Mike S wrote:
At 02:40 AM 7/28/2005, M. Warner Losh wrote...
The Turin leap second survey said that loss of life had occurred due
to a leap second insertion event.
That is a deliberately misleading statement. It MUST be the case that the loss
of life occurred due to and improperly designed, incorrectly specified, or
improperly used system. The person/organization at fault seeks to misplace
blame.
I've stayed out of this argument, because frankly I don't have a strong
view on the subject, but I don't think this is misleading at all. The
point Warner and Poul-Henning have been trying to make is that leap
seconds will cause programming errors, and this seems to be (anecdotal
and undetailed) evidence of that.
Certainly the death (if it occurred) was not an automatic result of the
leapsecond, but rather was the result of something that broke because it
wasn't properly programmed to deal with the leapsecond. But that's the
one of the points the anti-leapsecond folks are trying to make -- things
will break, because the majority of programmers don't know how to, or
that they even need to, program for leapseconds, and the infrequent and
unpredictable occurrence of leapseconds makes it unlikely that situation
will change.
John
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