[LEAPSECS] Coming of age in the solar system

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <96097.1283640204 at critter.freebsd.dk>
            "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> writes:

: >> I know several facilities of various kinds I which schedule their

: >> yearly maintenance during leap-seconds, or shut down extraordinarily.

: >

: >let's discuss these then. URL please?

: 

: What I can disclose publically has been disclosed publically on

: this list previously.  What has been relayed to me in confidence

: stays in confidence.

: 

: Some of these organizations could get in stock-holder or regulatory

: trouble, if their "deficient operating practices" were disclosed.


I've also heard of some military installations that shut down their
non-critical operations around a leap second.  They have had gear fail
in the past due to leap seconds, so in an abundance of caution they
shut non-critical operations down just to be safe.  Evidently, the
failures weren't 'off by a second,' but instead involved some piece of
hardware failing hard, requiring a reset afterwards.

There was a cryptic reference to loss of life in the Turin leap second
survey.  No details were given apart from the fact that one of the
failures caused loss of life.  I went looking for this survey, and
can't seem to find it now, maybe someone on the list cached a copy?

The closes I can find now is http://aas.org/files/DDA-UTCreport.pdf
which talks about GLONASS failure that could have resulted in loss of
life (page 9), but doesn't document an actual loss of life.

A space shuttle launch was postponed due to risks around leap seconds:
	http://www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/cal.html

	"Leaping forward. John Knight reported that a Shuttle launch
	scheduled to cross the end-of-year 1989 was delayed, to avoid
	the software risks of both the year-end rollover and a
	leap-second correction that took place at the same time."

Warner