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An upcoming International Telecommunication Union (ITU) conference is about to become an international battleground over whether or not to retain the leap second – the periodic adjustment of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) so it stays in agreement with atomic clocks.
The debate's expected to be so intense it will continue throughout the World Radiocommunication Conferences (WRC), which have an agenda spanning more than three weeks starting November 2.
In spite of frequent predictions of a leap second apocalypse, the last leap second passed pretty much without incident. Still, factions in the world of international standards keep the issue ticking over.
That wasn't the case in 2012, when Australian airlines Qantas and Virgin Australia both staggered when the Amadeus booking system crashed, and servers run by Mozilla, Reddit, Yelp, and FourSquare struggled. By contrast, 2015 was so unremarkable that some people argue we've worked out how to deal with leap seconds, so we may as well keep them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Sunday November 01 2015, @03:39PM
Required reading: http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time [infiniteundo.com]
To put it plainly, your systems should not be encountering problems due to leap seconds. Your systems should not be encountering problems due to leap centuries either, if you ever have to deal with such a thing. Time bugs are a symptom of poor programming; banning leap seconds won't fix your code.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @04:13PM
I'm not going to invite that guy to my next code review, since I want to leave before 9 PM.
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Sunday November 01 2015, @05:04PM
Of which day? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Entropy on Sunday November 01 2015, @05:19PM
Yeah..So...If your code doesn't have any of the most common programming errors then you'll be 100% fine, got it. And if any code your code uses doesn't have any of the most common errors....or other errors, that might mimic them. Yep that makes me feel better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @01:10AM
amen
Poor code is poor code.
WE had M$ screw big time when they code not get 366 days in year, and crashed mahines foe a full day.
Anyoner with crashed server for a leap second needs to get a new coding staff.