On Jun 26, 2012, at 7:09, AlbyVA wrote: > The world needs a leap second. Reading that article, it seems like there is > an effort to > ignore it and/or get rid of it. But its not like its based on some arbitrary > issue to keep > time keepers at some atomic clock employed. As the moon steals Earth's > rotational speed, > the planet is slowing down and the day is becoming longer.
But: *) It will be a REALLY LONG TIME before it's even an hour off. *) People are used to several hours of "slack" in how precise mid-day is (think traveling inside a timezone; lots of places in the world you'll sometimes be several hours off, in China I believe they have one time zone wide enough for three). *) We're really good at jumping the clock an hour. We do it twice a year in many places, and most jurisdictions have changed those laws a bunch of times in the last decades (often with short notice. And we know how to do that). *) Nobody has figured out how to deal with an extra or a missing second! For the last point, at the most recent leap second about 15% of the servers didn't figure it out in a timely fashion, and quite a few servers were completely broken for days. I wrote on a different list last year (and here a few years ago): "After the 2008-12-31 leap second about 1 in 7 of the NTP servers went bad by just around one second in the first hour after the leap second[1]. Even 12 hours later about 2% of the servers were still bad. I didn't write it down, but I randomly checked some of the bad servers and I recall that they were using a seemingly random mix of sources (CDMA signals, GPS directly, other NTP servers over the internet etc)." Ask [1] https://lists.ntp.org/pipermail/pool/2009-January/004623.html _______________________________________________ pool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/pool
