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posted by janrinok on Sunday November 01 2015, @01:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the leap-or-not-to-leap dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @04:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @04:13PM (#257177)

    I'm not going to invite that guy to my next code review, since I want to leave before 9 PM.

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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Sunday November 01 2015, @05:04PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday November 01 2015, @05:04PM (#257187) Journal

    I'm not going to invite that guy to my next code review, since I want to leave before 9 PM.

    Of which day? :-)

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.