[LEAPSECS] metafilter followup of the leap rant

[Steve Allen]

folks at metafilter have been discussing the video rant
about programming time at
http://www.metafilter.com/135241/This-way-lies-madness

Not surprisingly it is more ranting, but near the end is another
indication of how programmers who do not have to manage real-time
systems feel about the institution of leap seconds in 1972:

	to buggery with all the scientific systems that made the
	obviously unreasonable assumption that any given second is
	exactly as long as any other

This amplifies the impression that also comes from Google's leap smear
and the recent tendency of Linux distros to prefer chrony to ntpd
(because chrony allows bigger frequency shifts and avoids leaps).
To wit, admins of cloud-based, virtualized systems find it more
expedient to change the duration of seconds than to follow the
constant-duration seconds in the UTC specification as given by TF.460,
and so they are doing that.

It remains less clear what sorts of strategies are being adopted by
admins of systems that must perform real-time operations, for those
admins are not talking about their coping mechanisms.

--
Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>                WGS-84 (GPS)
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