On 29/12/2016 01:21, Peter Jeremy wrote:
On 2016-Dec-29 10:59:32 +1100, Dave Horsfall
<dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
(Yes, a repeat, but this momentous event only
happens every few years.)
Actually, they've been more frequent of late.
Important question: did anybody have an "exciting" new year because of a
leap second bug?
The
International Earth Rotation Service has announced that there will be
a Leap Second inserted at 23:59:59 UTC on the 31st December, due to the
earth slowly slowing down. It's fun to listen to see how the time beeps
handle it; will your GPS clock display 23:59:60, or will it go nuts
(because the programmer was an idiot)?
Google chose an alternative approach to
avoiding the 23:59:60 issue and will
smear the upcoming leap second across the period 2016-12-31 14:00:00 UTC
through 2017-01-01 10:00:00 UTC (see
https://developers.google.com/time/smear)
Of course, this means that mixing
time.google.com with normal NTP servers
will have "interesting" effects.
FWIW, Akamai and AWS are similar (but
different) implementations of leap
second smear:
*
https://blogs.akamai.com/2016/11/planning-for-the-end-of-2016-a-leap-second…
*
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/look-before-you-leap-the-coming-leap-secon…
S.