New
#20
Hi there
A little bit of History -- back in 1582 the Gegorian Calendar (current one) was introduced in some European countries before it was universally adopted (Turkey actually being the last country which didn't adopt it until 1927 !!). The old Julian calendar which preceded it was getting dangerously out of Sync -- mid summer would noticeably appear at the wrong time, navigation charts would become increasingly inaccurate etc. (Longitude calculations etc) so obviously the calendar needed to be corrected.
France was the first together with Italy, Portugal and Spain where 10 days were removed. Germany in 1610 also by removing 10 days flowed by the UK, Canada, USA in 1752 where 11 days were removed.
People went rioting in the streets thinking they'd been robbed of 11 days of life. !!!
Judging by some of the comments on this thread it would appear people are STILL of the same mind set !!!!.
Cheers
jimbo
This is a good read to get a primer on the Network Time Protocol and why leap seconds matter to the internet:
Network Time Protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Further down in the article you should note that servers adhering to the NTP should already be able to handle a leap second.
It looks like devices using time stamp protocols other than NTP could be affected.
From the wiki page TVeblen linked:There seems to be a few solutions to this already available for the server side of things.wikipedia said:
System programs are probably hardened by now, application programs, maybe not so much.
There's a lot of old software out that that is being maintained by one person. This might be a consultant who only supports the software when there is an issue.
How did (do?) some programs determine the passage of a day? Magic!
The magic number 1440 to be exact. That's all there was, no more than 1440.
It is fascinating that we have the technology to measure time so accurately that we can tell the Earth's rotation varies. That is really something. Kari you have to forgive grove. He is a Hoosier from Indiana which until recently did not do DST and parts near Chicago and the Far South West around Evansville are on Central time. The rest of the State is on Eastern time with DST. Before the state did DST the counties in several areas ignored the general time and followed DST. This happened around Louisville Kentucky those counties followed Louisville time so the TV schedules were correct. Some of the Northern counties did some weird things too even though they were not supposed to. That is why it is so confusing to Indiana natives until recently where we now seem to have the best plan. However some want to put the state on Central time which may lead to more problems such as darker evenings in Winter and early sunset in Summer.