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 ...
I used to lift the heavy PA speakers onto the stands myself too.
I still do it for Church, but now i am a bass player and i have a REAL drummer! LOL!
No.
Just....No
GPS and TAI time do not correct for leap seconds, so you have to factor in the accumulated number of leap seconds since their respective epochs, (35 seconds for TAI, 16 seconds for GPS) to derive UTC.
Not an issue for most computers to comprehend if the programmer had any brains.
At least we get a warning this time. The last time this was done in 2012, many people were caught offguard. It raised hell where I work as customer systems were going down left and right for a couple of days at the beginning of July.
But GPS time doesn't adjust for leap seconds. There is a different line in the transmitted GPS time word that describes the accumulated leap seconds since GPS epoch in 1980.
I agree. All 257 of my LinkedIn spam emails were 26 seconds late today!
I didn't "worry" about it. I worked on it, starting in about 1997.
I had confidence that Americans were smart enough to fix it;
Thank you.
and we had a lot of time to prepare.
We did indeed. By the time the brainless idiots in Big Media found out about it, it was largely a solved problem.
The receivers on the ground wouldn’t necessarily account for that, would they?
The receivers use GPS time at all times. Time displays that reference GPS time do have to take it into account.
Here's a web page that the major time types: http://leapsecond.com/java/gpsclock.htm
It wasn't a hoax. The IT industry spent several years fixing it.
People think it was a hox because we were actually successful.
Please read #20.
I didn’t express myself correctly, and apologized.
Oh I remember that very well...
I was walking along the beach around midnight, on the east coast of Costa Rica, Jaco Beach, and I did notice that there was a serious disturbance of the force, just about the time there was a serious deluge of rain.
It was awful!
Uh, no.
That’s not the way computers “tell time”. Computers count the number of seconds elapsed from some pre-defined “epoch” date, and then use software functions to represent that elapsed time as a a date, hours, minutes, and seconds using the defined locale (e.g., US Eastern vs. UTC). The computer’s internal “wall clock” is typically synchronized with a network time service which in turn is synchronized to an atomic clock.
A computer that is not patched to deal with the upcoming “leap second” will simply show time to be one second ahead of what the reference time actually is.
A government task force with massive powers is the only thing that can save us.
Women and minorities hardest hit.
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