Posted on 01/12/2015 7:45:50 AM PST by BenLurkin
This will be the 26th leap second added to a calendar year since the practice began in 1972. In the past, the extra second has messed with computer systems. The last leap second was added in 2012, and it caused problems for big companies like Reddit, LinkedIn, Gizmodo and FourSquare.
The problem is that during the leap second, the computer clock shows 60 seconds instead of simply rolling over to the next minute, or shows the 59th second twice. The computer sees a leap second as time going backward, Matsakis said. The machine registers this as a system error, and the CPU can overload.
Google, to skirt the problem, will add a millisecond to its servers every once in a while throughout the year. This way, the slowed-down servers don't notice when an extra second is slipped in. Another good way to avoid any trouble is to simply shut down a computer system for an hour or two around the leap second, Matsakis said.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
The sky will fall.
The seas will swamp our coastal areas.
Minorities, womyn and LGBTQ children will be most negatively affected.
The rising tide of racism in America will continue to rise.
And so on...
I remember doom. Didn't it happen at the beginning of the year 2000?
Y2K all over again!
Is this from World Net Daily?
Computers have to update their clocks all the time, it is not like the clocks in computers are ultra precise accurate...
Why not just update the NIST servers a few minutes after midnight on new years day and that change will propagate down all the servers with no issues like a run of the mill time sync.
Because PC clock are notoriously inaccurate, I had a computer a few years ago that was always runnign slow, sometimes by almost a minute a day, the windows time service would always update it and no crashies.
Just update the NIST servers and fogetabboutit
Ready!
just last week or so on New Years I thought back to 15 years prior and all the hysteria surrounding Y2K. I was working at GE Capital at the time and they must have spent hundreds upon hundreds of thousands becoming “Y2K Compliant”.
Me, one day for kicks I reset my computers clock to say it was 12/31/1999 11:59pm and watch it ticks off to past the date change, all was well, rebooted, all was well. Figured Y2K compliant is just a big swindle.
Y2K was rapidly approaching and I had a 5 hour solo New Year’s Eve Gig at a very nice senior community in Delray Beach.
Back in the day, I was a One-Woman orchestra with several MIDI devices synchronized that gave my keyboard the sound of a sixteen piece Jazz Band.
This was before Keyboards were equipped with hundreds of Rhythms, and the synchronization of my devices (including drum machines, keyboards, and 3.5” Floppy Drives) had to be in perfect synch. As I watched the ball slide down the pole, I wondered if my “Rig” would crash at the stroke of midnight, just when I was supposed to launch into “Auld Lang Syne”.
Of course, NOTHING happened, the song went off without a hitch, and I was relieved.
But I was also furious that our entire country had fussed and worried about this for nearly a YEAR, and it was all a hoax.
Just Like Acid rain, The Hole in The Ozaone layer, Globull Warming, and Peaceful islam.
This is only a problem for hyper-accurate time keeping requirements for technologies such as GPS. As a systems engineer, we are concerned but not so much so as to be in a panic. Kerberos, for instance, has a tolerance of 10 minutes in most Windows domain environments, so one second isn’t going to be a death sentence.
Older systems (looking at you, XP!) might have trouble figuring out the change if synchronizing time from an external source, but provided they don’t sync at the exact second of the leap second, nothing will break, per se.
If you are on an older operating system (i.e. Server 2000, XP, older distros of Linux) with no more service pack support, you might expect some system abnormalities on July 1.
Every system has latency and jitter. Just break the leap second up into pieces that get lost in the latency and jitter, and no one will be the wiser.
I'm impressed!
“But I was also furious that our entire country had fussed and worried about this for nearly a YEAR, and it was all a hoax.”
It was a real issue. But a lot of hard work by talented IT people made it turn out to be a non issue.
That is why I didn’t worry about it; I had confidence that Americans were smart enough to fix it; and we had a lot of time to prepare.
>> Are we doomed?
Yes, we are all going to die. I’m super serious about that.
Don’t worry computers are smarter than these Doomsayers
That all depends on incontinence supplies.
Have you seen a dreaded 'blue screen' lately?
Indeed there was a problem, and it had been solved (my dear late husband was one of the talented IT people to whom you refer), but the MEDIA and others persisted in the hand-wringing and doom-saying, so that it had become a daily drumbeat of fear. THAT was the hoax...not the actual computer issue.
I am sorry if I sounded like i was denigrating the actual people who worked on the problem. THEY were not the culprits. The Media were.
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