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from the like-this-year-hasn't-been-long-enough dept.
Phys.org (among many other sites) is reporting on a leap second being added before the end of 2016:
As if 2016 has not been long enough, the year's dying minute will last an extra second to make up for time lost to Earth's slowing rotation, timekeepers say.
Countries that use Coordinated Universal Time—several West African nations, Britain, Ireland and Iceland—will add the leap second during the midnight countdown to 2017—making the year's final minute 61 seconds long.
For others, the timing will be determined by the time zone they live in, relative to UTC.
"This extra second, or leap second, makes it possible to align astronomical time, which is irregular and determined by Earth's rotation, with UTC which is extremely stable and has been determined by atomic clocks since 1967," the Paris Observatory said in a statement.
The observatory houses the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS), responsible for synchronising time.
"The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be: 2016 December 31 23h 59m 59s, 2016 December 31 23h 59m 60s, 2017 January 1, 0h 0m 0s," the IERS website states.
Here is the original IERS announcement. There have been times in the past when the addition of a leap-second caused havoc — it is non-trivial to update the clocks on all the systems in an organization at the same time. When activity "A" happens before activity "B", but because of inconsistent system clocks the timestamps imply otherwise, things can go sideways in a hurry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @04:54AM
The way Unix time kludges in "support" for leap seconds (it doesn't support them, it employs hacks to sync back up with UTC) is pretty ugly and is explained in detail here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday December 31 2016, @12:23PM
The whole point of the original definition (seconds since a certain point in time) was perfect. The leap seconds could (and should) have been considered during conversion from/to local time, just as the time zone is. As bonus, you'd get correct handling of the leap second automatically as soon as the relevant tzdata is installed, even if at the time of the leap second no external time source is available.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @04:16PM
I agree completely. That would be the obvious, straightforward, and unambiguous way to solve it, i.e., the correct way.
Therefore, that way never stood a chance. Computer nerds LOVE the complicated, undependable hack more than anything else. Why fix it when you can kludge it instead? I think it's because the people who came up with the hack thought backward compatibility with crappy time libraries would make times be off by some seconds potentially, but their leap second "hack" pretty much GUARANTEES that will be the case forever going forward. It takes a very clever mind to come up with a solution this stupid.