[LEAPSECS] Did John Oliver just save the leap-second ?

[Rob Seaman]

On Jul 1, 2015, at 1:31 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:

> it is pretty obvious that John Olivers attention to the leap-second vastly increased the awareness.

It was the final kick, but the interest level was up broadly already, with many new voices like:

	https://medium.com/@NGA_GEOINT/by-national-geospatial-intelligence-agency-source-communications-1d7363673e42

Oliver’s folks recognized the issue is perfectly tailored to today’s short attention span.  It's scalable to any number of instant clips capturing the zeitgeist.  During future leap seconds one can anticipate other people picking up on the idea.

> Given that awareness has always been the major deficiency about leap-seconds he may just have saved them, by showing that awareness is possible.

Agreed!

> But it seems possible that large fraction of Linux systems have been following Googles leap-smear without knowing it because of systemd.

More evidence for the need for certification programs like NTF’s.  Whether leap seconds continue or not, there will be multiple timescales loose in the wild.  Certification of some sort is needed to have confidence that you’re using the right one for whatever purpose.

Rob