> ... the "invisible infrastructure" of the web; balancing historical accuracy with the technical need to minimize zone fragmentation is a much more complex trade-off than it appears on the surface ...
The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely.
At $work around 2014 we had three different hardware GPS types which we used for precision timekeeping; some chips, daughterboards, and firmware. One day a leap second arrived -- it gets broadcast to aGPS hardware a day ahead of time -- and all three implementations handled it differently. One handled it, one did something else like ignore it, and I think one even bricked itself. That situation was less than bueno.
wlkrtoday at 3:41 PM
Interesting! There's a lot I don't know about this, but I know a little more now. I'll admit, I naively thought this would be more regular than it appears to be [0].
Leap Seconds need to be abolished. The only people who need it are Astronomers. They could just use an offset. Implementing leap seconds correctly is a huge burden, for no gain.
Where I live, high noon today occurs at 1:03 PM. No one is complaining that it is 3 minutes (or 63 minutes) off. It's a non-issue for 99.9% of the population.
himata4113today at 4:52 PM
How about a leap minute instead so we only have to worry about this when it's not a problem anymore :)? We will either hit the fermi filter or accend intelligence.
SeanDavtoday at 4:21 PM
I assumed that leap seconds could be determined algorithmically, it appears I assumed badly. This is a bit of a can of worms...
throw0101dtoday at 4:02 PM
There was some talk about a negative leap second†a few years ago:
†T23:59:58Z would have skipped/suppressed :59 and gone to T00:00:00Z.
idiotsecanttoday at 5:48 PM
We should just have a standards body that meets each decade and decides what epoch time every day for the next 10 years officially starts on. Everyone knows ahead of time how it will work, software updates have predictable change intervals, it allows us to refresh time based on policy decisions, and it uses something sane as the backbone of the system.