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Time's Up: The Leap Second is Being Scrapped

posted by janrinok on Tuesday November 22 2022, @09:10AM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/21/23470759/leap-second-scrapped-2035-time-computer-chaos

A global panel of scientists and government representatives have voted to scrap leap seconds by 2035. The ad hoc time adjustment is occasionally inserted to account for the gradual slowdown of the Earth's rotation and has caused headaches for numerous tech companies over the years.

The leap second was introduced in 1972 as a way to adjust Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) roughly every 21 months. As these seconds are irregular and hard to predict due to the varying speed of the Earth's rotation, they can disrupt systems that require precise timekeeping. Meta published a blog post earlier this year calling for leap seconds to be scrapped, highlighting that Reddit went down for around 40 minutes back in 2012 when a new leap second interfered with the company's servers. In 2017, Cloudflare blamed the leap second for its DNS service going down on New Year's Day, precisely at midnight UTC.

As reported by The New York Times, member states of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures almost unanimously voted in support of Resolution D at a meeting in Versailles, France, on Friday. Resolution D calls for UTC to go uninterrupted by leap seconds from 2035 until at least 2135, during which it's hoped that scientists can develop a better system for keeping atomic and astronomical time scales in sync.

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  • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday December 03 2022, @01:39AM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Saturday December 03 2022, @01:39AM (#1280974) Homepage Journal

    This brought flashbacks to the Y2K bug when halfway through the last century dates were coded with only two digits for the years (storage was really expensive then). Those programmers' grandchildren had to fix it swiftly, because they all put it off. Now today's coders will fix the unintended consequence of the leap second; back then, nobody could have known the future, with the internet and GPS (except maybe Murray Leinster [baen.com] who wrote the linked story the year the first patent for a programmable electronic computer was issued).

    --
    mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday December 03 2022, @07:01AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday December 03 2022, @07:01AM (#1280995) Journal

    Time seems to have destabilized. The server seems to be mostly back in November. Or was it the effect of a leap second? :-)

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

  • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday December 03 2022, @02:53PM

    by acid andy (1683) on Saturday December 03 2022, @02:53PM (#1281014) Homepage Journal

    Fuck BMeta!

    From now on, I'm going to set my clocks according to the astronomically correct Universal Time, UT1 [wikipedia.org].

    I'll just leave this here [nist.gov].

    ut1-time.colorado.edu     128.138.140.50     University of Colorado, Boulder
    ut1-wwv.nist.gov          132.163.97.7       NIST WWV Radio, Ft. Collins, CO

    --
    If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
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