[LEAPSECS] The leap second, deep space and how we keep time -Brooks

[Warner Losh]

> On Jan 27, 2015, at 7:18 PM, Steve Allen <sla at ucolick.org> wrote:
> 
> On Tue 2015-01-27T21:41:17 +0000, Matsakis, Demetrios hath writ:
>> Equally unfortunate is that 30 servers in the NTP pool inserted a
>> leap second last Dec 31.
> 
> There is no action that the ITU-R can take which will change this kind
> of misbehavior in these already-deployed systems.
> 
> Therefore this is irrelevant to the activities which will happen at
> ITU-R WRC-15, and I don't think that misdirecting attention will help
> the ITU-R decide what to do.

One of the arguments against leap seconds  are that they are hard to get right.
How many machines inserted an April 31st by mistake? Has an error like that
ever happened? No. Or more likely, has anybody thought it was Feb 29th in
a non-leap year? No. There have been some applications that mistakenly though
Y2K wasn’t a leap year. And there were some issues with the Zune music player.
And there was that unfortunate Feb 30th incident, but that was in a transition
to Gregorian… :)

By comparison, the list of mistaken leap second issues is legion… Isn’t that
relevant to the practicability of any standard under discussion? Or am I missing
your point?

Warner