[LEAPSECS] leap smear

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 16 Sep 2011 at 10:54, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:


> Well, Googles hack is a workaround for internal use with no regard

> to subsecond interoperability with anybody else.


That's typical of Google's general philosophy, where they value their 
services functioning smoothly over strict compliance with external 
standards; for instance, "web purist geeks' find it infuriating that 
Google's HTML fails to validate, but they're more interested in 
shaving off a few bytes by doing things like omitting quotes around 
attributes even where the standards require them, so long as all 
known browsers render the page correctly.

Where time is concerned, they (probably correctly) judge that 
subsecond precision of timestamps isn't going to matter to users of 
their services, so all they're really concerned about is internal 
consistency between their many servers, which will be achieved if 
they all maintain accurate timepieces following the same internal 
standard for dealing with leap seconds.

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