Leap Second

[Kent A Bathurst]

I've been streaming Voyager via Netflix for several weeks now...almost done. I'm naming any new daughters, Seven.

YOu are gonna regret that, starting at about age 15.................

[Dan Hintz]

I've been streaming Voyager via Netflix for several weeks now...almost done. I'm naming any new daughters, Seven.

So you want hoardes of pubescent teens lusting after her?! Bad idea

[Joe Tilson]

Let me know when it happens so I can leap over it.
Give me plenty of time, these old legs don't leap like they use to.

[John Coloccia]

First daylight saving time, and now this.

[Brian Elfert]

Well it went so swimmingly well the last couple of times... I'm just suuuure there will be no problems

This is a fun summary of fail the last time around, mostly in java apps. We can (perhaps vainly) hope that people are handling it a bit better this round. Overall on par with y2k for visible outages, probably because of poorer preparedness.
http://phk.freebsd.dk/hacks/leap_20120630/index.html

I work in IT and don't recall any issues the last time there was a leap second. I don't think I even knew it was happening the last time. We do keep our servers up to date so maybe that is why no problems.

[Ryan Mooney]

I work in IT and don't recall any issues the last time there was a leap second. I don't think I even knew it was happening the last time. We do keep our servers up to date so maybe that is why no problems.

It depends on what you had running if you had a problem... and likely many folks who did have a problem probably didn't notice it because they weren't sensitive to the specific time issues or attributed the issues to solar flares and rebooted the machines (likely happened for many of the high cpu load problems).

I don't remember having a problem either, but then I work on wholly uninteresting things so there's that

A bunch of java code running on specific linux kernels was hit:
http://wiki.r1soft.com/display/kb3/H...eap+Second+Bug
and there were some other issues as well: http://winningraceconditions.blogspo...deadlocks.html

In practice this is a hard problem to test because it happens rarely so keeping updates up to date may or may not actually help you. There has been some discussion of actually abolishing the leap second: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.50.html#subj1.1

It turns out that "keeping time" is hard (even if you are a programming musician) and keeping time when it leaps hither and yon is even harder.

There's a bunch more out there if you feel as amused by this sort of thing as I am - risks digest is usually pretty good and a few google searches on "distributed locking time leap" and "distributed systems time leap" are insightful.

There is of course a solution - simply bombard the earth with asteroids to keep it from slowing down so much:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/26/
there may be some side effects not everyone would approve of

and John, don't get me started on daylight savings: http://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst/history.html sheeeesssh.. I miss living in HI and AZ for more than just the weather.

[Chris Padilla]

You'd like IN, too, Ryan.

[Jason Roehl]

You'd like IN, too, Ryan.

Not since about '05 or '06--that's when we went on DST with the rest of the sleep-deprived, zombie idiots.

[Chris Padilla]

No foolin'?! I lived in Chicago but regularly worked throughout IN in the late 80s to early 90s. IN was the worse because it was only parts of the state that changed.

[Ryan Mooney]

Not since about '05 or '06--that's when we went on DST with the rest of the sleep-deprived, zombie idiots.

That's a shame! More people should come over to the "dark side" :P

Wow daylight savings and time zones in general are/were a mess in Indiana: http://www.timeanddate.com/time/us/indiana-time.html Not that a lot of states are any better (thinking AZ with the navajo vs the rest of the state on different times depending on the time of the year). Time is complicated!

[Jason Roehl]

No foolin'?! I lived in Chicago but regularly worked throughout IN in the late 80s to early 90s. IN was the worse because it was only parts of the state that changed.

It's still a little bit of a mess because most of the state is in the Eastern Time Zone, but the NW and SW corners are in the Central Time Zone. My in-laws live just over an hour away (straight north of us), yet are in a different time zone.

When we made the switch to DST, it actually cost me MORE. Previously, darkness came early enough that the upstairs of our then-house cooled off just enough that putting the kids to bed wasn't too bad in the summer. After the switch to DST, I had to install a window A/C unit to make it possible for anyone to sleep up there.

We need to STOP THE INSANITY!! DST, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways...