in 2012, more than a few sites had trouble keeping pace. As reported by Phys.org, Foursquare, Reddit, LinkedIn, and StumbledUpon all crashed when the leap second ticked unexpectedly into place. In the case of Reddit, the problem was eventually traced back to a Linux subsystem that got confused when it checked the Network Time Protocol only to find an extra second. Speaking to Wired about the problem back in 2012, Linux creator Linus Torvalds commented: "Almost every time we have a leap second, we find something. It’s really annoying, because it’s a classic case of code that is basically never run, and thus not tested by users under their normal conditions."
please read more from here
2015 is getting an extra second and that's a bit of a problem for the internet | The Verge
On June 30th at precisely 23:59:59, the world’s atomic clocks will pause for a single second. Or, to be more precise, they’ll change to the uncharted time of 23:59:60 — before ticking over to the more worldly hour of 00:00:00 on the morning of July 1st, 2015. This addition of a leap second, announced by the Paris Observatory this week, is being added to keep terrestrial clocks in step with the vagaries of astronomical time — in this case, the slowing of the Earth’s rotation. And it's a bit of a headache for computer engineers.
Leap seconds are like the Y2K bug in that they threaten to throw out of sync time as measured by computers and time as measured by atomic clocks. But while Y2K was a single instance (computer systems that were used to abbreviating the year to two digits were confused by "2000" and "1900"), the addition of leap seconds are a regular problem. The first was added back in 1972; this year’s will be the 26th, and they're not likely to stop coming. They're also broadly unpredictable: earthquakes, tidal drag, and the weather all affect the rotation of the Earth, and it’s up to the scientists at the International Earth Rotation Service to keep an eye on things and call the changes as they come.
Unfortunately, when the last leap second was added back in 2012, more than a few sites had trouble keeping pace. As reported by Phys.org, Foursquare, Reddit, LinkedIn, and StumbledUpon all crashed when the leap second ticked unexpectedly into place. In the case of Reddit, the problem was eventually traced back to a Linux subsystem that got confused when it checked the Network Time Protocol only to find an extra second. Speaking to Wired about the problem back in 2012, Linux creator Linus Torvalds commented: "Almost every time we have a leap second, we find something. It’s really annoying, because it’s a classic case of code that is basically never run, and thus not tested by users under their normal conditions."
please read more from here
2015 is getting an extra second and that's a bit of a problem for the internet | The Verge
