[LEAPSECS] Leap Sec vs Y2K

[Warner Losh]

On 12/11/2010 17:18, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

> In message<1292109115.24926.42.camel at localhost>, Paul Sheer writes:

>> On Sat, 2010-12-11 at 22:35 +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

>>> But that does not allow us to ignore the servers which are

>>> synchronized and which need to be synchronized to work.

>> I disagree. It very much allows us to ignore those servers

> >from a standards point of view.

>

> Which bit of "need" don't you understand ?

>

> Are you happy with the ATC servers used to land your plane being

> "within some minutes" of each other ?

Yes.  We sometimes can ignore those machines that don't care.  However, 
if those machines drive the time-keeping software on the machines we 
use, then we do care about them.  Some machines can tolerate minutes of 
difference, but some machines cannot tolerate even millisecond skew.  
The former can't be used to justify it being impossible to build the latter.

ATC systems being unsynchronized means that planes crash; clearly a 
situation we want to avoid.

Warner